The record lows for Arctic sea ice area and volume are generally set in mid- to late September.

But as Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice Blog reports, we’re already starting to see those September minimum records being broken in mid-August. Cryosphere Today, for instance, reports that the Arctic has just dropped below its lowest sea ice area on record:

We are  all but certain to set the record low volume this year. In fact the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 probe confirms what the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center has been saying for years: Arctic sea ice volume has been collapsing faster than sea ice area (or extent) because  the ice has been getting thinner and thinner.

In fact, the latest satellite CryoSat-2 data shows the rate of loss of Arctic sea ice is “50% higher than most scenarios outlined by polar scientists and suggests that global warming, triggered by rising greenhouse gas emissions, is beginning to have a major impact on the region.”

A key point is that the thinner ice is much more vulnerable to winds and Arctic storms, like this month’s “Arcticane” (see “Massive Storm Batters Melting Sea Ice“).

That is the true death spiral, and I’ll do a separate post on volume shortly.

For Americans, the latest science suggests the loss of Arctic ice is already making our weather more extreme — and further losses will likely accelerate the trend (see Arctic Warming Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events ‘Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves’). I’ll do a separate post on this shortly, too. Indeed, Climate Progress will be reporting regularly on the record Arctic ice loss — and what it means for the nation and the world — for the duration of the melt season.

Here is more from Neven on Cryosphere Today’s new record low sea ice area:

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Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA)

FOLSOM, California — As droughts continue to ravage the West, citizens are pushing back against elected leaders who refuse to acknowledge that humans contribute to climate change.

This was on full display late last week at a town hall meeting in Folsom, California. When Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) took questions from the audience, a woman stood up and took the congressman to task for his climate denialism. After noting that global warming has caused the “worst droughts since the depression,” the woman expressed extreme disappoint in her congressman. “I’m horrified that you would ignore scientific evidence just to appease the moneyed interests of big oil which gives generously to your campaign,” said told Lungren.

CONSTITUENT: In the last town hall in Elk Grove, you said that Republicans and Democrats differ on global warming because they have different sets of facts. You stated that you didn’t believe humans were a cause of global warming. [...] If the NOAA, the majority of scientists, and even the Koch Brothers-funded study believe that global warming is real, that seems to point that there only being one set of facts, not two, not different ones for progressives and conservatives. I’m horrified that you would ignore scientific evidence just to appease the moneyed interests of big oil which gives generously to your campaign.

Watch it:

Lungren declined to answer the woman’s question.

According to OpenSecrets, the oil and gas industry has given Lungren more than $143,000 since 2006.

by Mark Muro and Jessica Lee, via The Brookings Institution

Hubs and clusters, institutes and ecosystems: In recent years, we and others have talked a lot about the morphology of innovation systems, which are frequently anchored by major centers of research and comprised of related regional clouds of entrepreneurs, orbiting firms, industry actors, and educational institutions.

Strengthening that optimal structure was the idea behind our companion proposals for the creation of a network of regional energy discovery-innovation institutes and the establishment of a program to aid and abet nascent clusters with competitive grants. And it is also the point of the Department of Energy’s Energy Innovation Hubs program as well as the several regional innovation cluster programs now running, including at the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, that have moved along these lines.

Now, it’s great to see the Obama administration moving to pilot another proposed national network of innovation hubs aimed at catalyzing regional growth ecosystems, this time in manufacturing.

In this case, the news surrounds the launch last week of a robust new public-private institute for manufacturing innovation in Youngstown, OH, that will seek to provide a proof-of-concept for the creation of a $1 billion national network of up to 15 such institutes around the country. Focused on the hot new process of “3-D printing,” the new National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII) will seek to bolster U.S. leadership on one of the critical Next Big Things in industrial production and will do it through an award of $30 million of federal funding that will be matched by $40 million from a winning consortium of 60 companies, universities, community colleges, and non-profit organizations arrayed around the Ohio-Pennsylvania-West Virginia “Tech Belt.”

To that extent it’s reassuring to see concerted effort to strengthen the nation’s competitive advantage on advanced manufacturing through an embrace of regional hubs and ecosystems. There’s been an awful lot of dithering in recent years and it’s time to move forward on bolstering U.S. manufacturing!

And yet what’s equally gratifying is the intellectual sophistication of the administration’s innovation strategies, which have consistently sought to aid and abet local innovation by supporting regional, multi-party collaboration.

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by Peter Lehner, via NRDC’s Switchboard

Waste is just that – a waste.  A waste of time, money, and valuable resources, like food, clean water, fertile soil, or energy.

As pointless as waste is, and as much as we dislike it, it is all around us. We waste almost half the food we grow or raise. We waste more than half our energy through inefficiency, we waste three-quarters of our fuel in gas guzzlers, we waste water in our homes, our towns, our factories and farms. The list goes on and on.

None of this waste makes our lives better. It makes things measurably worse. Waste’s corrosive effects reach beyond our own pocketbooks and into our communities, our nation, and the world at large.  Wasting oil jeopardizes our national security. Wasting food creates social unrest.  Wasting energy poisons our air and water and sickens our families.

The good news is that we can dramatically reduce waste without in any way lowering our standard of living. After all – it’s waste!  We can stop waste at home and where we work or play or learn. Our towns can stop waste; our states and national government can stop waste. Our businesses can stop waste. Everyone can get in on the action.

Individual efforts can make a big difference to your own bottom line, and can have a ripple throughout your community as well. Once you start, say, turning off lights when you leave a room, you might get the idea to buy a motion sensor to save energy. Your friend sees it, likes it, and asks for it at the local hardware store. The store starts stocking lots of motion sensors, maybe adding some different brands. Soon, there are ripples going up the supply chain. Soon, you’re asking why your kid’s school doesn’t have motion sensors, and your individual action is creating change across your community.

We explored what might happen if every American took about a dozen pretty easy steps to reduce waste, and found it would reduce global warming pollution by a billion tons–the same effect as eliminating the carbon emissions of 200 million cars, or 200 coal-fired power plants.

If we recovered just 5 percent of the food we waste, we could feed 4 million Americans. We can save more oil than we currently import from the Gulf simply by making our cars more fuel-efficient. We already know how to construct green buildings that consume as much as 90 percent less energy than conventional ones.

Across the country, innovative solutions are being put in place to trim waste and boost efficiency, in ways that touch all of our lives. These efficient solutions are helping shore up bottom lines, save taxpayer money, create more attractive products, and make the most out of our valuable, and increasingly limited, natural resources.

Over the next few months, I’ll be highlighting smart ways to stop waste, as well as the people, towns, businesses and industries that are saving money and resources—and building success–through efficiency.

Peter Lehner is the Executive Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard and was reprinted with permission.

JR: James Hansen’s recent work on attributing climate extremes to global warming is very important. That’s because off-the-charts extreme weather — along with its impact on food production — is how most Americans and indeed most homo sapiens are likely to experience the negative impacts of climate change for the foreseeable future. So it’s no surprise that it has come under attack.

NASA’s Gavin Schmidt has an excellent explanation of why Hansen’s analysis is so relevant and why some of his critics are so wrong. The bottom line: The critics apparently think climate impacts are linear — a small change always has a small incremental impact — whereas reality makes clear that the impacts are non-linear and have potentially dangerous thresholds. There is a straw that breaks the climate’s back, and we would appear to be fast approaching it.

by Gavin Schmidt via RealClimate

There has been a lot of discussion related to the Hansen et al (2012, PNAS) paper and the accompanying op-ed in the Washington Post last week. But in this post, I’ll try and make the case that most of the discussion has not related to the actual analysis described in the paper, but rather to proxy arguments for what people think is ‘important’.

The basic analysis

What Hansen et al have done is actually very simple. If you define a climatology (say 1951-1980, or 1931-1980), calculate the seasonal mean and standard deviation at each grid point for this period, and then normalise the departures from the mean, you will get something that looks very much like a Gaussian ‘bell-shaped’ distribution. If you then plot a histogram of the values from successive decades, you will get a sense for how much the climate of each decade departed from that of the initial baseline period.

The shift in the mean of the histogram is an indication of the global mean shift in temperature, and the change in spread gives an indication of how regional events would rank with respect to the baseline period. (Note that the change in spread shouldn’t be automatically equated with a change in climate variability, since a similar pattern would be seen as a result of regionally specific warming trends with constant local variability). [Now combine] this figure … with the change in areal extent of warm temperature extremes:

[These] are the main results that lead to Hansen et al’s conclusion that:

“hot extreme[s], which covered much less than 1% of Earth’s surface during the base period, now typically [cover] about 10% of the land area. It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.”

What this shows first of all is that extreme heat waves, like the ones mentioned, are not just “black swans” – i.e. extremely rare events that happened by “bad luck”. They might look like rare unexpected events when you just focus on one location, but looking at the whole globe, as Hansen et al. did, reveals an altogether different truth: Such events show a large systematic increase over recent decades and are by no means rare any more.

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BILK_Thorn, via Flickr

by David Doniger, via NRDC’s Switchboard

As we sweat through this roaring-hot, extreme-weather summer, nearly 3 million Americans have raised their voices in public comments supporting EPA’s proposed standards to curb carbon pollution from new power plants and calling for action on the nation’s dirty existing power plants too.

Meanwhile, a handful of power companies and red states stagger on with zombie lawsuits to block EPA from doing its job, and with zombie plans for coal-fired projects with little prospect of getting financed or built.  Here’s an update on some of their shenanigans.

Zombie Litigation: In June, a coalition of coal and oil industry groups, climate science-deniers, and conservative politicians lost “the big one,” their combined challenge to EPA’s initial carbon pollution curbs – the endangerment finding, clean car standards, and permit requirements for big industrial sources.  In Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA, the Court of Appeals in Washington unanimously rejected every attack.  EPA’s reading of the Clean Air Act was “unambiguously correct” and EPA had ample support for its scientific assessment that carbon pollution is causing dangerous warming.  The unanimous ruling, by judges spanning the court’s ideological spectrum, is widely regarded as bullet-proof.  While the challengers can still appeal to the Supreme Court, no one expects that to succeed.

But other cases stagger on.  In a case called Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, Texas and a few others are still challenging the steps EPA took to make sure that builders of new power plants and other big new carbon polluters would be able to get needed construction permits come the beginning of 2011, when CO2 became a regulated pollutant.  I’ve written before (here and here) about Texas’s refusal to cooperate.  Texas said it wouldn’t issue those permits, claimed plants didn’t need them unless and until the state so decided, and told EPA to bug off.  But EPA knew, as the court confirmed this June, that new plants could not legally build without those permits, and that industry in Texas would be left high and dry if the state refused to issue them.  So EPA took the last-resort step of issuing those carbon permits itself where states could not or would not do so.

Texas is still harrumphing about the supposed affront to its sovereignty, and recently filed papers claiming support from the Supreme Court’s health care decision, NFIB v. Sebelius, in June.  Misapplying Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion, Texas claimed EPA put “a gun to the head” of the states.  NRDC joined with other environmental and state intervenors in response.  NFIB, we explained, “does not undercut the constitutionality of statutes that, like Clean Air Act Section 110, allow states to administer a federal program but provide for direct federal administration if states do not.”  Rather, NFIB reaffirms the constitutionality of laws that call for states to act but provide a federally-administered “backup scheme” if they do not.  “States,” we said, “have no constitutional right to administer a federal statute so as to nullify one of its requirements.”

Bottom line:  Far from putting a gun to Texas’s head, EPA kept the state from shooting itself in the foot. Read more

By Kiley Kroh and Michael Conathan

As the decision looms whether to allow Shell Oil to begin exploratory drilling in the Arctic Ocean this summer, the Center for American Progress released a new video today examining our lack of preparedness to respond to an oil spill in the remote and untested region.  Whether the Department of the Interior approves offshore drilling activity in the Arctic Ocean this year or next, the Arctic is still dangerously deficient in infrastructure and scientific knowledge. In “Oil and Ice: The Risks of Drilling in Alaska’s Arctic Ocean,” U.S. Coast Guard Captain Gregory Saniel, Chief of Response says the thought of mustering a response to a major incident like an oil spill “keeps me up at night.”

As Shell waits for heavy sea ice to clear and the Coast Guard to certify its containment barge, the fact remains that this region has far fewer resources to contain an oil spill than did the Gulf of Mexico. Even with the Gulf’s warm water and weather, large population centers, and decades of research and drilling experience, oil flowed unabated for three months in 2010, wreaking economic havoc and devastating the environment. If drilling in the Arctic starts next year, these fundamental infrastructure challenges still must be addressed.  This video highlights the perspectives of those who depend on the Arctic Ocean for their livelihood, the concerns and challenges facing the Coast Guard charged with its protection, and the grave doubts of the scientific community about the lack of knowledge in this area.

Kiley Kroh is the Associate Director for  Ocean Communications and Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress.

by Don Anair, via Union of Concerned Scientists

The longer you own an electric vehicle, the lower its global warming emissions are likely to become. Why? As some of the oldest, dirtiest coal plants are being retired and investments in renewable electricity increase, the global warming emissions that result from generating a given amount of electricity are estimated to fall nationwide by an average of about 13 percent by 2025.

That means, for 70 percent of Americans, charging their electric vehicle (EV) on the regional electricity grid in 2025 would result in lower global warming emissions than even today’s most efficient gasoline hybrid, the 50 mpg Prius. While that’s good news, it could be even better. By investing in more renewables and retiring more coal plants over the next decade, using electricity as a transportation fuel would deliver even greater global warming benefits than projected.

How will changes in the grid affect the emissions from charging an EV?

To get an idea of how emissions from charging an EV may change in the coming years, I looked to the Annual Energy Outlook updated most recently in June of this year by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The outlook projects changes in the electricity grid expected in the coming years as a result of varying energy demand, regulatory drivers, expected power plant retirements, and other factors.

Using the same well-to-wheels methodology used in our State of Charge report (more on this in the notes below), and the Annual Energy Outlook’s projections for 2025, I estimated how the emissions from charging an EV powered by the grid in 2025 compare to the emissions of a gasoline vehicle. I did this analysis across each of the grid regions across the United States, excluding Hawaii and Alaska for which projections were unavailable.

For each region, I show the miles per gallon that a gasoline vehicle would need to achieve to have emissions similar to an EV powered on the electricity grid (see the map below).  For example, charging an EV in Massachusetts on the 2009 regional (NEWE) electricity grid (the most recent year for which we have data) would create about the same global warming emissions as driving a gasoline vehicle that gets 75 mile per gallon. That’s better than any gasoline or hybrid vehicle on the market. In 2025, as the grid in Massachusetts gets cleaner, that same electric vehicle would be responsible for about the same emissions as a gas-powered vehicle with the astounding fuel economy of 106 mpg.

The maps show how EV emissions stack up across the country, with current data and projecting to 2025. Both maps stick with the same GOOD, BETTER, BEST ratings we used in State of Charge, where BEST means an EV has lower emissions than the even the most fuel efficient gasoline hybrid available today (50 mpg). By 2025, four additional regions move into the BEST category and another three move from GOOD to BETTER. A closer look at the map reveals the change in mpg ratings, and shows every regional electricity grid getting cleaner between 2009 and 2025

If the population distribution remains similar, 70 percent of Americans will live in BEST regions by 2025, where a grid powered EV will emit less global warming emissions than a 50 mpg gasoline vehicle. That holds true for about 45 percent of Americans today.

The improvement in emissions is expected as regions around the country clean up their electricity grids. EIA projections show renewables increasing their share of national electricity generation from about 11 percent in 2009 to about 15 percent in 2025. The projections also show the share of our grid powered by coal, the largest source of global warming emissions from electricity production, decreases from 44 percent in 2009 to about 38 percent in 2025.

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Small increases in temperature may have reduced the industrial and agricultural production of poor countries, according to a study by US economists. [Guardian]

Higher temperatures may also have contributed to political instability in these countries — defined as those with below-median per capita income, adjusted for the purchasing power of the country’s currency — according to the study published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics last month. In contrast, rich countries have so far shown no measurable economic or political consequences resulting from temperature change.

“Temperature fluctuations can have large negative impacts on poor countries,” said Benjamin Olken, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one of the authors of the study.

According to the Climate Prediction Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, El Niño conditions are likely to develop over the Pacific in August or September, which should affect global weather before the end of the year. This may drive food prices up further if it causes floods or further drought. [New Scientist]

Senior Whitehall officials from 10 government departments and agencies attended exclusive “training courses” laid on by Shell over two days at its London headquarters, according to documents released by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) following a freedom of information request. [Guardian]

Regional railroad operator RailAmerica told Port of Grays Harbor commissioners Tuesday that it is shelving current plans to build a coal storage and export facility at the port’s Terminal 3 in Hoquiam. [Seattle Times]

Rainstorms that pounded the Midwest Thursday provided relief to farmers hit hard by the worst drought in 56 years, but agriculture experts say it wasn’t enough to mitigate the lasting devastation to corn and soybean crops this summer. [Christian Science Monitor]