Perhaps the largest convention of climate science deniers in history — otherwise known as the 2012 Republican National Convention — starts Monday in Tampa, Florida. Unfortunately for the GOP, they are in the bull’s-eye of the latest track for tropical storm Isaac:

Even worse, Tampa Bay has unique geography that puts it atop the list of U.S. cities most vulnerable to a direct hit from a major hurricane. As meteorologist and former hurricane hunter Jeff Masters explained last week:

About 1/3 of the 4-county Tampa Bay region lies within a flood plain. Over 800,000 people live in evacuation zones for a Category 1 hurricane, and 2 million people live in evacuation zones for a Category 5 hurricane.

Masters points out that in a worst-case scenario, the “Tampa Bay convention center would go under 20 feet of water, and St. Petersburg would become an island, as occurred during the 1848 hurricane”: Minnesota Public Radio chief meteorologist Paul Huttner pointed out today:

“If major evacuations are called for, Tampa’s geography makes it almost impossible to get everybody out of town to safer locations. In fact, possible last hour variations in the eventual track of Isaac may make it impossible to tell residents where to evacuate to.”

That is why the Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn takes any forecast of a major storm headed toward his city very seriously. If Isaac turns out to hurricane and bears down on the GOP convention in Tampa, Buckhorn told CNN, “Absolutely, we’re prepared to call it off”:

Two points on the global warming connection. First, the subject is inevitably going to come up if — as the anniversary of Katrina approaches — we have a hurricane bearing down on a party that in just four years has flipped from running on climate action to running away from climate science (see National Journal: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones”). Second, as Kevin Trenberth, former head of Climate Analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, explained in the journal Climatic Change this year:

The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be…. The air is on average warmer and moister than it was prior to about 1970 and in turn has likely led to a 5–10 % effect on precipitation and storms that is greatly amplified in extremes. The warm moist air is readily advected onto land and caught up in weather systems as part of the hydrological cycle, where it contributes to more intense precipitation events that are widely observed to be occurring.

Global warming fuels more intense deluges from major storms like hurricanes. At the same time, warming-driven sea level rise makes storm surges more destructive.

“More than half the total hurricane damage in the U.S. (normalized for inflation and populations trends) was caused by just five events,” explained MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel in an email to me a few years ago. Trenberth has said that because the extremes are disproportionately more destructive and because manmade warming makes them disproportionately more likely, climate change can become the “straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

The irony of a hoard of GOP climate science deniers descending on this climate-endangered city was underscored when the Tampa Bay Tribune published an article Sunday by Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd, president-elect of the American Meteorological Society, on the many serious climate impacts the city faces: Sea level rise, brutal heat waves, ever-worsening deluges and urban flooding, and more intense hurricanes.

Because of the combination of these impacts, major conventions are likely to skip the coastal cities of the Gulf during hurricane season in the coming decades. Sea level rise and ever-worsening storms will make the risks too high. And in the second half of the century, temperatures routinely exceeding 100°F in the summer will ruin many southern cities as convention sites.

Of course, it’s not too late to avert the worst of climate change, but a certain obstructionist party would have to come to its senses and support preventive action now. That may seem impossible today, but consider the final irony. Here’s what Paul Ryan just said about “your President, or your Congressman, or your Senator” (on a different subject):

What if they knew approximately when it was going to happen, and what if they knew how to prevent it from happening and they had the time to do that but they just decided not to because it wasn’t good politics?

What if? People who live in green houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Note: The storm track has been updated. You can find the latest one here.

Related Post:

• Washington Post stunner: “The GOPs climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.”

by Justin Guay, via Sierra Club

Just days after the historic blackout reminded us that centralized coal is the problem, not the solution to India’s energy woes, a new era of entrepreneurs marked the beginning of a truly revolutionary effort to deliver energy access.

The landmark deal that marked their arrival was lost amidst the coverage of the blackout and the continued death spiral the coal sector finds itself in. Nonetheless, the deal between OMC Power, and Bharti Infratel (India’s largest mobile phone provider) to provide clean renewable energy to its off grid cell phone towers was historic. It marks the arrival of Community Power and it couldn’t have come a moment too soon.

As my colleagues at GSMA have demonstrated in a number of excellent reports, the potential for Community Power to deliver where the centralized grid has failed is tremendous. But what is it? Check out a few of these videos from OMC and let me explain.

As mobile phones leapfrog traditional infrastructure, a population of 548 million un-electrified mobile phone users has driven the mobile phone industry to fall all over itself to help them keep their phones charged.

That’s because when people’s phones are charged they use them more, and when people use them more the mobile phone companies make more money — significantly more money. This has created a dynamic that turns the traditional view of delivering energy access on its head. Instead of seeing it as an “expensive development project” it is increasingly becoming a lucrative business proposition.

It just so happens that taking advantage of this proposition solves another vexing problem for mobile phone providers: costly diesel. By switching out the expensive diesel gen sets that power their off-grid “base stations” — radio towers that convert electricity into radio waves — the companies save money.  In India there are an estimated 400,000 towers — over 150,000 of which don’t have reliable access to the grid.

This is where Community Power comes in.

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Tomorrow Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is scheduled to campaign in Hobbs, New Mexico, where he has said he will be “describing a comprehensive energy plan.”  The speech will be at Watson Truck & Supply, a trucking and oilfield services company in Hobbs that manufacturers drilling rig equipment, provides services for rigs, and hauls heavy equipment.

Interestingly, Watson Truck & Supply benefitted from $400,744 in stimulus funds, those from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act promoted by President Barack Obama that was signed into law in February 2009.  As recovery.gov shows, the company was a stimulus vendor hired by the City of Hobbs.  It used the funds for the “purchase of building for transit center”:

This is of particular interest because both Romney and his vice presidential pick Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) have strongly criticized the president’s stimulus and its results.  Romney has said the president’s energy “vision has failed,” and on the three-year anniversary of the stimulus he released a statement saying “the only thing President Obama’s stimulus has produced is a series of broken promises.”

And it’s not the first time that Romney and Ryan have campaigned with beneficiaries of the stimulus or shown hypocrisy towards it.  In June, Romney fundraised at the home of a recipient of stimulus funds.  He also bashed the stimulus at a small Ohio college that took $80,000 in stimulus money.  And just last week, it was revealed that Ryan helped various constituent groups acquire stimulus funds for bus services, energy efficiency, and renewable energy projects while calling the package “a wasteful spending spree.”

This campaign stop also runs counter to Romney’s consistent attacks on the Obama statement “you didn’t build that.”  Conservatives quickly pounced on the comment as belittling small business owners, whereas the full text of the president’s speech reveals that he was referring to the idea that government has helped successful individuals along the way.  Benefits from the stimulus to Watson Truck & Supply is just one example of government support for small business owners.

Various studies have shown that the stimulus actually created millions of jobs and turned the economy around.

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

We are headed for record lows in Arctic sea ice area and volume, as I discussed Monday.

The death spiral will start to make headlines in this country when we beat the record low sea ice extent set in 2007 as monitored by our National Snow and Ice Data Center. We are getting close, as the latest data make clear (see figure).

But the death spiral of Arctic ice deserves attention beyond its obvious indication of a warming planet. There is increasing scientific analysis suggesting that the loss of ice in the distant Arctic is helping drive the off-the-charts extreme weather we have been seeing right here in this country in recent years (see “Has Global Warming Caused A Quantum Jump In Extreme Weather?“)

In particular, a 2012 Geophysical Research Letters study, “Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes,” finds that the loss of Arctic ice favors “extreme weather events that result from prolonged conditions, such as drought, flooding, cold spells, and heat waves.”

One of the authors, Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, explains her work in this video (longer video here):

This is likely to be the story of the decade, especially since we are are on track for large declines in summer Arctic sea ice by 2020 and since the extreme weather is already helping to drive food prices to record levels (see “Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security“)

These videos are a bit on the technical side, so I’m going to reprint excerpts of two more general discussions. Andrew Freedman, senior science writer for Climate Central, had a good post in April, “Arctic Warming is Altering Weather Patterns, Study Shows.” He explains:

The study shows that by changing the temperature balance between the Arctic and mid-latitudes, rapid Arctic warming is altering the course of the jet stream, which steers weather systems from west to east around the hemisphere. The Arctic has been warming about twice as fast as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, due to a combination of human emissions of greenhouse gases and unique feedbacks built into the Arctic climate system.

The jet stream, the study says, is becoming “wavier,” with steeper troughs and higher ridges. Weather systems are progressing more slowly, raising the chances for long-duration extreme events, like droughts, floods, and heat waves.

“[The] tendency for weather to hang around longer is going to favor extreme weather conditions that are related to persistent weather patterns,” said Francis, the study’s lead author.

One does not have to look hard to find an example of an extreme event that resulted from a huge, slow-moving swing in the jet stream. It was a stuck or “blocking weather pattern” – with a massive dome of high pressure parked across the eastern U.S. for more than a week – that led to the remarkable March heat wave that sent temperatures in the Midwest and Northeast soaring into the 80s. In some locations, temperatures spiked to more than 40 degrees above average for that time of year.

The strong area of high pressure shunted the jet stream far north into Canada. At one point during the heat wave, a jetliner flying at 30,000 feet could’ve hitched a ride on the jet stream from Texas straight north to Hudson Bay, Canada. In the U.S., more than 14,000 warm-weather records (record-warm daytime highs and record-warm overnight lows) were set or tied during the month of March, compared to about 700 cold records.

Dr. Jeff Masters, Weather Underground director of meteorology and former hurricane hunter, also had a good explanation. Masters noted earlier this year that:

“The climate has shifted to a new state capable of delivering rare & unprecedented weather events.”

Here is his longer discussion of Francis’s work:

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Farmers in Ohio may not be facing extreme drought conditions like their counterparts in Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, but record high temperatures and little rain still caused plenty of headaches in the state this summer.

Corn yields in the state are expected to fall 29 percent this year. In some areas of the state, farmers are seeing yields up to 60 percent below last year. And some believe those losses, caused by the recent rash of usually hot, dry weather, has raised awareness of climate change among traditionally skeptical farmers in Ohio.

“I really do think that there are farmers that are being converted by the drought,” said Joe Logan, who owns a 300-acre corn, soy and livestock farm in Northeast Ohio. “I think farmers see the changes in precipitation patterns – not just this year, but over time – and make the connection. And I do think the drought moved the needle some more.”

Logan, who is also director of agricultural programs at the Ohio Environmental Council, isn’t quite sure how far the needle has moved – or if it will have any political influence. Like in many other states around the country, policymakers have been silent – if not downright hostile – on the issue of climate change.

However, there are small signs that the issue is still simmering in people’s minds. In April, Ohio’s Republican Governor told a group of political donors that he was breaking with his party, saying “there is a problem” with our climate. “This [view] isn’t popular,” he bluntly noted.

But that still doesn’t change the problem in Logan’s mind: Political leaders, heavily influenced by the fossil fuel industry, are spreading disinformation and ignoring serious environmental problems facing farmers.

“So many policymakers have hit a tipping point, moving into the ridiculous,” he said, referencing West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who shot a copy of the 2010 climate bill with his rifle. “They ought to be ashamed.”

Roger Wise, president of the Ohio Farmer’s Union, agrees about the ridiculousness of the manufactured “debate” and agrees that farmers are noticing changes. But he isn’t as optimistic about how people in Ohio’s agricultural community are reacting to them.

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by Harald Heubaum, via The Carbon Brief

US presidential contender Mitt Romney recently said that, if elected, he would not extend the production tax credits (PTCs) that have helped grow the US domestic wind energy industry since the early 1990s. But does Romney’s claim that discontinuing PTCs is necessary to “level the playing field” for energy sources stand up? A recent study taking the long view of subsidies to energy sources suggests renewables have received only a fraction of the historical support given to their fossil fuel competitors.

Romney’s position on support for renewables has vacillated over the years. In 2003, when governor of Massachusetts, Romney drew on a state fund to provide subsidies to a select group of renewable energy companies. But, nine years on, Romney’s support for free markets over government intervention has apparently hardened. He blamed the failure of Solyndra, a solar cell manufacturer that benefited from stimulus spending only to file for bankruptcy last year, on the Obama government’s decision to pick “winners and losers”.

Romney’s new stance should come as no surprise. It chimes with the current US Republican enthusiasm for unfettered free markets. And it also echoes the criticisms of predominantly right-of-centre politicians around the world, who have claimed government support has given low-carbon technologies an unfair competitive advantage over established energy players.

But are they right? Do renewable energy subsidies distort the market? To answer these questions it helps to take a closer look at government involvement in energy markets over time. The US experience is particularly illustrative.

Mapping US fossil fuel subsidies

In a 2011 study of historical US energy subsidies published by DBL Investors, Nancy Pfund and Ben Healy analyse US federal government support for various energy industries during their formative years. For the coal industry this meant cheap land grants in the 19th century. For oil and gas it was tax incentives during the first half of the 20th century, followed by costs of regulation, civillian R&D and liability risk-shifting among others for nuclear power from the late 1940s. Finally, for modern renewables it was tax incentives from the early 1990s onward.

Drawing on government, academic and NGO sources, Pfund and Healy find that when the first 15 years of subsidy life are compared, government support for the oil, gas and nuclear industries as a percentage of inflation-adjusted federal spending far outweighed the support granted to renewables.

Taking a longer-term view and again adjusting for inflation, the authors find that between 1918 and 2009, the oil and gas industry received a cumulative $446.96 billion in subsidies compared to just $5.93 billion given to renewables in the years between 1994 and 2009. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry benefitted from a cumulative $185.38 billion in federal subsidies between 1947 and 1999.

Pfund and Healy conclude:

“[C]urrent renewable energy subsidies do not constitute an over-subsidized outlier when compared to the historical norm for emerging sources of energy. Rather … federal incentives for early fossil fuel production and the nascent nuclear industry were much more robust than the support provided to renewables today.”

The study doesn’t just highlight the advantage the federal government gave oil, gas and nuclear in the form of subsidies. It also shows that the government continued the financial support as these industries matured, arguably enshrining a market distortion.

Pfund and Healy uncover evidence of direct and indirect coal subsidies reaching back as far as 1789 when the US federal government enacted a tariff on imported coal. Coal is not included in the final total of subsidy amounts, however, due to a lack of reliable data reaching back to the industry’s formative years in the early 1800s.

But it’s clear that coal continues to receive subsidies more than 200 years after the height of the Industrial Revolution. The US Energy Information Administration tallied federal government subsidies to the coal industry at $3.17 billion in 2007.

Subsidies beyond the US

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by Dana Nucitelli, via Skeptical Science

Readers may recall a letter published in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in January 2012, signed by 16 climate contrarians, which we dubbed The Latest Denialist Plea for Climate Change Inaction. 

Roger Cohen, William Happer, and Richard Lindzen (hereafter CHL) were 3 of the 16 signatories on that letter, and have published yet another in the WSJ a mere 7 months later.  As we noted at the time, neither Happer nor Cohen has a single climate science publication to his name, while Happer is a member of two fossil fuel-funded climate denialist think tanks (George C. Marshall Institute and Global Warming Policy Foundation) and Cohen is a George C. Marshall Institute ‘expert’ who has previously worked for ExxonMobil.  Richard Lindzen is of course a climate scientist, but quite possibly the most consistently wrong climate scientist on climate issues on the planet.

Suffice it to say that CHL do not have a great deal of credibility on climate science issues, which is perhaps why they continue to publish their opinions in the conservative mainstream media rather than subjecting their arguments to the scientific peer-review process.  As we saw in January, the first WSJ letter was little more than a compilation of many long-debunked climate myths, and the quality of their arguments has not improved much in their second attempt.  In fact the two letters bear some striking resemblances, for example both citing the climate opinions of Ivar Giaever, who we have previously seen has not even done the most basic climate science research.

In this post we will examine the claims made in the latest WSJ letter from CHL, with one in particular standing out above the rest.

WSJ – Home of the Whopper

Just last month we looked at a paper by Lindzen and Choi (2011) (LC11), which claimed to provide evidence for a climate sensitivity of less than 1°C, meaning that if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doubles, Lindzen argues that the average global surface temperature will only warm a total of <1°C in response.

As we discussed at the time, subsequent research has identified a number of fundamental errors in LC11 which have not been addressed, and in addition, virtually all other research using many different lines of evidence finds that climate sensitivity is very likely between 2 and 4.5°C for doubled CO2.  At the time, we also noted that arguments for climate sensitivity <1°C depend entirely on LC11, because there has simply been little if any other scientific research in recent years finding such extreme low outlier sensitivity values.

“Since the body of research using multiple different approaches and lines of evidence is remarkably consistent in finding an equilibrium climate sensitivity of between 2 and 4.5°C for doubled CO2 (whereas a ‘low’ sensitivity would be well below 1.5°C), climate contrarians…attempt to replace it with this single study by Lindzen and Choi”

As if they were reading our post when they penned their WSJ article, this is precisely what CHL have done, claiming:

“It is increasingly clear that doubling CO2 is unlikely to increase global temperature more than about one degree Celsius, not the much larger values touted by the global warming establishment.”

How is this “increasingly clear”?  The beauty of publishing an article in the mainstream media is that providing supporting evidence is unnecessary – the reader is expected to simply take CHL’s word for it.  We can only assume that this ‘increasing evidence’ refers to the increase from essentially zero studies finding such extremely low climate sensitivity, to one fundamentally flawed study (LC11).  While this can perhaps be construed as “increasing” evidence, it is hardly a strong or convincing case.

Extreme Weather Obfuscation, Again

Denying the link between climate change and extreme weather events is becoming a common exercise amongst climate contrarians, for example John Christy, Roger Pielke Jr., and Steve McIntyre.  CHL join the extreme weather obfuscation party, and in fact refer to John Christy’s myth and misinformation-filled congressional testimony on the subject as “measured and informative” in the process.  Perhaps they meant to say “misinformative.”

Their comments on the issue are in response to a previous WSJ article by Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp, in which Krupp asserted:

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A wind turbine manufacturing facility in Cedar Rapids is laying off some employees. Clipper Windpower officials say they’re reducing their company wide workforce by 32-percent, from 550 to 376 workers. The company is not releasing how many of those 174 layoffs are in Cedar Rapids, but workers at the plant believe it’s around 75. [Radio Iowa]

In spite of the PTC uncertainty wreaking havoc on the supply chain, turbine manufacturers continued to move their sourcing activities to the U.S. last year, with 67 percent of the equipment used in U.S. [Renewable Energy World]

Life in the world’s oceans faces far greater change and risk of large-scale extinctions than at any previous time in human history, a team of the world’s leading marine scientists has warned. [Science Daily]

The world urgently need to adopt drought-management policies as farmers from Africa to India struggle with lack of rainfall and the United States endures the worst drought it has experienced in decades, top officials with the U.N. weather agency said Tuesday. [Associated Press]

Mitt Romney plans to roll out an energy policy blueprint on Thursday, according to published reports. [The Hill]

The UK Government believes companies have been “profiting unfairly at the expense of [the] consumer” by overloading the national grid with electricity. [The Telegraph]

Wave power developers planning a project off the Oregon Coast now have the nation’s only federal permit to develop a commercial wave power park. [CBS News]

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet says GE’s $10 million clean technology innovation investment proves business wants to embrace a clean-energy future. [World News Australia]

China’s solar panel manufacturers, who dominate global sales with a two-thirds market share, are confronting growing trade and financial problems, a Chinese industry official acknowledged Tuesday, shortly before one of the industry’s largest companies, Trina Solar, announced weak results for the second quarter. [New York Times]