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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by Michael Kodas, via On Earth

In a little over a decade, the largest mountain pine beetle outbreak on record (by a factor of 10) has killed more than 70,000 square miles of Rocky Mountain forests — an area the size of Washington State. From above, the infested pine trees seem color-coded: green is healthy, red is dead, and after three or four years, the dead red needles fall off, leaving behind a graveyard of bare gray bark — or, if you’re worried about wildfires, what amounts to a field of 100-foot-tall matchsticks.

Colorado, already facing the most destructive wildfire season in state history, has 3.3 million acres of beetle-killed forests to worry about. No one doubts that dead and dying trees are a potential problem, but fears that the beetle infestation will fuel larger firestorms might be premature (at least in the short term). Across the West, some 40 scientific studies have failed to produce a clear picture of how millions of beetle-killed trees will burn.

One recent paper by researches at the U.S. Forest Service and University of Idaho predicts that during the “red phase” — when trees are dead but still have rust-colored needles — severe crown fires may burn through the treetops with greater speed and intensity than they would in healthy green forests. A study last year by ecologists with the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station showed that in beetle-infested forests, the red, dead needles ignite three times faster than their living counterparts, largely because they have 10 times less moisture and different chemistries than living, green needles.

The intensity of the crown fires in red, beetle-killed forests, the researchers predict, could also launch embers farther, thus spreading the fire faster over a greater territory. Another model shows that lower fuel moisture in the canopies of red and gray forests and dead trees that fell to the ground during and after the gray phase increased the intensity of ground fires, which allowed crown fires to erupt with less wind than they usually require. Other studies show that gray forests, in which the needles have fallen from the trees, are likely to slow down crown fires. Trees in those forests, however, have a great risk of “torching” — which means they burn individually with high, intense flames.

But other research contradicts the studies showing that beetle-killed forests are a cause for alarm.

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by John Atcheson

The Dog Stars, a debut novel by Peter Heller, succeeds on so many levels it’s almost frightening.

It is a piece of literary fiction that is likely to be a best seller.

It is a dystopic future tale that is nevertheless full of beauty.

It is a moving novel that illustrates the horror of climate change, without ever mentioning climate change.

Heller paints a grim picture of the world we are even now sculpting, populates it with people who are desperately violent or violently desperate, but leavens it with a triumph of the human spirit in the form of Hig, one of the most endearing and unlikely heroes to show up in fiction in a long time.

Hig, a pilot, lives in an abandoned airport in what appears to be an armed truce with his companion of nine years, a tough survivalist who refers to himself only as Bangley.  Their relationship seems, at first, strictly one of convenience.  Each contributes to the survivability of the other.  Bangley tackles the job of killing marauders with verve; Hig does so with reluctance.  He wants to believe in people, but it is a world which punishes people who do.

It is set sometime near the middle of this century. The natural world is in the process of being devastated by climate change and much of the world’s population has been killed by a pandemic.  Nine years have passed since Hig lost his wife, since the world crumpled into this chaos.

It is certainly one of the better novels addressing climate change out there, but as noted, it doesn’t once use the words climate change or global warming.  And therein lies its strength.  It reveals this new world without lecture, rancor or melodrama, and it does so through the eyes of a character we care about.  As a result, we aren’t beaten over the head with a message; we are exposed to a dramatic tragedy, which, as Whitehead put it, “… resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.”

At the end of the day, fiction must stand on story, character and damn good writing to succeed.  When it does, it reaches us on a visceral level, and it can be a powerful way to move us.

Heller, an award winning writer for Outdoor Magazine, succeeds on all three levels in his first foray into fiction.

Too many of us, writing novels that include climate change as part of the story allow the facts to compromise the fiction.  Even great writers such as Ian McEwan fall into this trap. I recently published an eco-thriller centered on global warming, part of a trilogy – and I definitely wrestled with this issue.  Still do.

Heller doesn’t.  He transcends it. Yet no one reading this book could fail to be moved by it, and by the future Hig lives in.

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Non-hydro renewable electricity generation has nearly doubled since President Obama took office, reaching 5.75 percent of net electricity, according to figures from the Energy Information Administration.

In 2008, before Obama entered the White House, non-hydro resources like solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass represented just over 3 percent of generation. Today, they total nearly 6 percent.

Ken Bossong of the Sun Day Campaign has been meticulously following EIA generation figures over the years. In his assessment of the figures below, Bossong offers an historical perspective:

During 2008, the last full year of the Bush Administration, non-hydro renewables accounted for 3.06% of net electrical generation with an average monthly output of 10,508 gigawatthours. By mid-2012, the average monthly electrical generation from non-hydro renewables had grown by 78.70% to 18,777 gigawatthours. Comparing monthly electrical output in 2008 versus 2012, solar has expanded by 285.19%, wind by 171.72%, and geothermal by 13.53%. However, electrical generation from biomass dropped by 0.56%.

According to the latest issue of the monthly “Energy Infrastructure Update” published by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Office of Energy Projects with data for the first half of 2012, 229 renewable energy projects accounted for more than 38% of new electrical generation capacity (not to be confused with actual generation). This includes 50 wind energy projects (2,367 MW), 111 solar energy projects (588 MW), 59 biomass projects (271 MW), 5 geothermal projects (87 MW), and 4 water power projects (11 MW).

New renewable energy electrical generating capacity was more than double that of coal (2 new units totaling 1,608 MW). No new nuclear capacity came on line during the first half of 2012. However, 40 new natural gas units came on line with 3,708 MW of capacity (42% of the total). Renewable energy sources now account for 14.76% of total installed operating generating capacity (water-8.66%; wind-4.30%, biomass-1.23%, geothermal-0.31%, solar**-0.26%). This is more than nuclear (9.16%) but less than natural gas (41.83%) and coal (29.66%). The balance comes from waste heat (0.07%).

As natural gas and renewable energy development has surged, net generation from coal has fallen substantially. According to the EIA figures, coal-fired electricity has dropped 20 percent since May of 2011. (The decline in domestic coal is mostly due to plants switching to natural gas, according to the EIA — not EPA regulations).

Obama himself acknowledged the surge in renewable energy yesterday during a campaign event at Colorado State University:

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Royal Dutch Shell is seeking permission to extend its Arctic drilling season as it struggles with the logistics of exploring untapped oil reserves beneath icy waters off Alaska. [Reuters]

Sea-ice cover in the Arctic Ocean reached a record low this week, dropping below the previous record set in 2007, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported on Monday. It is expected to continue diminishing for at least the next week.

Long-term disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has inspired development boosters to look to the area for new oil finds. So far, Shell has been the company with the most ambitious Arctic oil-exploration plans.

The usually ice-clogged Chukchi Sea is considered a promising but daunting frontier for oil drilling. The U.S. Department of Interior estimates the Chukchi holds over 15 million barrels of recoverable oil.

But remoteness and harsh conditions have hindered development. There have been only five wells drilled in the Chukchi, four of them by Shell, and all were abandoned.

Hurricane Isaac will continue pelting Louisiana with heavy rains today and tomorrow as it marches up the Gulf Coast, unleashing damaging 80 mile-per-hour winds and causing widespread flooding in New Orleans and other coastal cities. [USA Today]

Isaac’s high winds and rains, experts speculate, could also stir up remnant crude oil from the BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill — exposing more residents and wildlife to its potentially toxic effects. [Huffington Post]

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