A key reason the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change keeps issuing instantly irrelevant reports is that it keeps ignoring the latest climate science. We have known for years that perhaps the single most important carbon-cycle feedback is the melting of the permafrost.

Yet a must-read new United Nations Environment Programme report, “Policy Implications of Warming Permafrost” reports this jaw-dropping news:

The effect of the permafrost carbon feedback on climate has not been included in the IPCC Assessment Reports. None of the climate projections in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report include the permafrost carbon feedback (IPCC 2007). Participating modeling teams have completed their climate projections in support of the Fifth Assessment Report, but these projections do not include the permafrost carbon feedback. Consequently, the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, due for release in stages between September 2013 and October 2014, will not include the potential effects of the permafrost carbon feedback on global climate.

Here’s why that is head-exploding.

Carbon emission (in billions of tons of carbon a year) from thawing permafrost [from Schaefer et al, 2011]

Back in 2005, before the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment, a major study (subs. req’d) led by NCAR climate researcher David Lawrence, found that virtually the entire top 11 feet of permafrost around the globe could disappear by the end of this century. Using the first “fully interactive climate system model” applied to study permafrost, the researchers found that if we tried to stabilize CO2 concentrations in the air at 550 ppm, permafrost would plummet from over 4 million square miles today to 1.5 million.

That matters because the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere, much of which would be released as methane.  Methane is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 to 100 times as potent over 20 years!

A 2008 study by leading tundra experts, “Accelerated Arctic land warming and permafrost degradation during rapid sea ice loss,” concluded:

We find that simulated western Arctic land warming trends during rapid sea ice loss are 3.5 times greater than secular 21st century climate-change trends. The accelerated warming signal penetrates up to 1500 km inland….

Considering that 2012 saw a new record low in Arctic sea ice cover — and that Arctic ice loss is occurring many decades faster than climate models had projected —  you would think that climate scientists would want to incorporate this accelerated warming and the related tundra melt in their models.

The literature, of course, has continued to refine estimates of permafrost loss from various emissions scenarios. The graph above comes from a study published in February 2011, “Amount and timing of permafrost carbon release in response to climate warming,” which concluded soberly:

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Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain
And the wavin’ wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain.

Over 90% of Oklahoma is now in extreme drought, up from 72% just a week ago. The drought seems to intensify the denial — a feedback that, if it continues, will turn the state into a permanent Dust Bowl.

by Brian Powell, via Media Matters

The Oklahoman advocated for the separation of science and policy in its editorial pages, expressing serious misgivings about the veracity of manmade climate change and warning that we shouldn’t “mi[x] science” with politics. The newspaper is Oklahoma’s largest source of printed news and is owned by billionaire oil and gas tycoon Philip Anschutz.

In a November 28 editorial headlined “Mixing science, politics can result in bad policy,” The Oklahoman put scare quotes around the word “science” when discussing global warming and argued that, because the science of climate change isn’t “settled,” it may as well be ignored by policymakers (emphasis added):

[S]cientific evidence for global warming remains muddled at best. The United Kingdom-based Daily Mail recently noted data compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea showed the world stopped getting warmer nearly 16 years ago. Before that, temperatures rose from 1980 to 1996, but had been stable or declined for the 40 years prior to that period. Some scientists believe those temperature changes are a product of natural variability and non-manmade causes. Definitive proof remains elusive for all sides.

Those who claim science is “settled” don’t understand science. In 1854, cholera was tied to contaminated water. It took nearly 30 years before that explanation was accepted over theories blaming bad vapors for outbreaks.

When politics taints science more than science improves and informs policy, the results can be distressing. Should we wipe out countless jobs and increase economic hardship for families in the name of global warming theories that could ultimately prove no more valid than the cholera-vapors link?

Skeptical Science, a website dedicated to “explain[ing] what peer reviewed science has to say about global warming,” responded to arguments by climate change skeptics who claim, like The Oklahoman, that the science isn’t “settled,” and is therefore unworthy of consideration by policymakers and politicians:

No science is ever “settled”; science deals in probabilities, not certainties. When the probability of something approaches 100%, then we can regard the science, colloquially, as “settled”….

Outside of logic and mathematics, we do not live in a world of certainties. Science comes to tentative conclusions based on the balance of evidence. The more independent lines of evidence are found to support a scientific theory, the closer it is likely to be to the truth. Just because some details are still not well understood should not cast into doubt our understanding of the big picture: humans are causing global warming.

In most aspects of our lives, we think it rational to make decisions based on incomplete information. We will take out insurance when there is even a slight probability that we will need it. Why should our planet’s climate be any different?

The National Research Council (NRC) echoed these sentiments in a climate change report, stating that the occurrence of manmade global warming was “so thoroughly examined and tested” that there is a “vanishingly small” likelihood that the findings will be overturned. The report also reiterated the point that certain scientific conclusions have been more thoroughly verified than others, which should have been obvious to editors at The Oklahoman, who dubiously compared modern studies on climate change to 19^th century theories about cholera outbreaks. From the NRC report (emphasis added):

From a philosophical perspective, science never proves anything–in the manner that mathematics or other formal logical systems prove things–because science is fundamentally based on observations. Any scientific theory is thus, in principle, subject to being refined or overturned by new observations. In practical terms, however, scientific uncertainties are not all the same. Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities. In other cases, particularly for matters that are at the leading edge of active research, uncertainties may be substantial and important. In these cases, care must be taken not to draw stronger conclusions than warranted by the available evidence.

The Oklahoman published its editorial just one week after the Washington Examiner (also owned by Anschutz) published an op-ed arguing that cutting carbon emissions is futile, raising ethical questions about the papers’ tendencies to oppose any policies that would harm their owner’s pocketbook.

And The Oklahoman’s editorial serves as yet another piece of evidence that conservative voices will attack any peer-reviewed science that doesn’t align with their political agenda. Earlier this year, a study by the American Sociological Association looked at “trends in public trust in science in the United States from 1974 to 2010.” They found that “conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to liberals and moderates, and ended the period with the lowest,” a finding that seemed to confirm the theories expounded by Chris Mooney in his 2005 book The Republican War on Science — that the conservative movement has developed a uniquely adversarial relationship with scientific conclusions. The Oklahoman‘s “Mixing science, politics can result in bad policy” is a clear illustration of this phenomenon.

Related Post:

• We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming

by Wayland Radin, via Center for Progressive Reform

Action on climate change should be one of the first things President Obama takes on in his second term. There are countless steps the President might take, but perhaps one of the easiest things for him to do on that front is to instruct the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to release eight Department of Energy (DOE) rules regarding energy efficiency currently under OMB’s review.

Regular readers will know that OMB is a kind of regulatory purgatory where rules can be held up seemingly indefinitely or sent back to the agencies responsible for them to be reconsidered in light of OMB’s widely questioned cost benefit analysis. As Earthjustice and others have noted, President Obama could make substantial progress on climate change by telling his own OMB that it needs to move on the rules.

Some of the DOE rules have been at OMB for well over a year, and the benefits of energy efficiency are being foregone while they are held up. DOE’s Fossil Fuel Energy Consumption Reduction for New Construction and Major Renovations of Federal Buildings rule, for instance, has reached the final rule stage but has been stuck at OMB since August of 2011. Beginning one year after it is finalized, the rule would require that new federal buildings and those that undergo major renovations adhere to new limits on their fossil fuel consumption. Five years after that, stricter limits would go into effect for further renovations or constructions. So, the sooner OMB releases the rule the sooner the rule will take effect and we can start realizing its significant benefits.

DOE estimated the rule will bring significant emissions reductions:  in the first year after the rule takes effect it will prevent 52,700 metric tons of carbon dioxide, 111 metric tons of methane, 53 metric tons of nitrogen, and 151 metric tons of sulfur dioxide from entering the atmosphere. These reductions will increase rapidly as other buildings are renovated and the standards are tightened at five-year intervals.

Another stalled rule is DOE’s Metal Halide Lamp Fixture rule. In that case, the proposed rule has been at OMB for nine months and will result in significant energy savings when finalized. Halide lamps are generally used in big box stores and athletic venues. They also consume a significant amount of energy. DOE has estimated that the rule will save as many as 1.6 quads (quadrillion British Thermal Units) of energy from 2015 to 2045. To put that in perspective, one quad is roughly equal to 8 billion gallons of gasoline combusted, or almost 300 billion kilowatt-hours.

The pending DOE efficiency standards are certainly just one small part of what needs to be done on climate. And it’s past time they get done.

Wayland Radin is Policy Analyst with the Center for Progressive Reform.

by Peter Lehner, via NRDC’s Switchboard

The health cost of power plant pollution is an estimated $100 billion each year, nationwide, when people get sick or die from breathing dirty air. When polluted water makes swimmers sick, the additional public health costs in just two southern California counties has been estimated at $21 to $51 million each year.

In addition to being harmful to our health, pollution is a serious drag on the economy. As Congress attempts to negotiate this country off the edge of the fiscal cliff, it needs to maintain and strengthen the programs that protect our health by keeping pollution out of our air and water. Gutting programs that cut power plant pollution and keep sewage out of our waters will only end up imposing bigger costs down the road.

Congress has already cut programs that help keep our water clean; deeper cuts to these programs would deal a serious blow to the health and prosperity of communities where clean water is not only a source of recreation but a means of economic sustenance. When a beach on Lake Michigan is closed because the water is too polluted for swimmers, it can cost the local economy as much as $37,000 each day.

If your local beach doesn’t have the funding to monitor bacteria levels, and the local sewage plant can’t get a loan to upgrade its facilities, and climate change is inducing more frequent and heavier rainstorms that overload sewer systems, you have a recipe for an outbreak of waterborne illness–and untold health costs. When federal support for certain clean water programs falls short, municipalities have to rely on local sources of funding to meet their clean water obligations. The burden falls on local taxpayers instead.

Attacking clean air programs could prove costly as well. Last year in my home state of New York, nearly 300 premature deaths were attributed to pollution from coal-fired power plants. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, the death toll is even steeper. Our study examining emissions from just 26 coal-fired power plants puts the estimated cost of their pollution at $24 billion–and that’s just in 2011 alone. Imagine if the enforcement of laws that keep polluters accountable, and the monitoring of air quality that helps alert people at risk to stay inside on bad air days, got worse instead of better. How much money would we really be saving?

Pollution is expensive. But the flipside is that the relatively small investments we make in protecting clean air and water have staggeringly high returns, as my colleague, economist Laurie Johnson, points out. A peer-reviewed study from the EPA found that in 2010, Clean Air Act amendments to reduce power plant pollution–and therefore reducing the number of premature deaths, illness, and lost work days due to bad air–brought $1.3 trillion in health and environmental benefits, for a cost of just $50 billion. That’s a benefit-to-cost ratio of 26 to 1. From a business perspective, this is a dream investment.

State revolving funds for clean water, which lend money to municipalities for  infrastructure projects such as building and repairing wastewater treatment plants, have created an estimated 1.4 to 2 million jobs since 1988. (Some of these jobs are pending right now, for example, in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, according to my colleague Jon Devine.) In the Chesapeake Bay these programs have helped improve water quality, boosting annual boating, fishing, and swimming revenue by $357.9 million to $1.8 billion. Clean water is clearly an asset worth protecting.

Clean air and clean water programs have proved their worth by any yardstick. These investments protect our health, help keep our air clean and safe to breathe, and our lakes, rivers, and beaches clean and safe for swimming. They can also create jobs, generate revenue, and save money while doing so. Putting these cost-effective programs on the chopping block will not help solve our debt crisis.

Here’s what should be on the table: eliminating subsidies for the oil and gas industry. There’s an instant $4 billion a year back in our coffers, instead of in the pockets of some of world’s most profitable corporations. A budget deal for the American people should put our health over the profits of polluters.

Peter Lehner is Executive Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard and was reprinted with permission.