Trenberth: 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.

Seasonal Jun-Jul-Aug 2010 sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies relative to 1951–70. Record high SSTs were recorded in the locations and at the times indicated with record flooding nearby.

That’s Kevin E. Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, in a must-read 2012 article in Climatic Change (PDF here, HTML here).

Like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace. And like a baseball player on steroids, it’s the wrong question to ask whether a given home run is “caused” by steroids. Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters explained the analogy this way last December:

… we look at heat waves, droughts, and flooding events. They all tend to get increased when you have this extra energy in the atmosphere. I call it being on steroids kind of for the atmosphere….

Well, normally, you have the everyday ups and downs of the weather, but if you pack a little bit of extra punch in there, it’s like a baseball hitter who’s on steroids.

You expect to see a big home run total maybe from this slugger, but if you add a little bit of extra oomph to his swing by putting him on steroids, now we can have an unprecedented season, a 70 home run season. And that’s the way I look at this year.

We had an unprecedented weather year that I don’t think would have happened unless we had had an extra bit of energy in the atmosphere due to climate change and global warming.

I’m reposting all this because of a recent editorial in the journal Nature that seems to have missed the key point. Below is a response to that editorial by NASA’s Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate, followed by a comment on the editorial from Trenberth.

First, though, it’s worth noting in March that Nature Climate Change published a major new analysis of the scientific evidence, “A decade of weather extremes” (subs. req’d) — see my post Nature: Strong Evidence Manmade ‘Unprecedented Heat And Rainfall Extremes Are Here … Causing Intense Human Suffering’. That Nature analysis concluded:

It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming.

Here is the RealClimate piece:

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There’s a new report out today analyzing climate coverage from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Wall Street Journal. The results likely won’t shock anyone who reads this blog.

According to a review of recent climate coverage at these two outlets, 93 percent stories from Fox News on climate were misleading and 81 percent of stories in the WSJ op-ed section were misleading. The assessment was conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

What makes a “misleading” comment? UCS researchers say they include “broad dismissals of human-caused climate change, disparaging comments about individual scientists, rejections of climate science as a body of knowledge, and cherry picking of data.”

Or, as climate scientists have called Fox News’ climate coverage over the years: “utter nonsense,” “utter rubbish,” “patently false,” and “simply ignorant.”

According to the UCS analysis, Fox News aired 40 stories or interview segments between February and July 2012 that mentioned climate change. Here’s how the misleading statements broke down:

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page also did very poorly. According to the UCS analysis, which looked at op-eds over the last year, 81 percent of pieces mentioning climate change were misleading. In this case, the WSJ featured many stories personally attacking climate scientists:

In 2009, a managing editor at Fox News issued a memo telling reporters to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.”

This shoddy reporting isn’t just limited to U.S. operations. According to a recent analysis from the Australian Center for Independent Journalism, the top six Australian newspapers featuring overwhelmingly negative and misleading coverage about climate issues in 2011 were all owned by Rupert Murdoch.

“It’s fair to say they’ve campaigned against it rather than covered it,” wrote the report’s authors.

Responding to Rupert Murdoch’s disinformation campaign, one Australian climate scientist put it bluntly: “The Murdoch media empire has cost humanity perhaps one or two decades of time in the battle against climate change.”

This study shows once again that Murdoch’s news outlets are leading the charge in climate disinformation.

by Katie Valentine

Reducing our carbon output isn’t just good for the climate, it’s good for local health. When we price carbon, we potentially reduce other co-pollutants at power plants, oil refineries and industrial facilities — particularly in minority communities located disproportionately located near these pollution sources.

And these co-benefits need to be considered in any carbon pricing mechanism, argues a new report released by the Economics for Equity and the Environment Network.

The report, written by James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Manuel Pastor of the University of Southern California, argues that emission-reduction policies such as cap and trade need to factor in co-pollutants that are often emitted along with greenhouse gases – pollutants such as Sulfur Dioxide, Nitrogen Oxide and particulate matter:

Comparing these rankings to the sectoral sources of carbon emissions, we find that the three industrial sectors that produce the most carbon emissions—power plants, refineries, and chemical manufacturing, which together account for more than 90 percent of industrial CO2 emissions in our sample — also have the most environmentally inequitable impacts on minorities with regard to the air-toxics measure and rank in the top five in population-weighted PM2.5. Any climate policy that reduces co-pollutants along with GHG emissions, therefore, is likely to reduce environmental disparities and thereby advance environmental justice objectives. By the same logic, any regulatory program that sacrifices air quality co-benefits not only will forgo public health savings, but also is likely to violate the official federal directives to consider environmental equity in rule and decision making.

The report recommends strengthening carbon emission reduction targets and redefining the “social cost of carbon” to include the cost of co-pollutants. It also suggests policymakers create ways to monitor co-pollutants, designate high priority zones and facilities, where co-benefits from carbon reduction would be especially high, and recirculate a share of carbon revenue back into the communities to be used for further environmental improvements.

This last recommendation is important: Pastor said since carbon taxes tend to be regressive in nature, some of the revenue would need to go back into the communities.

Pollution sources are disproportionally located in minority communities. The report cited a California study (also done by Pastor) that found that, even when adjusting for income, a person of color is more likely to be located near a co-pollution source and is more likely to live near facilities with greater co-pollutant outputs than a non-Hispanic white person. An African-American household earning $100,000 per year in California is about 3 percent more likely to live near a pollution source than a white family earning $15-$25,000 per year, according to the study.

Past environmental justice-related studies have yielded similar results: a report analyzing metro-Atlanta, Georgia counties found that race was the demographic characteristic with the most direct correlation to pollution, with areas with 75-100 percent non-white populations containing more than twice the amount of pollution points as areas with less than 25 percent minority population.

Second, certain industries emit much higher amounts of co-pollutants than others – power plants account for 80 percent of the CO2 emissions in the report’s sample of 1,542 facilities, along with 65 percent of the particulate pollution and 78 percent of the NOx pollution. Petroleum refineries come second with 7 percent CO2 emissions and 3 percent NOx. This gap, Pastor says, is good news and bad news for policy making.

“The bad news is this is really unequal,” Pastor said at a presentation at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Thursday. “The good news is targeting a few of these bad actors could make a big difference.”

Of course, none of this is relevant unless the U.S. actually adopts some sort of carbon reduction policy, but several states have already agreed to reduce their carbon output in the coming years, and Pastor and Boyce said California’s upcoming cap and trade policy could serve as a model for other states.

“You know the old adage, ‘think globally, act locally?’ We can also think locally and act globally,” Boyce said. When drafting policy for emissions reductions, he said, “we can and should think about the impacts on real communities and real people.”

Katie Valentine is an intern on the energy policy team at the Center for American Progress. She graduated from the University of Georgia.

The climate science literature is vast. It merits broad and deep reading by anyone planning to write about it. The fact is the IPCC forecasts have generally underestimated key trends, including warming (see here) and greenhouse gas emissions and Arctic sea ice loss and ice sheet disintegration. I explain why here. Finally, the IPCC generally overstates uncertainty because it insists on conflating uncertainty in future emissions with uncertainty in the climate’s sensitivity to those emissions. Continuing to take no serious action on climate eliminates almost all of the uncertainty as to whether or not future impacts will be catastrophic. Even while publishing this piece by one of the country’s top climatologists debunking the climate analysis in Nate Silver’s new book, I remain a big fan of Silver’s polling analysis (as does Mann) — Joe Romm.

by Michael Mann

If you’re a science or math geek like me, you can’t help but like Nate Silver. He’s the fellow nerd who made good. His site FiveThirtyEight.com is a must for any serious polling buff, and he regularly graces the leading talk shows with his insightful if wonky commentary. So you can imagine how excited I was a year ago when Nate’s assistant contacted me, indicating that he wanted to come to State College, PA — the “happy valley” — to interview me for his new book on “forecasting and prediction.”

Nate, I was told, was working on a chapter about global warming. He sought me out because he felt my expertise would make me an “excellent guide to the history of climate modeling”. He also expressed interest in my own upcoming (since published) book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars which details my experiences at the center of the climate change debate. Needless to say, I was very much looking forward to the meeting.

And so it was on a crisp early November day that Nate arrived at my office in the Walker Building of the Penn State campus. We exchanged pleasantries and proceeded to engage in a vigorous, in-depth discussion of everything from climate models and global warming to the role of scientific uncertainty, and the campaign by industry front groups to discredit climate science (something that is the focus of my own book). As I saw Nate off, I insisted he sample the Penn State Creamery’s famous ice cream before leaving town. I tweeted excitedly about my meeting with him, and by the end of the day Nate had even added me to his relatively short list of twitter followees. Certain our discussion had been productive and informative, I awaited Nate’s book with great anticipation.

And so I was rather crestfallen earlier this summer when I finally got a peek at a review copy of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t. It’s not that Nate revealed himself to be a climate change denier; He accepts that human-caused climate change is real, and that it represents a challenge and potential threat. But he falls victim to a fallacy that has become all too common among those who view the issue through the prism of economics rather than science. Nate conflates problems of prediction in the realm of human behavior — where there are no fundamental governing ‘laws’ and any “predictions” are potentially laden with subjective and untestable assumptions — with problems such as climate change, which are governed by laws of physics, like the greenhouse effect, that are true whether or not you choose to believe them.

Nate devotes far too much space to the highly questionable claims of a University of Pennsylvania marketing Professor named J. Scott Armstrong. Armstrong made a name for himself in denialist circles back in 2007 by denouncing climate models has having no predictive value at all. Armstrong’s arguments were fundamentally flawed, belied by a large body of primary scientific literature — with which Armstrong was apparently unfamiliar — demonstrating that climate model projections clearly do in fact out-perform naive predictions which ignore the effect of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. As discussed in detail by my RealClimate.org co-founder, NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, Armstrong simply didn’t understand the science well enough to properly interpret, let alone, assess, the predictive skill of climate model predictions.

That Nate would parrot Armstrong’s flawed arguments is a major disappointment, especially because there are some obvious red flags that even the most cursory research should have turned up. A simple check of either SourceWatch or fossil fuel industry watchdog ExxonSecrets, reveals that Armstrong is a well-known climate change denier with close ties to fossil fuel industry front groups like the Heartland Institute, which earlier this year campaigned to compare people who accept the reality of climate change to the Unabomber, and secretly planned to infiltrate elementary schools across the country with industry-funded climate change denial propaganda.

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Photo credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center

by Ramez Naam, via Scientific American

On September 19^th, NSIDC, the National Snow and Ice Data Center, announced that Arctic sea ice has shrunk as far as it will shrink this summer, and that the ice is beginning to reform, expanding the floating ice cap that covers the North Pole and the seas around it.   The Arctic Sea Ice extent this September was far smaller than the previous record set in 2007.  At 3.4 million square kilometers of ice coverage, this year’s Arctic minimum was 800,000 square kilometers smaller than the 2007 record.  That difference between the previous record and this year’s is larger than the entire state of Texas.  An ice-free summer in the Arctic, once projected to be more than a century away, now looks possible decades from now. Some say that it looks likely in just the next few years.

What’s happening in the Arctic?  Why is it happening?  And does it matter for the bulk of us who live thousands of miles away from it?

Faster and Faster

Conditions in the Arctic change dramatically through the seasons. In the depths of winter, the Earth’s tilt puts the Arctic in 24 hour-a-day darkness. Temperatures, cold year round, plunge even lower. The sea surface freezes over. At the height of summer, the opposite tilt puts the Arctic in 24 hour-a-day sunlight. While it’s a cold cold place even at these times, the constant sunshine, warmer air, and influx of warm waters from further south serve to melt the ice.  The ice cap usually starts shrinking in March, and then reaches its smallest area in mid-September, before cooling temperatures and shorter days start the water freezing and the ice cap growing once again.

When scientists and reporters talk about an ice-free Arctic, they’re usually speaking of the Arctic in summer, and especially in September, when ice coverage reaches its minimum.

The amount of ice left at that minimum has indeed been plunging. In 1980, the ice shrank down to just under 8 million square kilometers before rebounding in the fall.  This year’s minimum extent of 3.4 million kilometers is less than half of what we saw in 1980.  Strikingly, two thirds of the loss of ice has happened in the 12 years since 2000.  The ice is receding, and the process, if anything, appears to be accelerating.

As recently as a few years ago, most models of the Arctic ice anticipated that summers would remain icy until the end of the 21^st century, and well into the 22^nd century.  But the trend line above makes that look unlikely.   The amount of ice remaining, this year, is about the same as the ice lost between the mid-1990s and today.  If ice loss continued at that pace, we’d see an ice free summer sometime around 2030, give or take several years.

Is that plausible?  Opinions differ substantially, even among climate scientists.

At one end of the spectrum are those who see the ice lasting in summer for another 20 or 30 years, or perhaps even a bit longer.

For example, Lars-Otto Reierson, who leads the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme told Reuters that most models predict the summer ice disappearing by 2030 or 2040.

Similarly, a paper published this year in Geophysical Research Letters by multiple scientists, including several from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, found that an ice-free summer in the Arctic in the “next few decades” was a “distinct possibility.”

A recent assessment from Muyin Wang at the University of Washington and James Overland at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, using the most up to date Arctic ice models and data, projected a nearly ice free Arctic around 2030.

And Ceclia Bitz, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington at part of the Polar Science Center sees a 50/50 chance that the Arctic will be ice free in summer in the next few decades.

On the other end of the spectrum are those who think the melt could happen much sooner.  Peter Wadhams, who leads the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, has predicted since 2008 that the Arctic ice could be gone in summer by 2015.  He now believes there’s a chance that it could happen even sooner.

Similarly, Mark Drinkwater, the European Space Agency’s senior advisor on polar regions and a mission scientist for the CryoStat satellite that measures arctic ice, believes that the Arctic could be ice free in September by the end of this decade.

When will the ice melt? While the range of possibilities is wide today, it’s shrunk dramatically from just a few years ago, when most climate scientists expected the ice to survive through the 21^st century.  Now the question is whether it will be gone in decades – or in mere years.

Why is the Ice Melting?

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Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that the U.S. is in the midst of a shale gas boom. Armed with a horizontal drilling technique that allows companies to access natural gas trapped in shale formations, the industry’s production has surged and prices have fallen to historic lows.

Supporters often hail shale gas as a miracle of the free market — a product of enterprising risk takers who commercialized fracking techniques without government help.

Except that’s not entirely true.

If we look at the history of how horizontal drilling techniques were commercialized, we find a strong base of government support through R&D, mapping techniques, cost-sharing programs, and billions of dollars in tax credits. The Breakthrough Institute wrote a report on this support last year showing how decades of federal support helped businesses pioneer and commercialize new, risky drilling techniques.

The Associated Press published a follow up story yesterday on the history of government support in shale gas. It illustrates the importance of federal assistance for new energy technologies. Along with establishing a tax credit for drillers in 1980 that amounted to $10 billion through 2002, the Department of Energy provided crucial technical assistance during times of failure:

“There’s no point in mincing words. Some people thought it was stupid,” said Dan Steward, a geologist who began working with the Texas natural gas firm Mitchell Energy in 1981. Steward estimated that in the early years, “probably 90 percent of the people” in the firm didn’t believe shale gas would be profitable.

“Did I know it was going to work? Hell no,” Steward added.

In 1975, the Department of Energy began funding research into fracking and horizontal drilling, where wells go down and then sideways for thousands of feet. But it took more than 20 years to perfect the process.

Alex Crawley, a former Department of Energy employee, recalled that some early tests were spectacular — in a bad way.

A test of fracking explosives in Morgantown, W.Va., “blew the pipe out of the well about 600 feet high” in the 1970s, Crawley said. Luckily, no one was killed. He added that a 1975 test well in Wyoming “produced a lot of water.”

Steward recalled that Mitchell Energy didn’t even cover the cost of fracking on shale tests until the 36th well was drilled.

“There’s not a lot of companies that would stay with something this long. Most companies would have given up,” he said, crediting founder George Mitchell as a visionary who also got support from the government at key points.

“The government has to be involved, to some degree, with new technologies,” Steward said.

This is a hugely important message that we need to keep in mind today. Ever since the bankruptcy of a few clean energy companies that received loan guarantees — most famously Solyndra — some politicians and conservative organizations have called for an end to all government support for clean energy. Some are even calling for an end to the Department of Energy all together. (Oddly enough, many of these opponents fight for preserving billions of dollars in permanent tax credits for the oil and gas industry).

Whether they’ve truly fooled themselves or they’re just blatantly lying, these hypocritical free-marketeers are trying to convince Americans that government investments in clean energy are unique. In fact, all energy technologies — nuclear, coal, oil, and gas — have received generous federal support in order to bring them to scale.

According to an analysis from DBL Investors, federal support for oil and gas was five times greater than federal support for renewables during the first 15 years of available subsidies. The support for nuclear was more than 10 times greater than renewables.

There is a legitimate debate to be had about the extent of government support and the types of mechanisms we should use to deploy and commercialize new technologies. But there shouldn’t be a debate on whether that support should exist at all.

Related Post:

• Free Market Hypocrisy: Why Do We Hold Renewables To Different Standards Than Fossil Fuels And Nuclear?

by Michael Conathan

Earlier this week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its annual report on the state of U.S. fisheries and overall, the news was fairly positive. U.S. fishermen caught 10.1 billion pounds of fish in 2011, up nearly 20 percent from 2010. They did so while remaining increasingly within science-based total catch limits intended to end overfishing and rebuild depleted stocks.

But the news wasn’t all good: Some fisheries still face severe uphill battles to remain profitable. And while Americans’ consumption of seafood per capita declined by about 5 percent last year, the total amount of fish we imported shot up—increasing from 86 percent to 91 percent. Meanwhile, domestic fishermen face increasing costs and, in many cases, stricter catch limits than in years past.

If we can’t allow fishermen to catch more fish without compromising the viability of fish populations, then for some of our struggling domestic fisheries to remain economically viable, we must figure out how fishermen can get more money for the same amount of fish. And ideally, to do so either without passing the affiliated cost on to consumers or by providing a higher-quality product.

Innovation in seafood marketing has led to new programs allowing fishermen to rethink the way they get paid to do the most dangerous job in the country. Two methods in particular—community-supported fisheries and underutilized species—provide a framework for how we can give fishermen a boost while getting a better product into the hands and ultimately the mouths of consumers.

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by Bob Berwyn, via Summit County Citizens Voice

This year’s El Niño is likely to be one of the weaker versions of the event in recent memory, according to experts with the National Climatic Data Center, who discussed the fall outlook and reviewed the long, hot summer at teleconference last week.

That could weaken potential impacts, particularly across the southern tier of states, where an “average” El Niño often brings above-average precipitation.This could be especially important for states like New Mexico, which just experienced its driest and warmest 24-month period on record, and farther east, where Oklahoma was also parched during a record-hot summer.

During an El Niño, sea surface temperatures in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific surge to above average, often shifting the storm track to the south. It’s part of a cyclical shift in sea surface temperatures and related wind patterns that can affect weather patterns worldwide.

Sea surface temps have hovered at slightly above average the past few months in the region where El Niño formation is measured, but haven’t reached the formal threshold yet. An area of cooler water in the north Pacific may be a factor.

The North Pacific is not cooperating … there’s a cold area near Alaska. It’s not quite a perfect setup for a warm event in the tropics,” said NOAA scientist Huug van den Dool.

“It’s probably too late to get a major El Nino … it’s going to be somewhat weaker than we expected a few months ago,” he said, explaining that there’s still a chance for enhanced precipitation across the South. An average El Niño footprint would normally also result in below-average precipitation in the northern tier of states.

El Niño or not, the Climate Prediction Center says there’s a good chance the next three months will bring mostly above average temperatures to a big swath of the country, from the eastern edge of the Great Basin through the central and northern plains, up into the Great Lakes region and New England.

The three-month precipitation outlook is for near-normal total for much of the country, with a chance of above-normal rainfall in the southeast, and drier-than-normal conditions in the Pacific Northwest.

Looking back, Jake Crouch, of the NCDC, said it was the third-warmest summer on record for the U.S. and second-warmest summer for the northern hemisphere. A total of 33 states reported their warmest year to-date on record.

The year to-date is the ninth-warmest on record globally.

Bob Berwyn is Editor of the Summit County Citizens Voice. This piece was originally published at the Summit Voice and was reprinted with permission.

The top ocean predators in the North Pacific could lose as much as 35 percent of their habitat by the end of the century as a result of climate change , according to a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. [Washington Post]

Environmental activists showed off a new form of protest throughout the country and around the world Saturday: a “Global Frackdown.” [Los Angeles Times]

People love to talk about the weather, especially when it’s strange like the mercifully ended summer of 2012. This year the nation’s weather has been hotter and more extreme than ever, federal records show. Yet there are two people who aren’t talking about it, and they both happen to be running for president. [Associated Press]

There is more than coal burning in America’s coal fields these days, and that anger could have an effect on November’s elections in coal-producing swing states such as Virginia. [Washington Post]

A former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who resigned after using the word “crucify” to describe his approach to violators says recent court decisions striking down federal pollution rules are delaying the inevitable. [Houston Chronicle]

While summer rains improved drought conditions in much of the state, the Savannah River basin remains seriously dry. [Herald Online]

As the worst drought in 50 years devastates this year’s U.S. corn crop, farmers are turning to ice cream sprinkles, marshmallows and gummy worms as alternatives to feed beef and dairy cows, Reuters reports. [Fox News]

As icebergs in the Kayak Harbor pop and hiss while melting away, this remote Arctic town and its culture are also disappearing in a changing climate. [New York Times]

The Persian Gulf, Libya, and Pakistan are at high risk of food insecurity in coming decades because climate change and ocean acidification are destroying fisheries, according to a report released on Monday. [Business Green]

Microscopic particles, among the most harmful forms of air pollution, are still found at dangerous levels in Europe, although law has cut some toxins from exhaust fumes and chimneys, a European Environmental Agency (EEA) report said on Monday. [Guardian]

As climate change alters the Arctic landscape, shrinking the ice cover on sea and land, it opens up more of the region to resource exploitation. [CBC]

A University of Utah study suggests something amazing: Periodic changes in winds 15 to 30 miles high in the stratosphere influence the seas by striking a vulnerable “Achilles heel” in the North Atlantic and changing mile-deep ocean circulation patterns, which in turn affect Earth’s climate. [Science Daily]