Warming-driven peatland fires are an amplifying climate feedback. Credit: NASA

News story via NASA

Forests and bog land in far eastern Russia have been burning since the beginning of June 2012. Contributing to the record fires have been the record temperatures of this past summer. This summer in Siberia has been one of hottest on record. The average temperature ranged around 93 degrees Fahrenheit and there doesn’t seem to be any break in the weather coming anytime soon.

The fires in eastern Russia have affected the districts of Krasnoyarsk, Tuva, Irkutsk, Kurgan, and the Republic of Khakassia. Especially hard hit is the city of Tomsk. According to official figures, over 24,000 acres of land had been burnt in Tomsk by early August. The city has been covered by heavy smog for weeks and the airport has been out of operation since the beginning of July.

On August 23rd, the Russian Information and News Agency (RIA Novosti) reported that “firefighters extinguished all six forest fires over the past 24 hours that remained raging in Russia’s Siberia this summer, the regional forestry department said in a statement on Thursday. There are no more registered fires in the region, but the emergencies situation still remain in force in three areas of the Tomsk region due to the high risk of new wildfires outbreak,” the statement added. However, it also reported that “more than 200,000 hectares [494.210 acres] of forest already burned down in Siberia and the Russian Far East, where fires are still raging, since the start of the summer.” On August 28, RIA Novosti reported that: “The majority of wildfires triggered by the summer heat wave in Russia have been put out, but 11 wildfires with a total area of 838 hectares [over 2000 acres] are still raging in Khabarovsk Territory.” These are the fires that still burn in the image taken today by the MODIS instrument on the Aqua satellite.

Of course wildfires are devastating to any area, but ecologically this is catastrophic for this region with many rare animals living in Siberia’s unique ecosystem.

So too the fires burning in Russia will have worldwide effects as the torched peat bogs whose layers consist of dead plant materials will end up releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide into the air accelerating the greenhouse effect and making the air nearly unbreathable. Record numbers of fires in the summer of 2010 drew attention to this damaging situation (see NY Times article cited below).

In the early 1900′s Soviet engineers drained swamps to supply peat for electrical power stations. It was eventually stopped in the 1950′s but the bogs were never reflooded. Unfortunately, that approach is currently causing some of the wildfire problems and air quality issues that Russia is dealing with today.

Officials and residents are hoping that the upcoming expected harvest rains will help extinguish the wildfires and bring a much needed natural remedy to the affected regions.

NASA/Goddard, Lynn Jenner with information from The New York Times and RIA Novosti (en.rian.ru)

Related Post:

• Stunning Peatlands Amplifying Feedback: Drying Wetlands and Intensifying Wildfires Boost Carbon Release Ninefold

A national political convention is the first real chance for a political party to introduce its ideas and leaders to the country. Even though this election has been gearing up for 18 months, it’s only around now that Americans start paying attention.

The Republican National Convention is now over. The speeches have been made, the platform introduced, the balloons have been dropped. And if it hasn’t been obvious over the months, Americans now have a clear window into the GOP’s scary policies on energy and climate.

Let’s start with what some of the leading international energy experts and climate scientists are saying about the impending global warming tipping point we’re facing:

NASA climatologist James Hansen:

“Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels. If this sounds apocalyptic, it is.”

Fatih Birol, chief economist with the International Energy Agency:

“The door is closing. I am very worried – if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever.”

Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University’s climate change institute:

“This is the critical decade. If we don’t get the curves turned around this decade we will cross those lines.”

In the lead up to the Republican National Convention, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the U.S. had just experienced the hottest 12-month period on record and the hottest July ever recorded. So far this year, more than 27,000 high-temperature records have been broken or tied, beating cold record temperatures by 10 to 1 — five times the ratio of the last decade (if there were no warming, we’d see the same number of hot records and cold records). And throughout the summer, America faced record drought, record wildfires, and freak storms — all things that climate scientists warn will happen with increasing frequency and intensity.

Topping it all off, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported this week that Arctic sea ice had reached record lows — with temperatures in the region rising at twice the rate of the rest of the globe.

But as the evidence mounts and experts issue increasingly dire warnings about the need for immediate and swift reductions in carbon pollution, the Republican party dug its heels in on promotion of carbon-based fuels. Almost every speech on energy was devoted exclusively to increasing production of coal, oil, and gas — with the only mentions of renewable energy used to politicize the failed solar company Solyndra.

The only mention of climate in the party’s platform was to mock President Obama for including climate risk in national security planning:

“The strategy subordinates our national security interests to environmental, energy and international health issues, and elevates ‘climate change’ to the level of a ‘severe threat’ equivalent to foreign aggression. The word ‘climate,’ in fact, appears in the current President’s strategy more often than Al Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, radial Islam, or weapons of mass destruction. The phrase ‘global war on terror’ does not appear at all and has been purposely avoided and changed by his Administration to “overseas contingency operations.’”

In fact, a military advisory board under the Bush W. Administration concluded in 2007 that climate change “acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world” and “will add to tensions even in stable regions of the world.” The Pentagon agreed with that assessment, concluding that climate change will “place a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.”

There was one other mention of climate change during the convention. Mitt Romney finished his acceptance speech by mocking Obama’s earlier promises to deal with the problem:

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by James Bradbury and Forbes Tompkins, via the World Resources Institute

Almost seven years ago to the day since Hurricane Katrina made landfall, a new hurricane came ashore on the Gulf Coast near New Orleans. While Hurricane Isaac has been much less intense than Katrina, it has caused serious damage, with heavy rains, storm surge, and winds of up to 100 miles per hour.

Hurricane Isaac comes at the end of a U.S. summer season filled with extreme weather events. From heat waves to droughts to wildfires, the United States has seen little in the way of relief from severe events over the last several months. In fact, the majority of the lower 48 states are still facing drought. While Isaac may relieve drought conditions in some areas of the country, recent forecasts from the Climate Prediction Center project drought conditions to continue through large parts of the country at least through November.

America’s Vulnerability to Hurricanes and Tropical Storms

Hurricanes that make landfall disrupt commerce while damaging critical transportation and energy infrastructure, with economic ripple effects throughout the country. Although damage from high winds can be significant, storm surge is often the leading threat to lives and property along the coasts. For example, storm surge was responsible for many of the 1,500 lives lost as a result of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The combination of Hurricane Ike’s storm surge, winds, and flooding caused property damages in 2008 estimated at nearly $25 billion. Additionally, large amounts of rainfall typically accompany hurricanes, contributing to coastal inundation and oftentimes flooding communities further inland – as we are seeing in the Gulf Coast as a result of Hurricane Isaac.

Each year, the western U.S. Gulf Coast (including Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) faces an average of $14 billion in damages, driven by high winds and storm surge from hurricanes. The same region has accumulated more than $2.7 trillion in hurricane-related damages over the last century. The Insurance Information Institute estimated at almost $4 trillion the 2004 aggregate value of insured property vulnerable to hurricanes between the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

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by Daniel Bailey, via Skeptical Science

It’s happened to all of us. Whether as a child on the school playground missing the call to come back in from recess or later, as teenagers, forgetting to return a library book until it was overdue or as adults realizing with a start that it’s the day after taxes were due and we haven’t done a thing, we’ve all wakened from a walking sleep to realize something we’ve just been missing all along.

For the mainstream media and the average person in general, that thing is the ongoing demise of the Arctic sea ice cover.  And nothing puts facts, especially record-breaking facts, into perspective like a visual aid.  Consider this visual aid provided from RealClimate of the NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice Extent:

Virtually every sea ice metric there is shows a record-breaking loss of the Arctic sea ice “cap” in 2012. With Arctic sea ice dropping off the bottom of existing sea ice graphs, the noted sage Chief Brody from the movie “Jaws” might put it this way:

“We’re gonna need a bigger graph.”

This piece was originally published at Skeptical Science and was reprinted with permission.

by Mindy Lubber, via Ceres

Severe weather has been clobbering insurance companies, and the headlines just keep coming. “Drought to cost insurers billions in losses,” said the Financial Times a few days ago. “Many U.S. hurricanes would cause $10b or more in losses in 2012 dollars,” the Boston Globe said about the latest hurricane forecasts. “June’s severe weather losses near $2 billion in U.S.,” said the Insurance Journal earlier this year.

This year’s extreme events follow the world’s costliest year ever for natural catastrophe losses, including $32 billion in 2011 insured losses in the United States due to extreme weather events. This is no short-term uptick: insured losses due to extreme weather have been trending upward for 30 years, as the climate has changed and populations in coastal areas and other vulnerable places have grown.

The U.S. insurance industry continues to be “surprised” by extreme weather losses. But the truth is that weather extremes are no longer surprising. Back-to-back summers of devastating droughts, record heat waves and raging wildfires are clear evidence of this. Last year’s crazy weather triggered near record underwriting losses and numerous credit rating downgrades among U.S. property and casualty insurers.

And in the face of a changing climate, such events can be expected to increase in number, and severity.  It’s time for insurance companies to recognize this new normal, and incorporate it into their business planning—for the sake of their shareholders, their industry’s survival, and the stability of the U.S. economy.

Ceres, a business sustainability leadership organization, has been researching the effects of climate change and severe weather on the insurance sector. In a report to be released next month, titled Stormy Future for U.S. Property and Casualty Insurers, we will detail our recommendations for insurance companies, investors and regulators to help strengthen the insurance sector so it can better weather the challenges ahead.

For insurance companies, using catastrophe models that can better anticipate probable effects of climate change on extreme weather events are key. And especially in vulnerable markets, insurers’ guidance on insurability should inform decisions that communities make on land-use planning, infrastructure decisions, and building codes.

Insurers can also encourage the transition to a low-carbon economy—one built to forestall the worst effects of climate change—by offering products and services that encourage clean and efficient energy, encouraging customers to adopt climate-change mitigation plans, and encouraging policymakers to act to reduce carbon pollution.

This would not be the first time insurance companies have helped change American society. By making insurance contingent on smoke detectors, insurers cut down on deaths and losses from building fires. By backing seat belt laws and including seat belt violations in rate calculations, they helped save lives on the road.

By engaging fully on climate change and energy policy—inside and outside of the boardroom – insurance companies can lead the way once again. It would be the right thing to do, both for their business, and for our future.

Mindy Lubber is President of Ceres and Director of the Investor Network on Climate Risk. This piece was originally published at Ceres and was reprinted with permission.

Global food prices jumped 10% in July from the month before, driven up by the severe Midwest drought which has pushed the price of grains to record levels, the World Bank reported Thursday. [Los Angeles Times]

The World Bank issued a global hunger warning last night after severe droughts in the US and eastern Europe sent food prices to a record high. [Guardian]

The League of Conservation voters has started a petition drive calling on PBS’s Jim Lehrer, the moderator of the first presidential debate, to force the candidates to answer questions about climate change. [New York Times]

Over the past four years, the Republican Party has undergone a fairly dramatic shift in its approach to energy and environmental issues. Global warming has disappeared entirely from the party’s list of concerns. Clean energy has become an afterthought. Fossil fuels loom larger than ever. And one way to see this shift clearly is to compare the party’s 2008 and 2012 platforms. [Washington Post]

After ignoring the issue of global warming since he began his 2012 run for the White House, Republican nominee Mitt Romney is now invoking it to illustrate a key difference issue between him and President Obama. [National Journal]

The Republican National Convention seems a strange place for a press-shy billionaire benefactor of iconoclastic libertarian causes that have vexed GOP leaders — including the anti-establishment tea party movement. [Politico]

While climate change hasn’t played a big role in the 2012 White House campaign, a new report claims that this summer’s weather shows an urgent need to address the issue. [The Hill]

Indiana farmer John Kolb normally would welcome storms that could provide his crops with badly needed water in this summer of drought. Instead, he and other Corn Belt farmers are nervously watching the forecast as Hurricane Isaac’s remnants slog their direction, concerned they could end up getting too much of a good thing. [Washington Post]

A Colorado brewery said Thursday that it’s monitoring the water it gets from the city of Fort Collins to make sure residue from a deadly wildfire that blackened a northern Colorado river doesn’t befoul the taste of its beer. [Associated Press]

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Thursday that Royal Dutch Shell would be allowed to start “certain limited preparatory activities” for oil drilling in the environmentally sensitive waters off Alaska’s northwest coast. [Washington Post]

The second lamest part of the Republican National Convention — after Clint Eastwood’s incoherent ramble — was this part of Romney’s speech:

President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans — [pauses for audience laughter(!)] — and to heal the planet. MY promise is to help you and your family.

TPM posted this comment which I agree with:

This is obviously meant to portray Obama as grandiose and foolish, making wild promises he can’t keep —- about things that don’t matter to people.

However, it creates an odd distinction, as if the health of the planet and help for one’s family are different altogether and one’s family will do well even if the planet is doing poorly. Meanwhile, this summer, families in Colorado have lost their homes to fire and families through the Midwest have suffered intense heat and farmers’ crops have failed. Belief that global warming is happening has increased.

If the Obama people were to take this comment seriously, not just ignore or dismiss it as a nasty crack, but take it seriously as a policy matter, they really could have a winning issue in some swing states.

IF (see “Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?”)

One can mock Obama for not doing enough to keep this important promise, but not for making it in the first place.

Chris Hayes on MSNBC rightly says the audience laughter at the whole notion of fighting sea level rise will some day “be in documentaries as a moment of just ‘what-were-they-thinking’ madness.” Hear! Hear!

This wasn’t a great speech. It was devoid of metaphor and vision.

It was a checklist, as Tom Brokaw said on NBC afterwords — and was marred by Eastwood’s bomb.

Recently, climate change has been the Voldemort of the Obama Administration: ”The Threat-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

In January, the President omitted any discussion of climate change from his State of the Union address, since, what really does the gravest threat to Americans and indeed all homo “sapiens” have to do with the state of the union? Then the White House edited climate change from Obama’s Earth Day 2012 proclamation.

But in an April Rolling Stone interview, Obama pulled a Harry Potter, saying outright that he thought “climate change” would be a campaign issue. Nervous campaign aides looked around to see if invoking the threat that must not be named would somehow cause it to mysteriously appear. And it did, as the nation went through brutal heatwaves and wildfires and a record-smashing drought.

Having learned his lesson, the President was back to being “Silent On Climate Change In his Big Iowa Energy Speech” by the end of May. Then earlier this month, the president recounted the story of climate change record-breaking heat and ever-worsening drought, but wisely decided not to tempt fate by naming names or causes or what’s gonna happen in the future if we keep doing bloody little or any of that scary sciency stuff.

But it turns out that the President was just being coy. He will talk about climate change to select audiences, you know, the kind that are going to suffer the most from climate change — thanks to their parents’ greed and myopia: college students, Generation CO2.

Here is Obama at Iowa State University Tuesday afternoon:

Hello, Cyclones!  Thank you….

The decisions we make as a country on big issues like the economy and jobs and taxes and education and energy and war and climate change — all these decisions will directly affect your life in very personal ways. And I’ve got to say, this is something I’m acutely aware of when I make these decisions, because they’re decisions that are going to affect Malia and Sasha, my daughters, as well. It’s the way it’s always been — one generation makes decisions on behalf of the next.

But here’s the thing, Cyclones — your generation chooses which path we take as a country….

Will this be a country that keeps moving away from foreign oil and towards renewable sources of energy like wind and solar and biofuels — (applause) — energy that makes our economy more secure, but also makes our planet more secure? (Applause.) …

You believed four years ago that we could use less foreign oil and reduce the carbon pollution that threatens our planet.  And in just four years, we’ve doubled — doubled — the generation of clean, renewable energy like wind and solar.  (Applause.)

We developed new fuel standards so that your car will get nearly 55 miles per gallon by the middle of the next decade.  (Applause.)  That’s going to save you money at the pump.  That will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a level roughly equivalent to a year’s worth of emissions from all the cars in the world.  (Applause.)

Today, America is less dependent on foreign oil than at any time in nearly 20 years.  We’re on track to emit fewer greenhouse gases this year than we have in nearly 20 years. You can keep those trends going.  You believed in America, and that’s what’s brought about change.

Governor Romney wants to pass a new $5 trillion tax cut targeted towards the wealthiest Americans. That’s not going to cut our debt. Ignoring inequality doesn’t make it go away. Denying climate change won’t make it stop. These things won’t make for a brighter future. They won’t make your future stronger.

Go, team! Of course, Obama was only kidding when he told the students their generation chooses which path we take as a country. He wasn’t was addressing Hogwarts students, after all.

In the real world, the students’ parents and grandparents have already set the world on a path towards catastrophic warming and only their parents and grandparents can reverse course fast enough to prevent bringing unimaginable peril to all the world’s children.

Note to team Obama: Not talking about climate change doesn’t make it stop, either (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?“)

Since the Iowa State team is the Cyclones, Obama was being very gutsy here, taking the risk that by mentioning climate change he would be blamed if an actual cyclone made land fall that day.

The fact that one did, however, should merely be taken as coincidence because a few hours later, at Colorado State University, Obama said:

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by Greg Rucks and Alisha Kuzma, via Rocky Mountain Institute

America has been built and shaped by its ability to move people and goods freely and quickly, fueled by oil. But this “freedom” comes at a cost. Transportation is America’s number-two consumer cost after housing. American drivers pay $8,000 a year for an auto they drive only 4 percent of the time.

According to RMI research, using vehicles more productively can provide the same or better access to transportation services with 46–84 percent less driving. Fortunately, we can now access and share detailed transportation data on an unprecedented scale, allowing creative software app developers to expand and enhance our mobility options. It all amounts to an emerging new transportation paradigm.

Imagine, for example, this scenario:

While eating breakfast, you receive a notification on your smartphone alerting you to weather-induced traffic delays along your normal route to work. You decide to take the suggested alternative route that will save you 15 minutes. You then reserve parking in a nearby garage at a fraction of the cost because you received a half-price push notification coupon.

While walking to your car, you notice a street lamp with a burnt-out light bulb. You snap a photo with your smartphone and place a work order with the city, and in doing so, qualify yourself for a monthly cash prize drawing.

On your drive, your car alerts you to two potential rideshares along your current route who have five-star ratings, so you agree to pick them up and make a few bucks. When you drop the passengers off, their mobile phones automatically complete the payment transaction.

In the parking garage, you redeem your coupon and pay the discounted daily rate, all on your smartphone, which then automatically logs the location of your parking spot so that it can help you find it later.

The 3 I’s of Intelligent Transportation Systems

Many emerging factors are making this vision a reality, and many areas of the country have made strides toward it. Scaling these solutions to their full potential will require a transportation system that is instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent:

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by Verity Payne, via the Carbon Brief

Two new research papers published today improve our understanding of the planet’s methane emissions, and might raise worries about the role of the gas in warming the planet. The first suggests that there may be extensive methane deposits under the Antarctic ice sheets. Meanwhile, the second concludes that emissions of the gas from Arctic permafrost have been underestimated.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas – accounting for around 14 per cent of the warming effect of current man made greenhouse gas emissions. Recent research has focused on measuring emissions from methane sources, both natural and manmade.

Antarctic methane reservoirs

Scientists have been particularly interested in methane emitted from the Arctic. This is because the region is warming particularly rapidly. In addition, methane released from melting permafrost and escaping methane hydrate deposits could exacerbate climate change. But research published today in the journal Nature suggests for the first time that there might also be large stores of methane at the other end of the planet, under the Antarctic ice sheet.

Plants thrived on Antarctica before the continent was covered by ice some 35 million years ago. Lab experiments show that microbes living beneath the ice are able to convert plant remains into methane, and scientists calculate that half of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (1 million square kilometers) and a quarter of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (2.5 million square kilometers) could cover carbon-rich sediments containing up to 4 billion metric tons of methane in the form of methane hydrates. These are an ice-like substance formed when methane and water combine.

The researchers suggest methane could be released if ice sheets retreat as global warming continues. According to study co-author Slawek Tulaczyk, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, the findings underline “the need for continued scientific exploration of remote sub-ice environments in Antarctica, because they may have far greater impact on Earth’s climate system than we have appreciated in the past.”

Media outlets have reported the findings widely, with most headlines focusing on potential impacts of escaping methane. For example, Reuters headlines the story ‘ Antarctic methane could worsen global warming – scientists‘, while the UK Press Agency goes for ‘ Methane fear beneath Antarctic ice‘.

So how realistic is the prospect of enough of the Antarctic melting to release methane that might be beneath the ice?

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It’s not a new solar manufacturing plant. It’s not a revolutionary wind turbine. And it’s not a fancy new electric vehicle. But a big clean energy initiative announced by the White House today may be a bigger deal than all of those combined.

Yes, the President is pursuing industrial energy efficiency — a lot of it.

Earlier today, Obama signed an Executive Order that sets a national goal of 40,000 MW of new combined heat and power (CHP) installations in the next 10 years, while directing various departments to initiate policies and technical assistance programs to help implement projects.

According to the White House, achieving these targets could bring between $40 billion and $80 billion in new capital investments to the manufacturing sector over the next decade.

CHP — a process that uses excess heat from electricity generation for air-conditioning or water heating, or uses excess heat to generate electricity — is well proven in both manufacturing and at power plants (see also “Recycled Energy — A core climate solution“). The U.S. currently has about 80,000 megawatts of electricity capacity from CHP — or about 9 percent of the nation’s overall portfolio.

However, as illustrated from the chart below put together by the Pew Environment Group, the U.S. is still far behind other nations in implementation:

The industrial sector accounts for about 30 percent of all energy use in America. So the U.S. can still do a lot more to make its industrial base more efficient — thus reducing carbon emissions, saving manufacturers money, and making them more competitive. The Obama Administration plan would increase America’s capacity of CHP by 50 percent over the next decade.

According to the Department of Energy, that could save up to $10 billion per year in energy costs and reduce annual CO2 emissions by 150 million metric tons, or the equivalent of taking 25 million cars of the road.

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by Walter Frick, via BostInno

The central energy challenge we face as a nation and a planet is the transition away from fossil fuels, which contribute to climate change, to clean sources of energy. The most important debates in this area concern just how quickly this must be accomplished and how to do it in the cheapest way possible. Last week Mitt Romney’s campaign released its energy plan, which completely ignores all of this.

Instead, the plan focuses on the goal of North American energy independence by 2020 through expanded fossil fuel production. Unfortunately, as Michael Levi, an energy policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in a review of the plan for Foreign Policy, “achieving energy independence through expanded supplies is a pipe dream.” You can read his review to find out why. I want to focus on the plan’s dismissal of clean energy.

The Romney Plan’s Only Mention of Clean Energy

The only mention of clean energy comes in the plan’s Innovation section, where it states support for basic research into new energy technologies, and notes that expanded development should apply equally to all sources. There’s no way to read this as anything except a commitment to drastically scale back existing clean energy programs like tax credits, applied research, and funding for commercialization. The terms ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ are totally absent.

Boston’s Cleantech Community on the Plan

I emailed a number of Boston’s most astute cleantech analysts and businesspeople for comment on the plan and what I heard was (unsurprisingly) overwhelmingly negative.

“It’s a political document not worth serious analysis,” said Mitch Tyson, a serial cleantech entrepreneur and a lecturer at Brandeis.

As Bilal Zuberi, cleantech VC at General Catalyst, put it:

I wish Mitt Romney understood the need for a true long term energy strategy for the US. Instead he is delivering where he sees money in the short term, i.e. continued focus on same old oil and gas sectors that have made us pawns in the hands of foreign governments.

I expected a Presidential candidate to understand he will be responsible for making decisions that would affect multiple generations. I don’t see how his energy policy at all link to the steady and growing concern across America for environmental pollution, global warming, and sustainable development.

Marcie Black of Bandgap Engineering pointed out another sin of omission: though it calls out clean energy subsidies, the document makes no mention of U.S. fossil fuel subsidies which are on the order of $10 billion per year.

Jim Cabot, SVP at Rasky Baerlein and a former EPA official, took issue with the plan’s nod towards resolving energy permitting issues. “Over the years I have found that blaming permitting is often a red herring for other more substantive problems,” he wrote. “Oh, and the approach of ‘I’ll just roll the dice with the future of the planet by rapidly accelerating carbon emissions’ gives me pause too.”

Romney Used to Appreciate Clean Energy, At Least a Little

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George Monbiot has a new piece in the Guardian titled “The day the world went mad,” which looks at the underwhelming reaction in the press and political sphere to the August 27th announcement of record Arctic ice melt.

As Arctic sea ice faces a death spiral due to human-caused global warming, Monbiot points to the complete lack of attention: Instead of focusing on the Arctic, a British parliament committee on climate change debated building new runways for Heathrow Airport; meanwhile in the U.S., the Republicans were holding a convention celebrating fossil fuels and the party’s active denial of climate change:

“I wonder whether we could be seeing a form of reactive denial at work: people proving to themselves that there cannot be a problem if they can continue to discuss the issues in these terms….When your children ask how and why it all went so wrong, point them to yesterday’s date, and explain that the world is not led by rational people.”

Well, not everyone was ignoring the insanity of the situation. Speaking on Current TV’s coverage of the National Republican Convention, Al Gore had some strong words for the press:

“The whole North polar ice cap is disappearing in  front of our eyes. Twelve massive million dollar plus climate related disasters…and they keep coming…Just as [the media] did not report the truth about the proposal to invade Iraq, we are not getting the accurate impression about this challenge that we have to face. To stop putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution up into the atmosphere every single day… They aren’t only doing nothing about it, there’s hardly any discussion about it. It drives me crazy.”

Watch it:

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An Indian supporter holds a placard during a protest against what they say is illegal migration of Muslims from Bangladesh to the northeastern Indian state of Assam. The conflict in the state could get worse as the effects of climate change become more drastic.

by Arpita Bhattacharyya

Recent violence between the Bodo tribe and immigrant minorities in the northeastern Indian state of Assam has cost the lives of at least 96 people and caused more than 300,000 residents to flee their homes for refugee camps. The violence also led to mass panic among northeastern migrants across India, when text messages and videos circulated social media sites warning of attacks on northeastern migrants in southern Indian cities such as Bangalore and Pune in retaliation for the deaths of Muslim minorities in Assam.

The violence and resulting panic revealed a fragile peace in Assam and demonstrated the speed with which historical tensions can bubble over into larger confrontations that could roil the whole country. A lot of this tension could worsen with the confluence of climate change, migration patterns, and community security in Assam and India—a confluence that the Center for American Progress is examining in a series of papers and events on climate change, migration, and security. Before looking at those patterns in Assam, let’s first take a look back at Assam’s history to better understand today’s conflicts.

Assam’s troubled past

Assam is located in the northeastern part of India and shares a border with China, Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. This underdeveloped region, which is connected to India politically by a small land bridge, is also known as the “Seven Sisters” and includes the states Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram. The surrounding countries’ cultures have influenced Assam, creating a patchwork of ethnic, religious, and linguistic traditions that distinguish the Seven Sisters from the rest of India. The Bodos are one of the main indigenous tribes located in the western region of Assam. In the 2001 Census the Bodos made up around 5 percent of Assam’s entire population.

The Bodo insurgents have been fighting for years for statehood in India. In 2003 they were granted special status through the creation of the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts in exchange for ceasing their insurgency. The total area of Bodoland is about 8,970 square kilometers—roughly the size of Cyprus—and includes more than 3,000 villages. The status allows the Bodoland Territorial Council to legislate on communal-level issues such as agriculture, education, and tourism. Though the Bodos govern the districts, the tribe only makes up one-third of the overall population therein. The remainder of the residents belong to other indigenous tribal groups or are native Assamese.

Muslims are the second-largest group in the region, and tensions have long simmered between Bodos and Muslim residents over land-ownership rights. The most recent incident before the current violence was in 2008, when fighting between the two groups resulted in 55 deaths, more than 100 injuries, and 200,000 people escaping to refugee camps. The main issue between the two groups is land, with Bodos claiming that undocumented Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh are taking land rightfully owned by Bodos. Muslim communities, however, view the accusation of illegal Muslim Bangladeshi settlement as a false campaign to restrict their rights and drive Muslims from the area.

Moreover, Bengali-speaking Muslims settled in the area long before the British Partition created the state of Bangladesh in 1947. This makes it difficult to determine who is a Bengali-speaking Muslim long-term resident versus an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant.

Before 1947 India and Bangladesh were unified and ruled as British India—thus the issue of illegal immigration did not exist. Following independence from Britain, present-day Bangladesh was East Pakistan until 1971, when East Pakistan fought for independence from West Pakistan. During that war, 10 million East Pakistanis (including many Bengali-speaking Muslims) fled to India. Given this history, it is difficult to distinguish between Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam who lived in the area before the Partition, those who moved during the 1971 war as refugees, and those who moved after the war, including the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants whom the Bodos distinguish.

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by Stephen Mulkey, via Climate Access

Recent papers in the journal Nature show that we have transgressed the boundaries of a safe operating space for humanity with respect to several key environmental factors. Chief among these is climate change, which amplifies the effects of all other critical factors such as freshwater depletion, nitrogen pollution, biodiversity loss, ozone depletion, and changes in land use. There is now mounting evidence that sometime during this century we will reach a state shift in the planet’s ability to support us. Climate change will affect every facet of the academy and change the practice of essentially all fields of study.

Unity College aspires to be America’s Environmental College and thus climate change must be a centerpiece of our programming. It is nothing short of mission critical that we get this right. At my request the faculty and Board of Trustees have adopted Sustainability Science (sensu U.S. National Academy of Science) as our overarching framework for all academic programming, and especially for upper division courses. Although this approach addresses all aspects of global environmental change, because of its innovative delivery, it is especially suited to the urgency of climate change. As a four-year liberal arts academy, a focus this specific has sweeping implications for our programming, but it does not obviate the need for critical skills such as oral and written literacy.  Thus I am quick to point out that the humanities are foundational to implementation of Sustainability Science as pedagogy.

As multiple components of our life support deteriorate, I think it likely that this century is destined to be the Century of the Environment. There can be little doubt that a child born today faces the prospect of living in a vastly diminished world unless we are able to make significant adjustments in our use of natural resources and bring new sources of energy rapidly online.  Development of a sustainable relationship with our natural resources is an imperative for our survival as we face the ultimate test of our adaptability as a species. Owing to the lead-time required to address climate change, it is likely that we have little more than a decade to vigorously transition towards sustainability. Because our curriculum is science-based, we do not shy away from acknowledging that the consequences of failing to respond will be catastrophic and irrevocable over a millennial time scale. Such a broad frame for the work of Unity College gives profound meaning to everything we do.

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A vast reservoir of the potent greenhouse gas methane may be locked beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, a study suggests. [Guardian]

“Our laboratory experiments tell us that these sub-ice environments are also biologically active, meaning that this organic carbon is probably being metabolised into carbon dioxide and methane gas by microbes.”

The amount of frozen and free methane gas beneath the ice sheets could amount to 4bn tonnes, the researchers estimate.

Disappearing ice could free enough of the gas to have an impact on future global climate change, they believe.

“Our study highlights the need for continued scientific exploration of remote sub-ice environments in Antarctica because they may have far greater impact on Earth’s climate system than we have appreciated in the past,” said Prof Tulaczyk.

The G.O.P. platform approved Tuesday in Florida included tough language on many expected issues like abortion, but also takes a stand on an issue that has historically been out of the party’s mainstream: Agenda 21. [New York Times]

Isaac’s whistling winds lashed this city and the storm dumped nearly a foot of rain on its desolate streets, but the system of levee pumps, walls and gates appeared to withstand one of the stiffest challenges yet. To the north and south, though, people had to be evacuated or rescued as Isaac lingered over Louisiana. [Washington Post]

Although it made landfall more than 12 hours earlier, Hurricane Isaac continued to pummel southern Louisiana Wednesday morning as the huge Category 1 storm stalled in its motion to the northwest. [Climate Central]

Climate change is already hurting seven national seashores on the Atlantic Coast and threatens to submerge some of their land within a century, according to a report Wednesday by environmental groups. [USA Today]

A total of 1,590 cases of West Nile virus, including 66 deaths, were reported through late August this year in the United States, the highest human toll by that point in the calendar since the mosquito-borne disease was first detected in the country in 1999, health officials said on Wednesday. [Reuters]

Prices for wheat, corn and soybeans rose. That was partly from Hurricane Isaac. Its rain might be welcome after a drought, but it’s unlikely to have much effect on crops that have been suffering all summer. It will also cut into harvesting time in the Southeast. [Associated Press]

Higher prices and crop-insurance payments will outweigh losses from dry conditions, propelling aggregate farm profits to $122.2 billion this year, up 3.7 percent from 2011, the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast yesterday. [Businessweek]

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The U.S. Geological Survey led a study last year that found, “Drier conditions projected to result from climate change in the Southwest will likely reduce perennial vegetation cover and result in increased dust storm activity in the future.”

Dust-Bowlification’s threat to food security is probably the biggest impact that climate change will have on most people for most of this century, as I discussed in my 2011 Nature article, “The Next Dust Bowl.”

And dust storms can be an amplifying feedback for droughts and dust storms, as dust storm expert William Sprigg, a professor in the University of Arizona’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics, explained:

Sprigg mentioned a further danger posed by dust storms in the dry region: their potential to self-propagate. As dust settles on the Rocky Mountains, it speeds up the snowpack’s melt, which then depletes the amount of water available in the summer. The result could be a worsening drought and increased chances of further dust storms. “It’s a bad cycle,” he said.

But dust poses direct dangers to human health, that “go far beyond common respiratory ailments,” according to Sprigg.

Dust storms carry a noxious mix of fungi, heavy metals from pollution, fertilizers, stockyard fecal matter, chemicals and bacteria, which can cause cardiovascular disease, eye diseases and other illnesses.

And while bigger, more frequent storms are only likely to increase the number of people suffering from diseases that health officials know are linked to dust, and possibly amplify their effects, medical science still does not have an accurate accounting of the full effects of breathing those pathogens.

A 1935 study, in Public Health Reports, “Dust Storms and Their Possible Effect on Health” concluded:

The “immediate” effects are shown in the increase in morbidity and mortality from the acute infections of the respiratory tract.

The study also reported Kansas experienced its “most severe measles epidemic,” together with “abnormally high rates of strep throat, respiratory problems, eye infections and infant mortality during the intense dust storms that struck from February to May of that year.” HuffPost notes:

The same regions that were affected then — from New Mexico to the Dakotas — may be at greatest risk from dust storms in the future, said Dale Griffin, an environmental health microbiologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Griffin points to the unsustainable strip farming methods of the 1920s and ’30s, and consecutive years of desiccating heat and high winds that combined to devastate a large swath of the country. And he agrees with Sprigg that conditions today could favor more of the same….

“Because of climate change, it looks like we’re possibly shifting into a phase similar to what occurred in the 1930s, or worse,” said Griffin. “We may be seeing an increase in dust storms that could affect human health.”

Texas and Oregon are among the regions already seeing a rise in such events. Haboobs — severe thunderstorms that kick up massive amounts of dust — have blanketed Phoenix more frequently in recent years, including one headline-grabber last July.

Here’s a time-lapse video of that amazing Phoenix haboob:

It’s no surprise a storm like that might harm people. The key point is, as Sprigg said, ”Anything that is loose on the soil is going to be picked up by these storms.” And that can include a lot of diseases:

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by Ben Bovarnick

This week, while the Republican National Convention gave the floor to climate change deniers such as North Carolina State Rep. David Rouzer — author of the recently passed bill legislating against accelerated sea level increases off the North Carolina coast — Louisiana residents were battling a 12-foot storm surge swept in by Hurricane Isaac, which topped over levees and induced heavy flooding in some parishes.

Unfortunately, with a platform of continued fossil fuel addiction and increased carbon emissions, Republicans are inviting similar future risks to their convention’s host state of Florida, and low lying coastal areas in general.

Climate change is expected to increase sea levels by more than three feet over the coming century, while strengthening hurricanes and storm surges, thereby placing residents in low lying areas at greater risk from flooding.  This is particularly pertinent to Florida, which has 2.4 million people and 1.3 million homes at risk from a four foot rise in sea levels.

For Florida’s southern counties, this trend is particularly troubling.  The majority of residents in danger of flooding live in these low lying areas built on porous limestone, which renders levees like those in Louisiana ineffective.

Further accentuating denial of these dangers, House Republicans held disaster relief funding hostage repeatedly in 2011 and the Ryan Budget would force lawmakers to offset disaster relief though budget cuts.  Requiring the $60 billion in budget cuts for relief necessary to respond to Hurricane Katrina would have been a disaster unto itself.

A report published by NOAA predicts that “anthropogenic warming over the next century will lead to an increase in the numbers of very intense hurricanes in some basins,” that these hurricanes will “be more intense on average,” and that “anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause hurricanes to have substantially higher rainfall rates.”   These trends will all contribute to greater risks of coastal flooding and property damage.

In spite of this, Republicans continue to call for an “oil above all” strategy, under the guise of job creation and suppressing gas prices, while ignoring both the plan’s unrealistic nature and the consequences of these actions.

Rather than helping Americans “leave the same legacy to their children,” as Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND) proclaimed during his speech Tuesday, this plan would leave a legacy of costly flood protection for Florida’s low-lying cities and inhabitants.

Now that renewables are receiving some of the same incentives that fossil fuels have enjoyed for nearly one hundred years, we’re suddenly being inundated with calls for a purely “free-market” approach to energy development from politicians on the right and companies concerned about the growth of clean energy.

Their arguments make for good sound bites. But if we take a look at the history of energy development in the U.S., it’s very clear that we’ve never had a truly “free” market. In fact, all of the technologies that dominate our energy system today were given special incentives by the government in order to get them to commercial scale.

According to a recent report from the venture capital firm DBL Investors, the U.S. coal, oil, gas, and nuclear industries have cumulatively taken in more than $630 billion in tax credits, land grants, R&D programs, and direct investments from the government. That far surpasses the roughly $50 billion in government renewable energy investments (wind, solar PV, solar thermal, geothermal, biofuels) through these same mechanisms over the decades, according to the report.

But when renewable energy is given similar incentives — helping double the penetration of non-hydro renewable electricity since 2008 — the energy free-marketeers come out of hiding and lament how we’re supposedly “picking winners and losers.”

The Republican party’s platform released this week is a perfect example:

Unlike the current Administration, we will not pick winners and losers in the energy market-place. Instead, we will let the free market and the public’s preferences determine the industry out-comes. In assessing the various sources of potential energy, Republicans advocate an all-of-the-above diversified approach, taking advantage of all our American God-given resources. That is the best way to advance North American energy independence.

Sounds pretty straightforward. However, the RNC’s platform is very bullish on maintaining use of coal, a resource that is declining in the U.S. because of … current market forces.

According to the Energy Information Administration, we’ve seen a 20 percent drop in coal generation over the last year. That decline has been “primarily driven by the increasing relative cost advantages of natural gas over coal for power generation in some regions,” wrote EIA.

But when market forces move in the wrong direction for coal supporters, that is apparently when it’s okay for government to intervene. According to the RNC’s platform, the party wants to use the strength of government to “encourage the increased safe development in all regions of the nation’s coal resources.”

So there you have it. When the government encourages renewable energy, that’s called picking winners and losers. But when the government encourages coal — an increasingly-expensive resource that has become an environmental nightmare — that’s “the best way to advance North American energy independence.”

And the picture becomes even more complicated when looking at the forces behind the boom in gas production. In fact, the fracking technologies people love to hold up as a miracle of the free market were made possible through years of government investment.

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by Scott Lilly

It’s late August. The Republicans are having their national convention. A huge tropical storm is bearing down on the U.S. Gulf Coast. So what’s new? We have had major hurricanes bearing down on the United States during four of the past six Republican conventions: Andrew in 1992, Frances in 2004, Gustav in 2008, and this year, Isaac.

But the Republican problem with hurricanes seems to go well beyond convention timing. A number of hurricanes have erupted into huge political issues, and it has almost always been at the expense of Republican candidates. This is not a coincidence: Republicans seem determined to underfund, undermanage, and understaff the government agencies that respond to hurricanes, putting lives and property at risk, as well as their political careers.

Hurricane Andrew became a major factor in former President George H.W. Bush’s re-election effort. After leaving numerous vacancies at the Federal Emergency Management Agency unfilled during his term as president, President Bush was slow to react when Andrew, the most expensive hurricane in American history (at that time), crashed ashore a few days after the 1992 Republican convention concluded in Houston. Agencies that had prepared for the storm were not called into action, and within a week angry victims were ranting about the failed government response on every network news program, underscoring the impression that the president was “detached from domestic problems.”

President George W. Bush was a good deal luckier than his father on the question of timing. While Hurricane Frances marred his New York renomination convention, the meteorological event of his presidency would not come until August 2005, 10 months after his re-election in 2004. Hurricane Katrina and the hapless effort of his administration to respond to it redefined his entire presidency and contributed importantly to the Democrats gaining control of the Senate and picking up 31 House seats in off-year elections 14 months later.

The final two years of George W. Bush’s presidency were marked by a major controversy over budget cuts at the National Hurricane Center, a dispute that eventually cost the center’s director his job. But those controversies did not end with the conclusion of the Bush administration. When Republicans retook the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010, they made deep cuts in the President Barack Obama’s 2011 request for the Polar Joint Satellite System, a system of new satellites needed to replace the old ones, which currently provide 85 percent of the data used in hurricane forecasting. House Republicans proposed further deep cuts in the program in fiscal year 2012.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Director Jane Lubchenco called the cuts “insanity.” She said that failure to fund the satellites would create a significant gap between the time the existing satellites failed and the new system became serviceable. Lubchenco said that the gap would be like “going backwards in 20 years’ time” in hurricane forecasting.

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