Note: The “additional price increase” percentage is calculated off the original price increase.

As Oxfam explains in its news release:

Food price spikes will get worse as extreme weather caused by climate change devastates food production

New research shows that the full impact of climate change on future food prices is being underestimated, according to international agency Oxfam.

Oxfam’s new report, Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices, highlights for the first time how extreme weather events such as droughts and floods could drive up future food prices. Previous research only tends to consider gradual impacts, such as increasing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns.

Oxfam’s findings should come as no surprise to anyone following recent headlines. Here’s an August 30th story from the World Bank:

Severe Droughts Drive Food Prices Higher, Threatening the Poor

Global food prices soared by 10 percent in July from a month ago, with maize and soybean reaching all-time peaks due to an unprecedented summer of droughts and high temperatures in both the United States and Eastern Europe, according to the World Bank Group’s latest Food Price Watch report.

And here’s one from the UK Guardian from September 2nd:

The era of cheap food may be over

A spike in prices caused by poor harvests and rising demand is an apt moment for the west to reassess the wisdom of biofuels

Duh? See CP’s 2011 posts, “The Corn Ultimatum: How long can Americans keep burning one sixth the world’s corn supply in our cars?” and “Biofuels May Push 120 Million Into Hunger, Qatar’s Shah Says.”

Last December I wrote that the Climate Story of the Year was “Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security.” This may well be the climate story of the decade — though the world’s inaction on carbon pollution, the media’s silence on climate change, the GOP’s descent into hard-core denial, and the Arctic Death Spiral will all be battling for that title.

Here’s more from the Oxfam news release on this most important of stories:

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by Brad Johnson

Years ago, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spoke forcefully about the need for action on global warming:

“We cannot afford more of the same timid politics when the future of our planet is at stake. Global warming is not a someday problem, it is now.” — Barack Obama in 2007

“I concur that climate change is beginning to effect on our natural resources and that now is the time to take action toward climate protection.” — Mitt Romney in 2003

But during this election, they’ve been silent about the key facts of global warming and how they plan to address it. In the past four years, Americans have been struck by a barrage of billion-dollar climate disasters, driven by increasing greenhouse pollution from fossil fuels. From record heat waves to increasingly powerful storms, crushing droughts to unprecedented flooding, the impacts of climate change are now squarely being felt within our borders. Yet, amazingly, the clear and present danger of carbon-poisoned weather remains largely absent from this year’s presidential election.

ClimateSilence.org chronicles this slow, collective descent toward mute acceptance of global calamity. While many in the media have noted the general trend, this site from Forecast the Facts and Friends of the Earth Action lays out in painstaking detail just how far our national conversation has drifted from where it needs to be.

ClimateSilence.org also provides an opportunity for American voters concerned about the climate crisis to speak out and let the candidates know that they want the silence to end, with a petition that states:

I implore you to explain how you will address the growing climate crisis if elected to the nation’s highest office, not only for the Americans being affected right now, but for the sake of future generations, including your children.

In 2008, both political parties nominated presidential candidates — Barack Obama and John McCain — who promised to address the climate crisis with mandatory caps on carbon pollution. Four years later, the arithmetic of climate change has become even more dire. Yet the rhetoric of the 2012 candidates has moved in the opposite direction. For President Obama, climate change has gone from an “urgent” challenge worthy of major speeches and comprehensive legislation, to an afterthought, fleetingly mentioned at occasional campaign events. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has backpedaled from weak acknowledgement of the basic science to outright mockery of the carbon crisis. While there is clearly a difference between these two positions, neither come anywhere near the honesty and leadership that the problem demands.

The climate constituency is large and growing. Consulting group Breakthrough Strategies recently commissioned a nationwide poll of likely voters, using the same polling firm that assisted President Obama during his 2008 campaign. The poll found that three out of four Americans have noticed a serious shift in extreme weather patterns, are concerned about the problem, and want to hear about solutions. In August, the Center for Climate Change Communication (4C) conducted a national survey of registered voters, and found a solid majority consider a candidates’ stand on global warming when deciding who to support. As Ed Maibach told National Journal:

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American crude oil production is at its highest level since 1997, according to government figures reported today. The increase is being driven by innovations in hydraulic fracturing, which have allowed producers to access previously inaccessible oil deposits in shale formations.

This development is likely to be trumpeted by fossil fuel proponents as: a) the key to cheap gasoline prices; and b) a shining example of the free market working when government gets out of the way.

Don’t believe the hype.

Firstly, gas prices are still high, even with all this new crude output. Secondly, these hydraulic fracturing techniques driving the production boom didn’t just magically appear out of the free market — they were pioneered through many decades of government tax credits, loans, R&D programs, and mapping tools.

In other words, the two major talking points pushed by the fossil fuel industry (“cheap energy forever! Just let the free market decide!”) are proving to be vastly overblown.

Here’s the news on domestic production increases from Bloomberg:

Crude output rose by 3.7 percent to 6.509 million barrels a day in the week ended Sept. 21, the Energy Department reported today. America met 83 percent of its energy needs in the first six months of the year, department data show. If the trend continues through 2012, it will be the highest level of self- sufficiency since 1991. Imports have declined 3.2 percent from the same period a year earlier.

A combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has helped reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil. The same technology unleashed a boom in natural gas output from shale that pushed inventories to a record last year.

So domestic oil production is higher than when George W. Bush was ever in office. What has that done to gasoline prices? They’re still hovering at historic highs:

As a recent analysis from the Associated Press showed, there’s simply no correlation between increasing domestic oil production and falling gasoline prices. In March, AP took 36 years of Energy Information Administration production data and matched it with gas prices in the U.S. Here’s what they found:

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by Richard Sommerville and Jeff Masters, via Climate Communication

With oppressive heat waves, devastating droughts, ravaging wildfires, and hard-hitting rainstorms, the summer of 2012 has been one for the record books. Thousands of precipitation and temperature records were broken, plaguing almost all of the contiguous United States this season and underscoring the connection between climate change and increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather. With climate change, we’ve set the stage for precisely this kind of extreme weather, and unfortunately, our changing climate threatens to alter summers to come.

It is important to note that as the planet continues to warm, new high temperature records and some other types of extremes will increasingly occur, but where they occur in a given year will not be predictable due to natural modes of climate variability. Extreme weather pummeled the United States this summer, but the next few years might see the most dramatic extremes occurring elsewhere around the world. Regardless, record-breaking high temperatures, droughts, wildfires, and heavy downpours are all signs of new extreme weather patterns that we can expect to see more of in a warming world, both domestically and abroad.

Here’s a roundup of weather events during the record-breaking summer of 2012:

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Arctic methane, and all that frozen soil carbon, could easily play a huge role, not so much in the near-term evolution of Earth’s climate, but in the long tail of the global warming climate event.

Buzz Hoffman, via Flickr

David Archer makes clear in this RealClimate repost that while Arctic methane probably will not be the beginning of the climate catastrophe, it may well be the end – if we don’t control CO2 emissions soon.

Walter Anthony et al (2012) have made a major contribution to the picture of methane emissions from thawing Arctic regions. Not a game-changer exactly, but definitely a graphics upgrade, bringing the game to life in stunningly higher resolution (/joke).

Katey Walter Anthony draws upon her previous field findings that methane emissions from the Arctic landscape tend to be focused at the intersection between frozen and thawed, in particular in rings around a peripheries of lakes. She also knew what a methane seep looks like in that landscape, leaving visible bubbles frozen into the ice or maintaining an unfrozen hole in the ice. Now she takes to the skies to produce an aerial survey of the Alaskan landscape, data that is so much more voluminous than before that it becomes different in kind.

The methane emission fluxes are higher than previous estimates, but that’s not really the most important point, because emissions from the Arctic are small relative to low-latitude wetlands, and doubling or even nearly quadrupling the Arctic fluxes (in one of their analyzed regions), they would still be small in terms of global climate forcing. And the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere is short, about 10 years, so methane doesn’t build up like CO₂, SF₆, and to a lesser extent N₂O do.

The really interesting take-away from the new paper is how it shows that the near-surface geology and freezing state conspire to control the venting of accumulated gas dribbling up from below, and the decompostion of frozen soil carbon. They have so many methane seep observations that they are able to correlate them with (1) currently melting permafrost, which allow fossil soil carbon deposits from the last ice age called Yedoma to decompose (Zimov et al 2006) and (2) melting ice sheets and glaciers “un-crunching” the landscape as they fade away, making cracks that vent methane from deep thermal sources. Glaciers that melted long ago no longer vent methane, showing that the methane is transiently venting from built-up pools of gas.

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In just over one month, wind manufacturers in the U.S. have announced layoffs of more than 1,130 workers around the country. The layoffs come in states such as Colorado, Florida, and Iowa that are considered “battlegrounds” in national elections.

Every company shedding employees has blamed the looming expiration of the production tax credit for wind, which is set to lapse at the end of this year.

The latest announcement comes from LM Wind Power, a manufacturer based in North Dakota. The company said yesterday that it will lay off lay off 345 workers because of lagging demand for product. The company also cited the production tax credit, which Congress has failed to extend past 2012.

“It is important to emphasize that the challenging situation in the U.S. wind market is not specific to LM Wind Power, nor to Grand Forks manufacturing facilities,” said the company in an announcement. “The whole sector is affected.”

So far this year, companies in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have all cancelled projects or laid off workers. In the last month alone, more than 1,334 manufacturing workers have lost their jobs. That tally comes from individual announcements made by companies since late August.

The world’s largest wind manufacturer, Vestas Wind, says it may lay off 1,600 American workers in the next year if the production tax credit is not extended. That temporary credit offers owners of wind farms 2.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour of wind generated. The American Wind Energy Association says the credit has helped raise $20 billion in private investment over the last five years, supporting 75,000 jobs.

However, according to analysis from a prominent consulting firm, the wind industry could shed up to 37,000 jobs if the wind tax credit is not extended past 2012.

As the layoffs continue, extension of the credit has become a major issue in the presidential campaign. President Obama wants to extend the credit; Republican challenger Mitt Romney wants to end it. Romney’s stance has raised major concerns from fellow Republicans who live in states where wind has been a major economic driver. According to the American Wind Energy Association, 81 percent of wind projects are installed in Republican districts.

Some voters are also saying that wind will play a role in how they cast their votes in the November elections.

The fight over wind credits has also uncovered major contradictions in national energy policy. While Congress continues to stall on extending the temporary production tax credit, many politicians opposed to federal wind investments continue to support permanent tax credits for the fossil fuel industry.

Earlier this month, 47 House Republicans sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (who’s home state supports more than 5,000 wind jobs) asking him to kill the production tax credit for wind. Out of the 47 Republicans calling for an end the wind investments, 46 voted last year against closing tax loopholes that let oil companies collect $4 billion in annual government support.

by Christy Goldfuss 

The fact that the local jail is one of the only lodging options for visitors to the native Alaskan village of Tuntutuliak is a clear indication of its remote location. But what really stands out about this village isn’t its isolation but instead its incredible story of renewable energy—specifically, the use of wind and smart-grid technology that has the potential to fundamentally change the energy landscape of rural Alaska.

The village of Tuntutuliak, known locally as Tunt, is situated in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region—an area about the size of the state of Oregon in western Alaska. There are approximately 400 people living in Tunt and they are almost entirely Yup’ik Eskimos. English is the second language here, since children speak Yup’ik at home and learn English in school. It is also a hunter-gatherer society, with a diet that includes smoked fish, wild salmonberries, and moose, to name a few local delicacies. There are approximately 56 villages almost identical to Tunt in the region, and they all struggle with extremely high energy costs.

Each of these villages is off the power grid and on their own microgrid, which means they cannot take advantage of the large economies of scale that occur with more centralized energy generation in the lower 48 states. Instead, these villages primarily use diesel-burning generators for electricity. With the price of diesel hovering around $7 per gallon in the region, energy costs consume approximately half of the overall budgets of these villages. As many experts expressed this past May during a Center for American Progress event—“Challenges and Opportunities for Renewable Energy in Alaska”—these costs are crippling native Alaskan communities.

Yet Tunt is attempting to curb these costs with five wind turbines, the first thing one notices coming in for a landing on the village’s gravel runway. The wind turbines have just recently come on-line and are part of a sophisticated energy system devised and managed by the Chaninik Wind Group, a consortium of four villages with a mission of harnessing the extensive wind resources in the region to defray the high costs of using diesel.

As part of the consortium, the local utility in Tunt, TCSA Electrical, has been working closely with an energy consulting company, Intelligent Energy Systems, or IES, to develop a system that will work in all four villages. In Tunt alone it is estimated that the village will lower its diesel gas use by 7,000 gallons to 12,000 gallons a year, which could be an $80,000 annual savings depending on the price of diesel. But getting to this point was no easy journey—in fact it took more than 10 years and a great deal of grit and determination.

One of the first challenges the Chaninik Wind Group faced was simply choosing the right wind turbines for the community. The turbines had to integrate seamlessly with the existing diesel generators and suit the unique conditions of the harsh Alaskan climate. To meet that challenge, the group chose to remanufacture the medium-sized Windmatic 17S wind turbines, which means the controls in Tunt are entirely unique to that system. According to the group, the turbines have a rated capacity of 95 kilowatts at peak production. When the winds are strong and the air is cold in the winter, the turbines can easily produce 20 percent more than that at around 115 kilowatts. The group also reports that the average electric load in Tuntutuliak is around 160 kilowatts during the summer and 200 kilowatts in the winter, so the turbines have the potential to meet more than half the village’s electricity needs, but more realistically will meet 30 percent to 40 percent of the village’s needs due to the variations in wind capacity.

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A retest of water in Pavillion, Wyoming, found evidence of many of the same gases and compounds the Environmental Protection Agency used to link contamination there to hydraulic fracturing, the first finding of that kind. [Bloomberg]

One topic you don’t hear much about from Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is climate change. Like so much else, it’s become politically divisive, with polls showing Republicans far less likely to believe in it or support policies to address it. But two new groups aim to work from within, using conservative arguments to win over skeptics. [WBUR]

In Illinois, one estimate suggests that corn farmers will lose one-quarter less of their crop than they did during the 1988 drought – in large part because of the seeds they planted. [Christian Science Monitor]

Idaho and Washington states have been especially hard hit by wildfires. Spokane has received only a trace of rain in several weeks, while the Mustang Complex fire in Idaho still rages after more than a month. It has burned nearly 340,000 acres and is only 25 percent contained. [UPI]

Both the Farmers’ Almanac (FA) and Old Farmer’s Almanac (OFA) have released their winter outlooks. The common theme: cold east of the Rockies and warm in the West. [Weather Gang]

It is a fiercely ambitious goal, but a feasible one – according to the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. Universal energy access is just one of the aims of his Sustainable Energy for All initiative, which got a big push at a recent meeting on the sidelines of the UN general assembly. [Guardian]

More bad news for Mitt Romney: the Republican party’s scepticism about climate change seems likely to play badly with voters who haven’t yet decided who to back in November’s US presidential election. [New Scientist]

The Japanese government is seeking to relax procedures on environmental impact in order to make it easier to build more coal fired power plants. [Power Engineering]

The waters of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef are getting warmer, satellite measurements show, which spells bad news for the myriad creatures that dwell in this rain forest of the ocean. [Our Amazing Planet]

Salt marshes around the world’s coasts will help slow climate change until about 2050 by soaking up greenhouse gases but then risk making the problem even worse as sea levels rise, a study showed on Wednesday. [Reuters]

Another monster typhoon has spun up in the western Pacific. Following super typhoon Sanba that ripped across Okinawa and then into South Korea, super typhoon Jelawat is also eyeing Okinawa before a possible encounter with Japan. [Weather Gang]