Last week, the NY Times online asked me to contribute to their “Room for Debate.” The questions were “Is the current drought raising the possibility of another Dust Bowl? If so, what can we do to prevent it?”  My response is below, followed by a terrific new video by Peter Sinclair on “2012 Drought Update.”

UPDATE: At the very end, I’m adding the news release for a new study that makes clear the West is facing, “a new climatology that would make the 21st century climate like mega-droughts of the last millennium,” as the lead scientist put it.

Only one thing can stop ever-worsening Dust Bowls here and around the world — slashing carbon pollution.

Climate scientists have predicted for decades that man-made global warming would worsen droughts and dust storms in the Southwest and around the world because of the combined effects of warming, drying and the melting of snow and ice.

The warming directly dries the soil out. It also leads to earlier snow melt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season. It also shifts precipitation patterns, expanding the dry subtropics.

All of these predictions are being observed right now and some are occurring faster than scientists expected.

Now, studies project “extreme drought” conditions by midcentury over much of the most productive and densely populated areas on Earth — including southern Europe, Southeast Asia, Brazil, the southwest United States and large parts of Australia and Africa. One study found that those areas would see drought indices far worse than those of our Dust Bowl.

And, by century’s end, we would be 10 degrees or more warmer than the 1930s if we fail to act soon.

A 2009 study found that carbon pollution levels projected after midcentury would lead to “dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the ‘dust bowl’ era” that are “largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.”

The scientific “debate,” such as it is, is how far into the northern Great Plains and Midwest these Dust Bowl conditions will extend.

What can we do about this? The climatologist David Rind, who did pioneering work on drought projection with NASA, said back in 2005 that “if you get drought indices like these, there’s no adaptation that’s possible.”

The fact is human adaptation to prolonged, extreme drought is virtually impossible. Historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment. The word “desert” comes from the Latin desertum for “an abandoned place.”

We aren’t doing a great job of feeding the 7 billion people we have now. How can we lose much of the most productive farmland here and around the world and feed another 2 billion people?

The only sane response is to reduce carbon pollution sharply. To avert the worst of dust-bowlification, we need global carbon pollution to peak early next decade, drop 50 percent below current levels by 2050, and stop entirely by century’s end. Every year we delay adds $500 billion to the cost of action.

My 2011 Nature article last year on “The next dust bowl” is here. Sinclair’s video follows:

Here is the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) release, “Turn of the century drought worst in 800 years, study says“:

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Photo Courtesy of National Park Service

A recently released study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, estimates that the technical potential of photovoltaic cells and concentrated solar power (CSP) in the United States is as much as 200,000 Gigawatts, enough to generate about 400,000 TWh of energy annually.

The report dismisses economic and political impacts on the solar industry and focuses solely on the scientific and engineering limitations. The types of solar power studied in the report were Urban Utility-Scale Photovoltaics, Rural Utility-Scale Photovoltaics, Rooftop Photovoltaics, and Concentrated Solar Power, which is a utility-scale project “in which the solar heat energy is collected in a central location.”

The report broke down each type of solar array:

Urban Utility-Scale PV :

“The total estimated annual technical potential in the United States for urban utility-scale PV is 2,232 terawatt-hours (TWh). Texas and California have the highest estimated technical potential, a result of a combination of good solar resource and large population.”

Rural Utility Scale PV:

“Rural utility-scale PV leads all other technologies in technical potential. This is a result of relatively high power density, the absence of minimum resource threshold, and the availability of large swaths for development. Texas accounts for roughly 14% (38,993 TWh) of the entire estimated U.S. technical potential for utility-scale PV (280,613 TWh).”

Rooftop PV:

Total annual technical potential for rooftop PV is estimated at 818 TWh. States with the largest technical potential typically have the largest populations. California has the highest technical potential of 106 TWh due to its mix of high population and relatively good solar resource.

CSP:

Technical potential for CSP exists predominately in the Southwest…. Texas has the highest estimated potential of 22,786 TWh, which accounts for roughly 20% of the entire estimated U.S. annual technical potential for CSP (116,146 TWh).

The report also conducted a state by state breakdown for potential energy from solar sources.

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Photo Courtesy AP

by Doug Grandt, via the Oakland Tibune

Boy Scout spirits will soar Aug. 1 during the centennial celebration for Eagle Scouts everywhere.

Please join me in encouraging Eagle Scout — and Boy Scouts national President and Exxon Mobil CEO — Rex Tillerson to play a prominent role.

I have asked him to change the course of human history with true climate solutions leadership this year.

Eagle Scouts should live by “We leave our campsites cleaner than we found them” as well as the Scout Law and Scout Oath. We share reverence for God; our family, neighbors and society; and our environment, which supports life for all species.

Unfortunately, our actions belie our intentions.

During the past 200 years, the burning of carbon fuels has despoiled the environment. Scientists have predicted what spewing CO2 into the atmosphere will do to change the climate.

We are now seeing what scientists have warned us to expect — more extreme weather events, more intense forest fires, more killer floods, more record-breaking high temperatures, which outnumber record-breaking low temperatures by more than 7-1.

The dice are now loaded against humans’ long-term survival if we continue on our current path, and it is clear to the average citizen — you don’t have to be a scientist to recognize the obvious trends.

For two decades, our government has been unable to act on our behalf. Laws have been written, suits have been filed, people have demonstrated, corporations have lobbied — business as usual prevails.

Elected politicians cannot get the necessary job done. We need national and international recognizable individual leadership if we hope to change the course of our mother ship, which is now steaming headlong for a collision.

While we rearrange the deck chairs, we and our pristine vessel are heading for disaster, and only a shift from burning carbon fuels to carbon-free energy will set us on a safe course.

Eagle Scout Rex Tillerson is on record publicly supporting a steadily increasing carbon fee, which would not only pay for the externalized costs of polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, but would also level the playing field for clean energy and promote innovative entrepreneurs to develop and implement more and more efficient pollution-free energy facilities. Read more

There are 5.4 million in-ground residential swimming pools in the Unites States, and, according to Opower,  the homes with those pools use 49% more electricity each year than homes without. The increase in energy use amounts to about $500 per home per year.

Pools themselves are extremely energy intensive to maintain, they collectively use between 9 and 14 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, more than 11 states plus the District of Columbia , annually.

The average pool contains about 20,000 gallons of water, roughly 5,000 gallons more than the typical human will drink in a lifetime, and pool pumps use up to 2,500 KWh per year to circulate and filter it. Outside of the air conditioner, the pool pump is the largest electricity consumer in the average pool-containing home. According to the study, at the national average of 11.8 cents per KWh, a pool pump alone can add as much as $300 a year to an electric bill.

However, Opower’s investigation revealed that its not just the actual pool that accounts for the massive increase in energy consumption of homes with swimming pools.

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by Michael Kodas, via OnEarth

Last fall scientists and foresters from more than a dozen nations gathered for the world’s first conference on the growing threat of megafires. Considering that the American West has experienced record-breaking fire seasons over the past decade, the choice of venue for the conference was a bit surprising: northern Florida.

Living in Colorado and watching as massive fires bloom across the Rocky Mountains — sparked  by a combination of heat, drought, and poor decisions about forest management and housing development — it would be easy to think that the East Coast is relatively safe from smoke plumes and fireballs. Indeeed, during last year’s conference visit to Tall Timbers, a nonprofit fire research station in Tallahassee, one of the scientists in my group pulled out his phone and announced that a wildfire was threatening his home back in Nevada.

But as we learned at Tall Timbers, the humid hardwood forests of the East have their own history of fire problems, and just like out West, climate change and a century of fire suppression have primed them for danger.

Last spring, a thin snowpack, high winds, and drought — the same conditions that drove fires in the Rocky Mountains this year — also fueled fires from New England to Florida. This year, all 25 states east of the Rockies experienced their warmest recorded January-to-March periods in more than 110 years of record keeping. Many also experienced extreme drought. Last April on Long Island, wildfires threatened Brookhaven National Laboratory, destroyed three homes and nine businesses, and burned three firefighters. In Connecticut, a wildfire shut down an Amtrak line. And in New Jersey, fire spread through 1,000 acres of the state’s beloved Pine Barrens. In Virginia’s George Washington National Forest, more than 20,000 acres burned in early April — four times the previous record. Throughout the spring, much of Florida and Georgia were in extreme to exceptional drought — drier even than in 2007, when a record-setting drought brought on the Big Turnaround fire, the biggest in both states’ recorded histories.

The size of Eastern wildfires may not rival Western blazes — half a dozen of the active fires in the West this week were larger than 100,000 acres — but the East Coast is more densely populated, meaning that smaller fires can still threaten a great number of lives and property and require large resources to fight. “Even if the fires don’t look that spectacular, they can do a lot of damage,” says Kevin Robertson, the fire ecology program director at Tall Timbers.

This month authorities declared more than 1,000 counties in 26 states as natural disaster areas, in what has become the worst drought to strike the nation in decades. The conditions that have already contributed to massive wildfires across the West are bringing more fires to parts of the eastern U.S., including North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, according to the federal National Climatic Data Center.

The East, in fact, has a forgotten history of big burns. In New Brunswick, Canada, the Miramichi fire of October 1825 — one of the three largest ever recorded in North America — burned over three million acres, devastating the towns of Newcastle and Fredericton and killing 190 people. Hundreds more drowned in rivers where they took shelter with their livestock.  And on October 8, 1871 — the same day that the Great Chicago Fire exploded — a wildfire twice the size of the state of Rhode Island overran Peshtigo, Wisconsin, killing between 1,200 and 2,400 people, marking the greatest loss of life to a wildfire in the nation’s history. Seventy years later, British and American militaries studied the dynamics of the Peshtigo fire to plan the bombings of Dresden and Tokyo during World War II.

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

As the Midwest bakes amid an unrelenting drought, farmers aren’t the only ones sweating.[Wall Street Journal]

Companies that rely on a big U.S. corn crop, such as grain exporter and ethanol producer Archer Daniels Midland Co. have watched their share prices tumble the past several weeks as the prospect of ample supplies has shriveled and corn prices have skyrocketed to record highs.

Investors will get a glimpse into ADM’s challenges, and broader repercussions for the agribusiness sector, when the company reports fourth-quarter earnings Tuesday.

ADM Chief Executive Patricia Woertz warned investors at a mid-June conference that ethanol losses were mounting and its grain-handling business was underperforming previous forecasts. That was before crops started to feel the full effects of the worst U.S. drought in decades. ADM shares are down 15% in the past seven weeks.

State and county fairs in the sweltering and drought-stricken Midwest may see some skinnier pigs and smaller squash this year. The dozen pigs Greg Marzahl and his 15-year-old daughter are bringing to the Wisconsin State Fair are smaller than those he’d normally show. Marzahl, who had three grand champion pigs last year, said his pigs are around about 15 pounds smaller than the normal 275 pounds. The heat is affecting their virility and appetites, he said. [Huffington Post]

The best aircraft to fight the growing number of Western wildfires would be dozens of modern “scooper” planes that fill their bellies with water skimmed in seconds from a lake or river, and not the slower helicopters and tankers now in use, according to a study released on Monday by the RAND Corporation. But the chief of the federal Forest Service, which commissioned the study, has rejected its central finding.[The New York Times]

Enbridge, a beleaguered Canadian oil pipeline company, has spilled more than 50,000 gallons of light crude oil in rural Wisconsin —  shortly after the company said it had implemented safety reforms after a massive 2010 spill in Michigan. [LA Times]

Even though research clearly shows that present electric cars can satisfy the requirements of 95 percent of all trips made in the U.S., many car buyers say electric cars need to travel further per charge before they’ll consider buying one.[Christian Science Monitor]

China’s Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the world’s highest rail system, is being threatened by desertification on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau as a result of global warming, experts concluded after conducting a probe.About 443 kilometers of the 1,956-km railway are in areas affected by desertification, including 103 km that lie in seriously desertified areas, Wang Jinchang, a senior engineer with the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Company, told Xinhua Monday.Wang cited research showing that the threat of soil erosion has grown very fast in recent years, mostly near rivers and wetlands from Golmud and Lhasa, and the amount of affected rail tracks almost doubled from 2003 to 2009. [Global Times]

–Max Frankel

by Jonathan Koomey, via CSR Wire

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” — Henry Ford

The Pessimism Trap

One of my students at Yale in Fall 2009 emerged from my lecture summarizing the climate problem and told me it depressed her. “It seems so hopeless,” she said. I acknowledged that the problem was a daunting one, but explained again why I thought it wasn’t insoluble. And the problem of assuming we can’t fix the problem is that we’ll stop trying things that might actually work.  I call this “the pessimism trap.” If we don’t even try, we’re ensuring the bad results we fear will actually come to pass.

Here’s why I think we can still address the climate issue in a way that avoids catastrophe and preserves reasonable continuity for human society.  That outcome is not guaranteed, of course, but I’m still optimistic that we will, at long last, do the right thing.

By we, I mean first the United States, because most of the rest of the world already takes this issue seriously, and U.S. leadership can transform the current stalemate into real movement. I’m hopeful that Winston Churchill’s reading of the American character was correct when he said “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.”

To Break the International Logjam, the U.S. Must Step Up to the Plate

To that end, the U.S. needs to adopt a carbon price, set real emissions targets, and begin aggressive mitigation as soon as possible. It also needs to take the international relations aspect of this problem seriously, because the climate problem can’t be solved without international cooperation, and the recent U.S. public debate (such as it was) almost completely ignores this fact.

Each major country or group of countries could by themselves destroy the climate, so we cannot avoid the need for binding international commitments, but those cannot come about without real progress in the US, which stands today as the biggest roadblock to prompt global action.

The Chinese have already indicated, by their substantial investments in renewable energy production, that they are prepared to build the technologies of the future (and to beat us in that game).  If we make a real commitment to meet the constraints of the Safer Climate case, we can give the Chinese a real run for their money, and that’s a race in which the whole planet wins.  Once we realize that this isn’t a “zero sum game”, it opens up possibilities that we haven’t thought of before.

Aggressive Climate Action Easier Than We Think

There is a tendency in formal modeling assessments of the climate problem towards pessimism about the future, as I discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 of Cold Cash, Cool Climate. Our own cognitive limitations make us unable to fully evaluate all of the options before us, and as has been shown many times before, any evaluation of options that excludes important ones will underestimate the possibilities for action and overestimate its cost.

But of course, we always exclude important possibilities (because we can’t think of everything), so this bias is systemic. In addition, the methods used in these analyses embed structural rigidities in the forecasts that wouldn’t actually be present in a world aggressively pursuing the Safer Climate case, like assuming that institutional behavior and the structure of property rights remain constant.

They also ignore critical factors like increasing returns to scale, which make emissions reductions significantly easier as long as we start down a path of implementation that is a promising one. So aggressive climate action will almost certainly be easier than we think, although by no stretch of the imagination should effort at the required level be called “easy”. Read more

By Rebecca Lefton and Samuel Grausz

Addressing the projected growth in greenhouse gas emissions from the aviation sector will be integral to solving climate change. Aviation accounts for 13 percent of global transportation carbon dioxide emissions, and emissions from aviation are on track to quadruple by 2050 if left unchecked.

The share of aviation’s contributions to total global transportation emissions is even larger if non-carbon-dioxide emissions are included. In addition to carbon dioxide, aircraft emit other gases that lead to global warming—including water vapor, black carbon, nitrogen oxides (NOx), and sulfur oxides (SOx). The climate impact is potentially double, too, because airlines emit all of these greenhouse gases directly into the upper atmosphere.

Complicating the problem, the number of passengers on U.S. airlines is projected to double to 1 billion in the next 10 years, and the number of passengers globally will more than double to 6 billion by 2026.

Sustainable growth of the airline industry—which already contributes $1.3 trillion to the domestic economy annually, supports 10 million U.S. jobs and 15 million jobs worldwide, and sustains tens of millions more jobs for the tourism industry—is key to the health of our economy and our environment.

So what is being done to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the aviation sector? How can public and private sectors ensure the growth of the airline industry without harming the climate?

This issue brief will examine these questions by looking at steps the United States and Europe are taking.

What the United States is doing to bring down aviation emissions

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