The 'Muskego Muck' fire in central Ohio.

The 12-month period from August 2011 to July 2012 was the hottest ever recorded for the U.S. So far this year, more than 27,000 high temperature records have been broken or tied — beating cold temperature records by 10 to 1. All the while, the U.S. has faced a barrage of record-breaking wildfires, powerful storms, and an historic drought that covers the majority of the country.

“You look out the window and you see climate change in action,” said Kevin Trenberth, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in an interview this summer. Below are some ways that these extremes have manifested themselves around the country.

***

MARION, Ohio — Driving down the long, flat road in rural Ohio, I can see a grey mist rising above the soybean fields from three miles away.

But I know it’s not mist, it’s smoke.

I pull up to the field and get out of the car, sucking in the acrid smoke rising from the ground. It smells like burning plastic. Most of the vegetation has burned away and the ground is sinking in on itself. Black, cratered, and smoldering, the field looks like someone had just peppered it with heavy artillery.

A fire truck pulls up behind my vehicle and three men get out.

“What do you think about all of this?” asks Clint Canterbury, chief of the First Consolidated Fire District.

“What do you think about all of this?” I respond.

“I know it’s causing us a lot of headaches,” says Canterbury.

We are standing on the edge of a 15-acre underground fire that Canterbury’s team of firefighters hasn’t been able to extinguish. The field, which borders a 200-acre soybean farm, sits on top of a deep deposit of spongy peat, also known as “muskego muck.”

In late May, as temperatures rose into the 90’s – nearing record highs for the region at that time of year – Canterbury’s department got a call about a field fire. But after trying to put it out, they soon realized the fire was spreading underground, “burning layers off, sinking down, burning more layers, and causing new spots to pop up,” says Canterbury.

The lack of snow over the winter combined with the spring and summer heat waves dried out the muck, making it susceptible to burning. And when the local fire department found no evidence of a man-made fire, they concluded that it was spontaneous combustion.

“I’ve talked to a lot of old farmers and they say ‘we’ve never seen anything like this before,’” says Canterbury.

As summer unfolded, temperatures continued to rise, and little rain came, the problem just got worse. The fire is now burning five feet below ground at temperatures of up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, feeding the dried sediment and sending a constant stream of acrid smoke into the air, day and night.

According to Canterbury, a boy across the street with asthma has had breathing problems because of the smoke.

“The smoke just lingers here. You can see it for miles and miles. We believe this could go on well into the winter — and if we don’t get much snow like last year, this could likely burn for years,” he says.

***

The impact of extreme heat on the Des Moines river.

OTTUMWA, Iowa — Mark Flammang, a fisheries biologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, sits on the banks of the Des Moines River, surveying the water.

To his left, the low water levels have exposed large patches of sand. To his right, a hydropower facility sits idle, allowing only the minimum flow to pass through the dam. The temperatures are in the mid-90′s, a welcome change to the long period of 100-plus days in July that caused the river to overheat.

At one point in July — even with water levels four times higher than current levels — the temperature of the Des Moines River climbed to 97 degrees. And that created conditions for one of the biggest and longest fish kills in Iowa’s history.

“It was literally tens of thousands of fish. The kill started and it went on and on and on,” says Flammang. “We were following dead fish for well over a week.”

When it was over, approximately 37,000 shovelnose sturgeon and 12,000 channel catfish turned up dead, resulting in estimated economic losses of $10 million.

Read more

On his radio show today, Rush Limbaugh suggested that the government manipulated hurricane forecasts in order to force Republicans to cancel a day of their national convention, saying the model “allows them to do it.”

“The hurricane center is the regime; the hurricane center is the Commerce Department. It’s the government. It’s Obama,” said Limbaugh.

In reality, the National Hurricane Center forecast is, roughly, what you get if “you average together the track forecasts from” several models, most of which are done by other organizations, in some cases other countries. Obama would have more luck using his apparently omniscient powers to alter the course of the hurricane itself than somehow trying to rejigger the storm tracks from all these different models, which are publicly available and updated continuously.

Limbaugh communicated his absurd theory on this imaginary scheme while simultaneously claiming “I’m not alleging conspiracy.”

His latest conspiracy theory matches the absurdity of his claim from last July, when he said the heat index was “manufactured by the government” in order to convince the American people that it’s hotter outside.

Listen to Limbaugh’s paranoid rant on hurricane forecasting:

Here’s part of the full transcript:

Read more

This visualization shows the extent of Arctic sea ice on Aug. 26, 2012, the day the sea ice dipped to its smallest extent ever recorded in more than three decades of satellite measurements…. The line on the image shows the average minimum extent from the period covering 1979-2010, as measured by satellites. Every summer the Arctic ice cap melts down to what scientists call its “minimum” before colder weather builds the ice cover back up. The size of this minimum remains in a long-term decline. The extent on Aug. 26. 2012 broke the previous record set on Sept. 18, 2007. But the 2012 melt season could still continue for several weeks. Image credit: NASA

News via the University of Colorado Boulder

The blanket of sea ice floating on the Arctic Ocean melted to its lowest extent ever recorded since satellites began measuring it in 1979, according to the University of Colorado Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.

On Aug. 26, the Arctic sea ice extent fell to 1.58 million square miles, or 4.10 million square kilometers. The number is 27,000 square miles, or 70,000 square kilometers below the record low daily sea ice extent set Sept. 18, 2007.  Since the summer Arctic sea ice minimum normally does not occur until the melt season ends in mid- to late September, the CU-Boulder research team expects the sea ice extent to continue to dwindle for the next two or three weeks, said Walt Meier, an NSID scientist.

“It’s a little surprising to see the 2012 Arctic sea ice extent in August dip below the record low 2007 sea ice extent in September,” he said.  “It’s likely we are going to surpass the record decline by a fair amount this year by the time all is said and done.”

On Sept. 18, 2007, the September minimum extent of Arctic sea ice shattered all satellite records, reaching a five-day running average of 1.61 million square miles, or 4.17 million square kilometers.  Compared to the long-term minimum average from 1979 to 2000, the 2007 minimum extent was lower by about a million square miles — an area about the same as Alaska and Texas combined, or 10 United Kingdoms.

While a large Arctic storm in early August appears to have helped to break up some of the 2012 sea ice and helped it to melt more quickly, the decline seen in in recent years is well outside the range of natural climate variability, said Meier. Most scientists believe the shrinking Arctic sea ice is tied to warming temperatures caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases pumped into Earth’s atmosphere.

CU-Boulder researchers say the old, thick multi-year ice that used to dominate the Arctic region has been replaced by young, thin ice that has survived only one or two melt seasons — ice which now makes up about 80 percent of the ice cover.  Since 1979, the September Arctic sea ice extent has declined by 12 percent per decade.

Read more

by Bracken Hendricks and Adam James

In a political season dominated by divisive electoral politics and obstructionist legislative strategies, the future of America’s energy policy has been a casualty, caught in the political crossfire.

Whether debating drilling for oil on public lands, extending the production tax credit for wind energy, or the role of fossil fuel subsidies in an “all of the above” energy plan, federal policy makers are scoring lots of political points but coming up short on building a durable foundation for transformative energy innovation.

No matter who wins the election this November, the fact remains that in order to govern well the next President and Congress will have to place energy innovation at the center of any plans for economic growth.

There is one simple reason for this.  The energy sector is already changing rapidly and radically beneath our feet, right now. It is being driven by disruptive technologies that are fundamentally altering the old ways of doing business. Utilities can’t wait to plan for future growth and reliability; they must place their bets on tomorrow’s smart energy technologies today. Banks need to put capital to work right now in infrastructure investments, as a hedge against inflation, to earn stable returns for the pensioners whose savings they manage. And upstart companies are already building new, wired, and IT enabled technology businesses to tap the hundreds of billions of dollars of energy we waste each year as a new market for growth.

These changes are durable, structural, and the result of technology innovation.  Together, they are building the foundation for a fundamentally different, more efficient, and more productive economy. Only Washington seems to lag behind the curve in understanding this state-change that is underway in our energy grid.

In a new Center for American Progress report released today called “The Networked Energy Web,” we argue that this upheaval in the energy sector can best be understood as the next wave of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution.  Just as previous waves of technological change in wireless communications or digital data management brought with them fundamentally different engineering approaches, new business models, and ultimately dramatically changed industry structures, so too a new wave of growth, restructuring, and reinvestment are coming as our 19^th century energy infrastructure collides with 21^st century information management tools.  In this paper we offer a framework for understanding the fundamental differences between coming energy networks and our historical electricity grid, and we show how this network will unleash dramatic new efficiencies for the economy and important benefits for consumers.

Read more

by Michael Conathan

It’s tough sledding in the oil business these days. Federal subsidies integral to keeping quarterly profit margins in the double-digit billions are constantly under attack, meaning the industry must hand out millions in campaign donations to keep them in place.

Gasoline prices plummeted almost two whole percentage points in the second quarter of this year. And, for proponents who want to see every square inch of the U.S. open to drilling, the Department of Interior didn’t do enough when it granted access to 75 percent of all offshore deposits to the oil industry.

The latest slap in the face is that the Department of Interior has become such a stickler about drilling safety that Shell Oil has been forced to request a two-week extension of its proposed drilling season in the Arctic Ocean’s Chukchi Sea.

It’s like regulators remember some kind of horrible accident that happened just a couple years ago or something. Except that these operations would be carried out in a region with no infrastructure, no permanent response capacity, and virtually no significant scientific knowledge about how oil will behave in freezing conditions — deficiencies exposed in a video released last week by the Center for American Progress.

Why the need for the extension? While sea ice in the region has lingered later than anyone expected — striking considering that Arctic sea ice in general is at an all-time low – the areas of the Beaufort and Chukchi where Shell plans to drill have until recently remained too ice-choked to allow safe navigation of drilling ships and equipment.

But Interior Secretary Ken Salazar stated unequivocally earlier this month, if a key piece of Shell’s drill response equipment had managed to pass Coast Guard inspection, “[Shell] may already be up there today.”

In other words, the company’s reason to request an extension is the same proffered by any college student who partied a little too much, slacked off on his research, and overslept. They just didn’t get it done. So now, their solution is to ask the government to let them drill longer into winter.

Let’s get this straight. The main reason for the delay is that the company couldn’t make its own ships shipshape. The secondary reason is that there was too much ice. So Shell’s solution is to operate later into the fall, even though the government has already told them it’s not safe. At that time of year, it will be darker more often, the weather in the region is increasingly unpredictable, and temperatures will be dropping — meaning there’s likely to be more ice.

As the Los Angeles Times reported:

Read more

Latest storm track for Isaac

The good news: Tropical storm Isaac veered away from Tampa. The bad news: It is taking aim at New Orleans and is on a path to deliver that beleaguered city a dangerous deluge and serious storm surge on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Fortunately, Isaac does not appear likely to make landfall stronger than a strong Category 1 hurricane.  Unfortunately, it is a large, slow-moving storm and poses real dangers that have already led to evacuation orders for parts of Plaquemines Parish, Jefferson Parish, and St. Charles Parish.

As meteorologist and former hurricane hunter Dr. Jeff Masters explained this morning, “The latest 8-day precipitation forecast from the GFS model calls for 10 – 20 inches of rain over much of Louisiana.” The  biggest damage is expected to come from the storm surge, which could exceed 10 feet in places. Masters expects that based on its size and trajectory, “Isaac’s storm surge will be about 30% higher than the typical surge one would expect based on the maximum wind speeds.” He discusses the new levee system and concludes, “I expect New Orleans’ new flood defenses will be able to hold back Isaac’s surge, but areas outside the levees are at risk of heavy storm surge damage.”

A good place to capture the mood of New Orleans and the latest updates on the storm is The Times-Picayune website, nola.com. Here’s the front-page noon Monday:

I wonder if the editors were being intentionally ironic by running that headline below an ad for the musical, Les Misérables. The citizens of  New Orleans must feel as if hurricanes are hounding them like Inspector Javert.

Sadly, because of the obstructionism of one political party in particular, the most intense Gulf storms are all but certain to become increasingly destructive in the coming years. 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. The latest studies find that staying near our current greenhouse emissions emissions path, leads to a foot of sea level rise by mid-century and over 40 inches of sea level rise by 2100 and then seas continue to rise 7 inches or more a decade!

Since much of New Orleans is already below sea level, its battle against deluges and storm surges represents the warming-driven future for all coastal cities in Hurricane Alley.

Since my brother lost his home in Katrina, and that ultimately led to my launching this blog on the one-year anniversary of Katrina, I follow hurricanes and hurricane science closely.

Here is an excerpt from my book, Hell and High Water, about Katrina and what is to come:

Read more

by Mindy Lubber, via Ceres

Any day now, the Obama Administration will adopt the latest mileage targets for passenger cars and trucks sold in America: an average 54.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by the year 2025.

U.S. automakers are not just sitting around waiting for the official announcement, nor are they waiting 13 years to start delivering gas-sipping vehicles. Under the previously adopted 2012-2016 standards, they are already offering buyers a wider selection of more fuel-efficient vehicles than ever before.

Automakers and suppliers recognize that better fuel economy equals better sales, better profits and more jobs. Their recent hires and investments reflect this:

• Ford is accelerating development of its hybrid and electric vehicles by bringing the design and production of key components in-house, a $135 million investment.
• Ford has already doubled the size of its team working on forward-looking energy technologies – over 1,000 engineers and technicians – and plans to double size of that team again by 2015.
• Honda plans to hire 300 more workers next year at its Greensburg, Ind., plant, which is slated to start producing the Civic Hybrid.
• Volkswagen is adding a third shift at its Chattanooga, Tenn., plant, to boost production of its fuel-efficient Passat.
• Continental, a supplier of fuel-efficient turbo chargers to Ford’s 2014 Focus, is steadily pursuing electrification technologies and sees them as a “long-term investment.”

These represent just a handful of examples of how a shift toward efficiency and advanced technology is driving job creation, investment and innovation across the country.

Top consumer experts back the standards, saying not only that American drivers will benefit financially from more fuel-efficient cars, but also that they want and will buy these higher mileage cars, trucks and SUVs. When July sales numbers were released earlier this month, car company executives observed that consumers paid close attention to the fuel economy of vehicles they purchased. “Fuel economy continues to be a top consumer purchase driver across our lineup,” Ken Czubay, Ford’s head of sales and marketing in the U.S., told the New York Times.

Read more

by Gordon Scott, via the Sierra Club

The global grassroots movement against dirty, polluting coal-fired power has added another continent to the ranks of those finally moving away from the carbon-intensive fuel source: Australia. This July, the government of Australia announced that it is cancelling an A$100 million grant to Australian conglomerate HRL for a 400-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Victoria.  This is likely to be the death blow to what many believe is the last coal plant planned for Australia.

The government’s announcement marked the culmination of over half-a-decade of grassroots opposition to the project.  Led by Greenpeace International, as well as Australian environmental groups Quit Coal and Environment Victoria, activists staged protests, sit-ins of government offices, direct actions at the proposed project site, and legal challenges. The withdrawal of public funding for the HRL plant — thought to be Australia’s last major coal plant project — likely means the end of new coal plant construction in the country, as the upside-down economic model for coal-fired power has clearly been proven unviable.

On the heels of this victory, a new report shows that coal-fired generation in Australia fell by 10% in July of 2012 as compared to the same month the previous year. While lower energy consumption in the country due to the economic recession has some part to play in Australia’s July coal decrease, it cannot account for the whole gap. Analysts link the shift away from coal to a combination of decreased energy demand, the rising price of coal due in part to Australia’s new carbon tax, and increasing competitiveness of alternative fuel sources such as natural gas and renewables.

by Matt Kasper

Here’s another example of why good pollution regulations can be an economic driver and job creator.

While Republicans in Congress continue their disinformation campaign about EPA regulations and Romney’s ‘Bush-era’ energy team plans to roll back pollution rules, Alliant Energy and MidAmerican Energy in Iowa are celebrating an emission-reduction technology that will help a power plant meet new standards — creating 400 jobs in the process. One recent study found that “EPA’s two new air quality rules create 1.5 million jobs.”

Republican Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, Economic Development Authority Director Debi Durham, and CEO of Alliant Energy Pat Kampling recently visited the 726 megawatt coal-fired Ottumwa plant where scrubbing technology will be added to the generating station.

The Ottumwa Courier reported:

“The OGS [Ottumwa Generating Station] project is a win-win for Iowa’s economy and environment,” said Pat Kampling, president and CEO of Alliant Energy. “The project at OGS will create approximately 400 good-paying construction jobs for Iowa’s working families and foster future economic growth while making Iowa’s air cleaner.”

Gov. Terry Branstad called the project “a long-term investment in Iowa’s economy and environment.”

The $345 million investment in the power plant will reduce yearly mercury emissions from 150 pounds to 15 pounds and cut 4,900 tons of SO2 pollution.

Alliant Energy says it has plans of investing more than a billion dollars over the next five years in Iowa power plants. This is great news for public health: according to 2010 estimates from the Clean Air Task Force Iowa power plants’ toxic emissions cause 151 deaths and 250 heart attacks annually.

These investments will not only clean the air and save lives, but also create direct and indirect jobs.

Unfortunately, MidAmerican Energy – the other utility that co-owns the plant in Ottumwa – wants to delay rules for air toxics that apply to their coal-fired power plants. In testimony last year, MidAmerican claimed having to comply with EPA regulations could lead to shortages of equipment and labor to install the pollution reduction technology. This claim was debunked in 2010 by the Institute of Clean Air Companies.

MidAmerican Energy also has two of the most deadly coal plants in America, according to a report from Environmental Integrity. Combined, the George Neal South and Walter Scott Jr. Energy Center plants released over 30,000 tons of SO2 and 12,000 tons of NOx last year, resulting in over 80 premature deaths.

Read more

The recent West Nile virus outbreak is the largest ever seen in the United States, according to new numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [CBS]

Why West Nile Virus Is a Self-Inflicted Wound. [Time]

Why has the summer of 2012 proved so hospitable to the West Nile virus and the mosquitoes that carry it? Like so much else that’s gone this season, blame the weather. An extremely mild winter throughout much of the country allowed more mosquitoes than usual to survive, while the unusually high temperatures this scorching summer further increased their numbers as well as speeding up their life cycle, causing more of the virus to build up in their salivary glands….

As the summer ends, so will West Nile season. But thanks to climate change, this isn’t likely to be the last time a disease we’d usually associate with the tropics makes its way into the U.S. The mosquito-borne dengue fever, which is endemic in much of the tropics, has been reported in south Texas, as well as the Florida Keys. The first U.S. case of  Chagas disease, a deadly Latin American infection transmitted by a cockroach-like bug that can feed on human blood, was reported last month. As the climate continues to warm worldwide, the zone of risk for all these diseases and even malaria could continue to expand.

[See also DotEarth: “Scientific research and assessments examining the link between human-driven climate change and malaria exposure have, for the most part, accurately gauged and conveyed the nature of the risk that warming could swell the ranks of people afflicted with this awful mosquito-borne disease.”]

Ignited by lightning strikes two months ago, a massive fire rages in Alaska and shrouds the surrounding area beneath a dark blanket of smoke. [NY Daily News]

Two wildfires in southern Spain forced the evacuation of around 1,000 residents, making this the worst summer in a decade for countryside devoured by flames, authorities said Sunday. [CBC]

The insurance industry faces its biggest ever loss in agriculture as the worst drought to hit the US in more than half a century devastates the country’s multibillion-dollar corn and soybean crops, triggering large claims. [CNN]

With its bid to launch offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean running up against a deadline to protect against sea ice, Shell Alaska has requested an extension in its window for drilling in the Chukchi Sea. [Los Angeles Times]

Electric car drivers have crept into the corridors of power with the news that President Obama has approved plans for charging points to be installed in and around Congress. [Business Green]

Higher corn costs, brought on by the most severe U.S. drought in 56 years, has renewed attention on the 5-year-old federal mandate to increase the amount of ethanol blended into gasoline. [Tulsa World]