“YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY” to feature Matt Damon, Don Cheadle and Alec Baldwin as first-person narrators on the ground; series also to be executive produced by “60 Minutes” veterans Joel Bach & David Gelber.

I could not be more excited to announce the upcoming Showtime TV event, “Years of Living Dangerously,” a 6- to 8-part documentary series focusing on climate change, impacts and solutions.

I am the Technical Advisor for the first-of-its-kind series, which means I help advise the producers which scientists and experts they should talk to on a given story. Ultimately I’ll be looking out for any technical mistakes in the final product — which is set to air in late summer or fall 2013 — although we are assembling a science advisory board of A-list climatologists to help in that regard.

The talent that has been put together for this effort is amazing. The former “60 Minutes” producers who are exec-producing and co-exec-producing have a combined 18 Emmys! I’ve gotten to know Gelber and Bach — and they are both first rate. The print journalists involved have a combined 5 Pulitzers.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course, is the former Republican governor of California who enacted the nation’s most sweeping climate law, which mandates deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. James Cameron needs no introduction, but I can tell you that not only is he one of the most creative and imaginative people I’ve ever met, but he is also deeply passionate and knowledgeable about climate change.

Here is the Showtime release, with more background on the project and the participants:

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by Hunter Cutting

Right now heavy rain is falling from the latest Pineapple Express to slam into California, thudding and slapping up against my office window, framing a view going over and up to Twin Peaks where Sutro tower occasionally strides out of the incoming cloud banks. It’s a beautiful sight, but also a bit surreal, because there is likely extra rain in this storm, rain that shouldn’t be there. That rain comes from the extra water vapor that’s pumped into the atmosphere by global warming and then swept up into the storm by the Pineapple Express, an atmospheric current that rides the rails up from Hawaii to California.

A sharp increase in heavy precipitation over the past several decades is pretty much the story across all of North America and around the Northern Hemisphere, particularly so for the most extreme events, and the fingerprint of global warming has been firmly identified in this trend. Yet this remarkable change has yet to translate into action by political leaders of any stripe, giving the rain hitting my window a sense of urgency.

One thing about climate change is that it happens slowly, over decades. So it’s hard to see any difference, and even harder to feel it. The new normal slides in and fills the place of the old normal with little notice and no fanfare. Anyone younger than 27 years has never lived though a month in which the average temperature for the world was colder than the 20th century average. The heat has been stoked, but slowly. And while the most extreme rain and snowfall events are now more frequent, they’re still the exception, not a yearly event, not yet.

This slow transformation of the weather facilitates the age-old practice of denial by which most of us, if not all of us, lull ourselves into a comfortable sleepwalk. It’s a blinkered state that affects everyone to a certain degree. And normally it might be indulged in the name of compassion. But when the edge of the cliff is moving quickly to the front of your car, and your clueless driver has his foot settled firmly on the accelerator, somebody has got to wake up and do something, fast.

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In 2009, world leaders at the G20 summit agreed that phasing out fossil fuel subsidies should be a top priority. Three years later, with very little progress on actually repealing those subsidies, promises for reform ring hollow.

Now, as diplomats gather in Doha, Qatar for an international climate summit — an event that experts say will bring very few meaningful commitments — groups are stepping up the pressure on fossil fuel subsidy reform.

Rich countries spent $58 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2011. That’s roughly five times the amount they spent on “fast start” financing for climate adaptation and mitigation in developing countries, according to an analysis released today at the Doha climate talks by Oil Change International.

Established at the Cancun climate talks in 2010, fast-start finance is designed to help the most vulnerable countries fund renewable energy, efficiency, water access, and climate change adaptation projects. The goal is to raise $100 billion a year for these projects by 2020.

The Oil Change International analysis is derived from OECD figures on fossil fuel subsidies and World Resources Institute data on international commitments for climate-resiliency projects in developing countries. It found that the average yearly commitment from developed countries for climate financing over the last three years was $11 billion — a fifth of what they spent to support the fossil fuel industry.

“What this analysis shows is that governments gathered in Doha to supposedly fight climate change need to put their money where their mouths are,” said Oil Change International’s Executive Director Stephen Kretzmann in a statement. “It should be plainly obvious that you can’t solve a problem when you’re spending vastly more to continue creating it than you are to fix it.”

Fossil fuel subsidies have become an important fight in the climate advocacy world. With very little movement on an international plan to price greenhouse gas emissions, campaigners are now pushing countries to drop their support of dirty energy. But progress in this area has been stubborn as well. Although the issue is widely discussed in international negotiations as an option, there is very little appetite within individual countries to repeal subsidies for coal, oil, and gas.

Even the International Energy Agency — an organization set up in the 1970′s to counter the power of OPEC in the oil markets — strongly agrees that fossil fuel subsidies must be eliminated in order to seriously address climate change.

Earlier today, IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven released a very strong statement on the importance of fossil fuel divestment that happened to coincide with the Oil Change International analysis:

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Sandy floods Ground Zero construction site. AP Photo.

The 2012 hurricane season, which ended Saturday, is one for the record books. As Climate Central explains:

For the third straight season there were 19 named storms in the Atlantic, which is the third-highest level of storm activity observed since 1851….

Since 1851, only two hurricane seasons — 2005 and 1933 — have been busier than 2010, 2011, and 2012.

And then there was Sandy, the storm of the decade (so far), which will likely turn out to be the second most costly superstorm to hit the United States, after Katrina. Sandy proved that you don’t have to be a major hurricane (Category Three or greater) to cause unimaginably widespread devastation.

We will have to get used to this kind of frankenstorm — see “How Does Climate Change Make Superstorms Like Sandy More Destructive?” ABC News ran an excellent story on this, featuring Climate Central’s Heidi Cullen:

And for the extreme weather junkies out there, meteorologist and former hurricane Hunter Dr. Jeff Masters has the stunning numbers:

Hurricane Sandy was truly astounding in its size and power. At its peak size, twenty hours before landfall, Sandy had tropical storm-force winds that covered an area nearly one-fifth the area of the contiguous United States. Since detailed records of hurricane size began in 1988, only one tropical storm (Olga of 2001) has had a larger area of tropical storm-force winds, and no hurricanes has. Sandy’s area of ocean with twelve-foot seas peaked at 1.4 million square miles–nearly one-half the area of the contiguous United States, or 1% of Earth’s total ocean area.

Most incredibly, ten hours before landfall (9:30 am EDT October 30), the total energy of Sandy’s winds of tropical storm-force and higher peaked at 329 terajoules–the highest value for any Atlantic hurricane since at least 1969. This is 2.7 times higher than Katrina’s peak energy, and is equivalent to five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. At landfall, Sandy’s tropical storm-force winds spanned 943 miles of the the U.S. coast. No hurricane on record has been wider; the previous record holder was Hurricane Igor of 2010, which was 863 miles in diameter. Sandy’s huge size prompted high wind warnings to be posted from Chicago to Eastern Maine, and from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Florida’s Lake Okeechobee–an area home to 120 million people. Sandy’s winds simultaneously caused damage to buildings on the shores of Lake Michigan at Indiana Dunes National Lake Shore, and toppled power lines in Nova Scotia, Canada–locations 1200 miles apart!

Imagine what kind of superstorms we will see when it is 10°F warmer and sea levels are 6+ feet higher. Or, better yet, imagine we are somehow smart enough to deploy low carbon technology fast enough to avert that grim future.

by Justin Guay, via the Sierra Club

The biggest untold story in the world is now out in the open.

Despite warnings from the World Bank about the dangers of unchecked climate change, the coal industry has a global pipeline of nearly 1,200 plants planned, two thirds of which are in India and China. India alone has plans to build a coal fleet nearly twice the size of the entire U.S. coal fleet.

But if this pipeline has you thinking that a coal-fired future is inevitable, think again. The truth: The majority of plants in this global pipeline are nothing an illusion.

To understand the reality of the industry’s plans, take a look at India. India’s huge pipeline will require ~2.4 billion tons of coal by 2030. That’s two and a half times what the U.S. currently consumes. More importantly, it’s nearly five times the amount of coal that India produces. To feed this beast India is going to need a herculean effort to increase production.

Let’s take an optimistic scenario where Coal India (CIL) – the state owned mining company responsible for 90 percent of domestic supplies — maintains a robust 7 percent annual growth rate. In this scenario, India would increase production to ~ 1.5 billion tons. Despite this mammoth increase in production, the country would still face a supply shortfall equal to 920 million tons by 2030 – an amount equivalent to annual U.S. coal demand. That’s a jaw-dropping amount of coal and it’s the “optimistic scenario” because it’s based on the fantastical belief that CIL will maintain an annual growth rate it has only achieved twice in the past 10 years.

But this optimistic scenario looks even more doubtful when you take into account the woeful state of the Indian coal sector. Despite industry spin that “environmental hurdles” are constraining production, the truth is that India has simply not invested in the infrastructure necessary to mine and transport coal to power plants. Worse, the permitted mining expansions it does have are under heavy scrutiny as the coal gate scandal has already resulted in the revocation of dozens of coal leases.

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Global carbon dioxide emissions are set to rise again this year, putting the world on a path toward dangerous climate change and making the internationally-accepted warming target of 2 degrees Celsius nearly “unachievable,” say researchers.

According to a new paper published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change, carbon dioxide emissions will rise by 2.6 percent this year, fueled by major increases in China and India. This follows a record year in 2011, when countries pumped 3.1 percent more global warming pollution into the atmosphere — making it very likely that the world will blow past the 2 degree C warming threshold that scientists and international negotiators agree is needed to avoid catastrophic consequences.

Some even call global warming of 2 degrees C, which is on the lowest end of projections, a “prescription for disaster.”

Here’s how one of the report’s authors characterized the problem when talking to The Guardian:

“I am worried that the risks of dangerous climate change are too high on our current emissions trajectory. We need a radical plan,” said co-author Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Britain and professor at the University of East Anglia.

Current emissions growth is placing the world on a path to warm between 4C and 6C, says the study, with global emissions jumping 58% between 1990 and this year. The study focuses on emissions from burning fossil fuels and cement production.

“Unless large and concerted global mitigation efforts are initiated soon, the goal of remaining below 2C will soon become unachievable,” say the authors.

The findings come during the COP18 international climate talks in Doha, Qatar, where observers have low expectations for any agreements to reduce carbon emissions. The world’s two biggest emitters — China and the U.S. — are quietly setting up a framework for a possible international climate treaty after 2015. In the meantime, global warming pollution continues unabated and scientists warn that the window for action is closing fast.

“We are losing control of our ability to get a handle on the global warming problem,” said Canadian Climate Scientist Andrew Weaver, responding to the latest data on carbon emissions.

Last week, the World Bank issued a report sumarizing the latest climate science. It concluded that the world is on track for 4 degrees Celsius warming by the end of the century — an extremely dangerous rise in temperature that ensure “extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.”

Bob Berwyn, via Summit County Voice

The massive amounts of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico after BP’s Deepwater Horizon drill rig exploded was devastating to marine life, but the dispersant used in the aftermath to try and break down the oil slicks may have been even worse for some species, according to new research done by scientists with the Georgia Institute of Technology and Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes, Mexico.

Based on laboratory toxicity tests, the study found that the oil-dispersant mix was up to 52 times more toxic to tiny rotifers, microscopic grazers at the base of the Gulf’s food chain.

The researchers tested a mix oil from the spill and Corexit, the dispersant required by the Environmental Protection Agency for clean up, on five strains of rotifers. Rotifers have long been used by ecotoxicologists to assess toxicity in marine waters because of their fast response time, ease of use in tests and sensitivity to toxicants.

Other studies the past two years have shown similar results. Esentially, the mixture of oil and dispersant is more easily absorbed by organisms, raising the question of whether the benefits of using dispersant are enough to offset the negative effects.

One study showed a dramatic change in the composition of microbial communities on some Gulf beaches, while another found traces of a toxic blend of oil and dispersants present in the surf line, where swimmers and surfers could be exposed. Scientists with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that plumes of the dispersant lingered in deep Gulf waters for many months after the spill.

The Deepwater Horizon spill marked the first time dispersant was used in such massive quantities, being mixed directly with the oil spewing out of the broken well.

The latest research shows the mixture caused mortality in adult rotifers, and as little as 2.6 percent of the oil-dispersant mixture inhibited rotifer egg hatching by 50 percent.  Inhibition of rotifer egg hatching from the sediments is important because these eggs hatch into rotifers each spring, reproduce in the water column, and provide food for baby fish, shrimp and crabs in estuaries.

“Dispersants are preapproved to help clean up oil spills and are widely used during disasters,” said UAA’s Roberto-Rico Martinez, who led the study. “But we have a poor understanding of their toxicity. Our study indicates the increase in toxicity may have been greatly underestimated following the Macondo well explosion.”

Martinez performed the research while he was a Fulbright Fellow at Georgia Tech in the lab of School of Biology Professor Terry Snell. They hope that the study will encourage more scientists to investigate how oil and dispersants impact marine food webs and lead to improved management of future oil spills.

“What remains to be determined is whether the benefits of dispersing the oil by using Corexit are outweighed by the substantial increase in toxicity of the mixture,” said Snell, chair of the School of Biology. “Perhaps we should allow the oil to naturally disperse. It might take longer, but it would have less toxic impact on marine ecosystems.”

The findings are published online by the journal Environmental Pollution and will appear in the February 2013 print edition.

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

More than 60 per cent of the British countryside could be exploited for shale gas, government documents show, as ministers prepare to give the go-ahead for developing the country’s most significant new energy source since North Sea oil. [The Independent]

As leaders in Washington obsess about the fiscal cliff, President Barack Obama is putting in place the building blocks for a climate treaty requiring the first fossil-fuel emissions cuts from both the U.S. and China. [Detroit Free Press]

It’s a decision President Barack Obama put off during the 2012 campaign, but now that he’s won a second term, his next move on a proposed oil pipeline between the U.S. and Canada may signal how he will deal with climate and energy issues in the four years ahead. [Washington Post]

As of Friday, particulate pollution in North Pole was worse than in Beijing, which is notorious for chronic air pollution, a Fairbanks newspaper columnist reported, although Reuters was unable to verify the claim independently. [Reuters]

City officials estimate at least 12,000 New Yorkers are trying to survive in unheated, flood-damaged homes, despite warnings that dropping temperatures could pose a health risk. [Associated Press]

Over the past three years, the United States has ratcheted up support for foreign countries to cope with global warming, spending nearly $1.4 billion. [Washington Post]

A group of GOP House energy leaders advised Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to exercise caution in a possible study on the health impacts of natural-gas drilling. [The Hill]

Some Texas lakes — including Lake Buchanan, one of the key reservoirs for Central Texas — have lost more than 10 percent of their capacity since they were built. Statewide, Texas reservoirs have lost millions of acre-feet of capacity. [The Statesman]

Brazil has said a row over carbon credits could derail the United Nations climate change negotiations taking place in Qatar this week. [Guardian]

Recent studies indicate that assumptions about plants’ and soils’ capacity in the so-called “carbon cycle” may be overly optimistic. If these studies are correct, even bigger cuts in greenhouse gas emissions will be needed to prevent drastic, irreparable climate shifts. [InsideClimate News]