Photo: James Balog

This summer, the Arctic lost an area of sea ice equivalent to the state of Maine every day for a month. When the meltback was over in September, the Arctic shed an area of ice the size of Canada and Texas combined — a 40 percent decline over the historical average.

And just last month, scientists reported that the pace of ice loss in Greenland is five times greater than it was in the 1990′s, a development they called “extraordinary.”

Some predict ice-free summers in the Arctic as soon as 2016. Yet, these changes have gotten only modest coverage in the press. Even as scientists documented the “astonishing” melt in the Arctic this summer, television news outlets covered Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan’s workout routine three times more than record sea ice loss.

Why aren’t people paying attention? One reason is that it’s difficult to imagine the scope of the problem. For those with only a casual understanding or interest in global warming, the changes listed above might read like another laundry list of environmental impacts that aren’t relevant to daily life.

That’s where James Balog, star of the new film Chasing Ice, comes in. As a long-time photographer, Balog has tried to illustrate the interaction between humans and nature throughout his career. In 2007, after personally witnessing the melting of glaciers on an assignment for National Geographic, he started a groundbreaking project to document the demise of the world’s ice. Called the Extreme Ice Survey, Balog and his team put 27 cameras in place around the world and have taken pictures of glaciers every hour of daylight since.

Chasing Ice documents the enormously challenging process of getting the project off the ground, as well as the jaw-dropping final product showing geologic changes taking place in just a few years. Suddenly, the melting of the Arctic becomes real, immediate, and terrifying.

More importantly, through the time-lapsed photos and the film’s narration, Balog and director Jeff Orlowski successfully humanize the glaciers and explain why their changes are so important. This is one of the most important outcomes of the film. And judging from the response of both viewers and film critics, their approach is moving people in a big way.

Watch Chasing Ice. Bring your family, bring your friends, watch it on the big screen if you can. It will fill you with awe for the beauty of ice, admiration for the tenacity of Balog and his crew, and terror at the scale of changes we’re creating on earth.

I spoke to Chasing Ice star James Balog about the film and his philosophy behind communicating the reality of climate change:

Stephen Lacey: I wanted to ask about your initial thoughts on climate change. You talk in the film about being a skeptic back in the 80’s when people like James Hansen were really first starting to raise alarms in the policy sphere. So as a nature photographer, at what point did you look around and realize that you could see some of these changes firsthand and how did that change your perspective?

James Balog: Well, I have to confess that my initial resistance to this was connected with my work on some other big environmental issues back in the late 80′s and early 90′s on the extinction of animals and deforestation. There was a finite well of worry that I was willing to climb over and there were only so many things I wanted to occupy my brain with. So part of it was like, “oh my God here’s another issue.”

I’ve also been a little bit of a skeptic over the years about how activists like to paint things in very black and white terms; heroes and villains in order to motivate their bases and make issues really simple so that they can get people to pay attention. So there was that.

But an even bigger thing was that I thought that the science was simply based on computer models which at the time were not at all bomb proof. Now of course they are quite good – they’re not perfect but they are extremely good. And I took the time to learn in the late 90′s that the science was not about computer models, it was about actual tangible physical evidence that was preserved in the ice cores of Greenland and Antarctica. That was really the smoking gun showing how far outside normal, natural variation the world has become. And that’s when I started to really get the message that this was something consequential and serious and needed to be dealt with.

Photo: James Balog

SL: So in order to document these changes, the Extreme Ice Survey was born in the mid-2000s. You set up 27 cameras in Alaska, Iceland, Greenland and Montana and took pictures every hour of daylight for a few years. Describe what you saw when you got the images back and started looking through them and creating these sequences.

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Christina DeConcini, via WRI’s Insights

“Think globally, act locally” is a slogan that aptly describes what I witnessed last week at the Southeast Florida Climate Leadership Summit. At the event, local government officials from four counties gathered to discuss how to mitigate and adapt to climate change’s impacts.

Yep, you heard that correctly: government officials in the United States — in a “purple” state, no less — came together in a bipartisan manner to address climate change mitigation and adaptation. In fact, mayors, members of Congress, county commissioners, and officials in charge of water issues in the state discussed how to move forward with action plans in response to sea-level rise – a climate change impact which is not theoretical, but happening now.

Putting Aside Partisanship for Action

Unlike Congress, these public officials aren’t debating the facts of climate change and its impacts or whether we should act. They see current effects and understand that in the face of streets flooding more regularly, drinking water supplies threatened by salinization, and models showing that some neighborhoods could become uninhabitable, what political party you support is irrelevant. Climate change impacts like sea level rise don’t discriminate between Democrats and Republicans.

As Congress continues to fail to address climate change at the national level, local officials from Florida’s Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe, and Palm Beach counties—representing a combined population of 5.6 million—established the four-county Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact and recently completed a 110-point regional action plan. They have developed mitigation and adaptation strategies through joint efforts, which can inform policy-making and government funding at the state and federal levels.

Other Communities and Lawmakers Can Learn from South Florida

Panelists at the summit discussed the tens of millions of dollars already spent on new wells to replace those that have had saltwater seep into them and the hundreds of millions of dollars needed for new drainage systems in Miami. Meanwhile, people having side conversations talked of the Florida Keys eventually becoming a reef and parts of the state’s valuable beachfront property no longer being inhabitable. The fact that Florida is built on porous limestone makes the adaptation challenges even more daunting, as sea water will seep under any barriers that could be constructed.

Significantly, South Florida’s officials understand that they must also address the causes of climate change. They’ve included mitigation strategies as part of the action plan, including transitioning to cleaner energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions through adoption of forward-thinking policies, such as a renewable energy standard. A lot of work remains to implement the action plan, but there is no disagreement on the need to act now.

Will Federal Lawmakers Take a Page from South Florida’s Book?

The action plan by these local governments is a model for others to follow. However, we know that climate change is a global problem that will ultimately require national leadership. It’s admirable that local leaders in Southeast Florida are not waiting for that missing leadership before taking action, but it does raise real questions about Congress’s failure to act on climate change and its responsibility to protect American people and their property.

Two newly elected members of Congress spoke at the recent summit, providing some glimmers of hope at the federal level. Representative-elect Patrick Murphy (D-FL) said he would support climate change legislation and chastised politicians for “burying their heads in the sand.” Congresswoman Lois Frankel (D-FL) also committed to support federal action, saying “I will deal with it in a scientific way.” She noted that climate change is “not a partisan issue,” and “we cannot hide from it.”

Perhaps as more people at the local level respond to climate change, national policymakers will wake up and take action to protect our citizens and valuable resources from dangerous impacts. While local action is desperately needed and should be applauded, we ultimately need national leaders to lead on climate change.

Christina DeConcini is the Director of Legislative Affairs at the World Resources Institute. This piece was originally published at WRI’s Insights and was reprinted with permission.

by Noreen Nielsen and Rebecca Leber

Voters this year rejected polluter-backed candidates in some of the most expensive races targeted by outside groups. In the final two months of the campaign, dirty energy allies spent more than $270 million on misleading TV ads in presidential and congressional races, and on industry ads promoting polluter interests. That tally includes more than $31 million in energy-specific TV ads.

Despite record outside spending, candidates that spoke out for clean energy and common-sense public protections won down the ballot. President Barack Obama alone faced more than $176 million of ads from pro-polluter groups including Americans for Prosperity, Restore Our Future, and Crossroads GPS since September, yet he still captured 332 electoral votes. Polluters’ picks for the Senate also lost, including in heavily contested races in Montana, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin, despite an impressive $60 million tally on TV ads. These same polluter interests also spent more than $50 million since September to influence House of Representatives races.

Voters have spoken in 2012 but the election is not the end of the efforts to obstruct clean energy, public health protections, and climate action. Oil, gas, and coal industries’ “branding” campaigns—a $7 million effort between September and November—have relaunched after the election. Groups such as the American Petroleum Institute—responsible for the “I’m an Energy Voter” campaign—and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity have pumped millions of dollars more into ads protecting their special interests.

The map below shows the states that were polluter allies’ biggest targets in the final two months of the 2012 election.

Noreen Nielsen is the Energy Communications Director for the Think Progress War Room at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Rebecca Leber is a Reporter/Blogger at the Action Fund.

The global response to climate change is incapable of addressing the catastrophic consequences to a planet dependent on burning fossil fuels for energy, spewing greater volumes of the greenhouse gases that are boosting temperatures at an accelerating rate.

This gloomy assessment is based on new scientific studies that describe, with increasing certainty, the arrival of severe climate disruption sooner and with greater intensity than scientists had predicted even a few years ago.

Another day, another U.S. media outlet wakes up to the grim reality of a world where the climate deniers and delayers reign. This time it’s the The Salt Lake Tribune, with it’s powerfully headlined editorial:

A killing climate: Global warming unchecked

Nothing really new for Climate Progress readers, but it is always good to see reality taking hold in more places — especially in a state whose House of Representatives actually passed a resolution doubting climate science in 2010 (see also “Utah: Still the right wing place“).

The World Bank and the International Energy Agency are warning that if current climate trends continue unabated, the rate of global warming will increase temperatures by an alarming 4C to 6C, with rising sea levels swamping coastlines, and widespread famine, storms and heat waves forcing widespread human migrations….

A study published Thursday in the journal Science found that the polar ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are losing three times as much ice as 20 years ago, threatening low-lying coastal areas with rising sea levels. Julie Brigham Grette at the University of Massachusetts Amherst told The Washington Post that as the oceans warm and expand, and polar ice melts, sea level is expected to rise by about 40 inches before the end of the century. “It’s not like it’s going to happen in the future,” she said, “it’s happening now.”

And they quote the World Meteorological Organization on its annual state of the climate statement:

“Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records,” Michel Jarraud, head of the World Meteorological Organization, said in a statement Wednesday.

He pointed to the dramatic rate of melting of Arctic ice over the summer to its lowest level since satellite records have been available. “The trend is not only continuing but accelerating. The more it melts, the faster it will melt,” Jarraud said in a New York Times report.

Sea levels rise as the ice melts, and are almost 8 inches higher than a century ago, when a deadly storm such as Hurricane Sandy would not have carried the same destructive punch, he said.

And the Utah news outlet even points some fingers at the deniers who tend to dominate Utah politics:

Sadly, far too often in Utah government leaders and others dismiss global warming as a scare tactic by environmental activists with agendas that include cleaner energy sources and mass transit as substitutes for the fossil fuels that power the state and national economies.

Such ignorance, blind or willful, has transformed climate change into a political issue rather than the global threat it clearly is proving to be. Somehow, achieving American oil independence is seen as an imperative far more compelling than reducing carbon emissions that, at their current rate of production, will profoundly alter the lives of our grandchildren and their posterity.

Hear! Hear!

Almost exactly a year ago, during the height of the Solyndra hysteria, Mitt Romney made a rather odd statement about solar. (Yes, we’re still talking about Romney).

“When other solar companies saw Solyndra get $530 million from the government, investors pulled back in that industry,” he said. “So instead of encouraging solar development, the Obama administration hurt it.”

Actually, the statement wasn’t just odd. It was a flat out lie. In reality, the U.S. solar industry installed record amounts of solar in 2011 while bringing in nearly $2 billion in venture capital. And moving into 2012, that trend continued. In the second quarter of this year, U.S. solar installations jumped 116 percent over the same period in 2011, partly driven by large installations supported by the very loan guarantee program that Romney claimed was killing solar.

And according to Shayle Kann, vice president of research at GTM Research, that deployment was just “the opening act” for the final quarter of this year. According to a new report from GTM and the Solar Energy Industries Association, the U.S. market could see 1.2 gigawatts of solar photovoltaics installed through January, bringing 2012 installations to 3.2 gigawatts. That’s enough capacity to power about half a million average American homes.

The report shows that installers deployed 684 megawatts of projects last quarter, representing 44 percent growth over the third quarter of 2011.

The continued boom in the solar market means more jobs and better economics.

According to a census of the solar industry conducted by the Solar Foundation, the sector now employs more than 119,000 Americans — an increase of 13,872 workers over 2011.

And as more systems get deployed and businesses get more efficient, the price of solar continues to fall. According to the GTM analysis, solar PV system prices fell from $5.45 per watt to $5.21 per watt. Price declines were even greater in the utility sector, with system prices falling to $2.40 per watt — a 30 percent drop since the same period last year.

This matches historic declines in price reported by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A recent analysis from LBNL found that U.S. residential and commercial solar PV systems fell 5 to 7 percent each year between 1998 and 2011. (Interestingly, even with these consistent drops, the installed price of solar in the U.S. is still nearly double that of Germany, which hosts a much more mature solar market).

After all the political hand-wringing about solar during the U.S. election, this report shows the industry is indeed chugging along in the U.S. While some key states may see a downturn in installs next year, America’s share of the global market continues to expand. With a 70 percent growth rate expected in 2012, the U.S. will soon represent 10 percent of the world market.

by Don Carr, via the Environmental Working Group

Congressional leaders in search of a compromise to avoid plunging off the “fiscal cliff” are under growing pressure from the agriculture subsidy lobby and its friends in Congress to attach a subsidy-laden farm bill to legislation ostensibly designed to straighten out the nation’s finances.

Bypassing debate and hearings on a five-year, near-trillion-dollar piece of legislation would be profoundly undemocratic. It would also enshrine a bill that is as devastating for the environment as the fiscal cliff would be for the economy.

Both the Senate and House versions of the farm bill include $6 billion in cuts to conservation programs. Should a new version emerge from the fiscal cliff negotiations, these misguided cuts are sure to be part of the deal.

Industrial agriculture – not manufacturing, gas drilling or mining – is the largest contributor to America’s water pollution problem. And despite the high cost to taxpayers and businesses, most farm operations are exempt from the federal Clean Water Act. State governments, meanwhile, have little authority to compel farmers to control soil, pesticides and chemical fertilizers that flow off their fields and into water supplies. This leaves the farm bill’s current conservation programs – the ones slated for deep cuts – as the only line of defense.

Land protected under conservation programs is also particularly effective at fighting climate change because it keeps large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. The carbon that would be released as a result of the likely conservation cuts in a fiscal cliff cum secret farm bill could equal the annual emissions of two million passenger vehicles.

To make things worse, the centerpiece of such a bill would almost surely be lavish new subsidies for bloated crop insurance policies, which already allow some farmers to turn a profit by plowing up and cultivating poor and environmentally sensitive land on an industrial scale, pumping still more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. As one farmer told The New York Times, “I can farm on low-quality land that I know is not going to produce and still turn a profit.”

More recently, a EWG analysis found that the combination of unlimited subsidies, ethanol mandates and high prices has contributed to the loss of millions of acres of wetlands and grasslands in parts of the Great Plains, decimating wildlife and increasing water pollution from farms. EWG research has also shown that polluted runoff from farms is driving up the cost of drinking water and that soil erosion is growing worse.

Not long ago, American farmers were required to engage in common-sense conservation measures in exchange for the lavish, taxpayer-funded crop insurance subsidies they get – a quid pro quo called “conservation compliance.” But efforts to revive this requirement are unlikely to make it into the secret farm bill the subsidy lobby is pushing, even though editorial boards in farm country have been clamoring for it and farmers overwhelmingly support it. A 2010 Iowa Farm and Rural Life poll found that two-thirds of Iowa farmers agreed that they should be required to conserve soil on highly erodible cropland – regardless of whether they get support from federal farm programs.

Members of Congress who care about clean water and the planet’s increasingly volatile climate should resist the undemocratic attempts to sneak this badly flawed farm bill into law.

Don Carr is a Senior Adviser at the Environmental Working Group. This piece was originally published at EWG and was reprinted with permission.

Across two decades and thousands of pages of reports, the world’s most authoritative voice on climate science has consistently understated the rate and intensity of climate change and the danger those impacts represent, say a growing number of studies on the topic. [Climate Central]

A growing number of public health experts are recognizing the need to integrate information about climate change into their disaster preparedness and response mechanisms. [New York Times]

The booby prize this year for Dirtiest City in America goes to Fresno, California. [Forbes]

Fourth- and eighth-grade students in the United States continue to lag behind students in several East Asian countries and some European nations in math and science. [New York Times]

A US intelligence portrait of the world in 2030 predicts that China will be the largest economic power, climate change will create instability by contributing to water and food shortages, and there will be a “tectonic shift” with the rise of a global middle class. [Guardian]

The United States could see its standing as a superpower eroded and Asian economies will outstrip those of North America and Europe combined by 2030, according to the best guess of the U.S. intelligence community in its latest forecast. [Associated Press]

California is poised to meet its renewable energy target in the next eight years with a “comfortable margin” to spare as regulators work to promote projects that also help increase “green” jobs in the state. [Ventura County Star]

In an unexpected bonus, the very presence of the U.N. climate talks in energy-rich Qatar introduced the big-spending Gulf public to the issue of climate change close up for the first time. [Associated Press]

The operator of Japan’s Tsuruga nuclear power plant may be ordered to decommission the facility after seismologists confirmed that it sits directly atop an active fault line. [The Telegraph]

Wheat prices may climb 20 percent in the year through June as drought threatens crops from the U.S. to Russia, boosting global supply concerns, said last year’s second-biggest exporter. [Bloomberg]