The Senate confirmed John Kerry as a Secretary of State by a vote of 94 to 3. I believe this is a turning point in the fight to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.

Once again, I do not think that a man who had dedicated his Senate career to fighting catastrophic climate change would start his term as Secretary approving the expansion of one of the dirtiest sources of fossil fuels in the world.

Keystone is a gateway to a huge pool of carbon-intensive fuel most of which must be left in the ground — along with most of the world’s coal and unconventional oil and gas – if humanity is to avoid multiple devastating impacts that may be beyond adaptation.

How precisely could Kerry lobby other countries to join an international climate treaty — perhaps his primary goal as Secretary — after enabling the accelerated exploitation of the tar sands? Yes, you can say that the United States already has no standing to cajole other countries into climate commitments when we’ve expanded oil and gas drilling as well as coal exports. But none of those were Kerry’s decision, whereas Keystone is.

Kerry starts as Secretary of State with a clean slate. But approving Keystone would be like dipping that slate into the dirtiest, stickiest tar imaginable — it could never be cleaned again. Certainly the three Senators from Big Oil who voted against him – Ted Cruz (R-TX), John Cornyn (R-TX), and James Inhofe (R-OK) — must think he isn’t going to be the friend to Texas Tea.

Here is what Kerry said on the subject of climate change in his confirmation hearing:

The solution to climate change is energy policy. And, the opportunities of energy policy so vastly outweigh the downsides that you’re expressing concerns about … You want to do business and do it well in America, you have to get into the energy race … I would respectfully say to you that climate change is not something to be feared in response to—the steps to respond to—it’s to be feared if we don’t … I will be a passionate advocate on this not based on ideology but based on facts and science, and I hope to sit with all of you and convince you that this $6 trillion market is worth millions of American jobs and we better go after it.

I simply don’t think this climate hawk will recommend that Keystone be approved.

Related Posts:

• New Analysis Shows Simple Math: Keystone XL Pipeline = Tar Sands Expansion = Accelerated Climate Change
• James Hansen slams Keystone: “Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.”

At a dinner I attended last night, glaciologist Jason Box explained why he believes Greenland’s disintegration is likely to keep outpacing Antarctica’s for the foreseeable future. He has a detailed explanation at his blog, Meltfactor, reposted below. See also Chris Mooney’s interview of Box here and “Greenland Ice Melt Up Nearly Five-Fold Since Mid-1990s“ – JR.

Changes in global sea level due to ice sheet melting since 1992. Credit: ESA/NASA/Planetary Visions via NBC.

Icy contenders weigh in

by Jason Box, Ph.D.

Dahl-Jensen et al. (2013)^[i] suggest that the Greenland ice sheet was more stable than previously thought^[ii], enduring ~6k years of temperatures 5-8 C above the most recent 1000 years during the Eemian interglacial 118-126k years before present, its loss at the time contributing an estimated 2 m (6.6 ft) of global sea level compared to a total of 4-8 m (13-26 ft)^[iii], implying Antarctica was and will become the dominant source of sea level change. Consequently, environmental journalist Andrew Revkin writes: “The dramatic surface melting [in Greenland], while important to track and understand has little policy significance.”

Given the non-trivial complexity of the issue and that Greenland has been contributing more than 2:1 that of Antarctica to global sea level in the recent 19 years (1992-2010)^[iv], let’s not consider Greenland of neglible policy relevance until that ratio is 1:1 if not reversed, say, 0.5:1. Greenland, currently the leading contender with surface melting dominating its mass budget^[v], the positive feedback with surface melting and ice reflectivity doubling Greenland’s surface melt since year 2000^[vi]. Professor Richard Alley weighs in again: “We have high confidence that warming will shrink Greenland, by enough to matter a lot to coastal planners.”

That’s not to say that Antarctica couldn’t take over from Greenland the position of number 1 global sea level contributor in the foreseeable future. Nor should one be surprised if it did, given that Antarctica contains a factor of 10 more ice than Greenland^[vii],[viii].  And it is probable that the planetary energy imbalance^[ix] caused by elevated greenhouse gasses, expressed primarily through massive oceanic heat uptake^[x], is delivering enough erosive power to destabilize the 3.3 m of sea level^[xi] in the marine-based West Antarctic ice sheet. Yet, for today, consider also that climate change if increasing Antarctic precipitation a few percent can tip its mass balance toward the positive, lessening its sea level contribution^[xii] even while its glaciers retreat.

Irrespective of sea level forcing, through its ice mass budget Greenland plays an important role to North Atlantic climate through ocean thermohaline circulation, even being suggested as the Achilles heel of the global climate system^[xiii]. I wouldn’t tell our European friends Greenland’s hardly policy-relevant when climate change offers higher amplitude extremes in precipitation if not also temperature, as North Atlantic climate shifts in partial response to changes in neighboring Greenland.

Key differences between the modern Anthropocene and the Eemian interglacial suggest anthropogenic climate change may drive a different cryosphere response than during the Eemian…

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A new study links global warming to this year’s unusually severe flu season — a season which the Centers for Disease Contol officially dubbed an epidemic and which prompted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) to declare a state of emergency.

The scientists used data from the CDC to examine influenza and climate patterns going back to the 1997-1998 flu season. Previous studies have indicated that unusually warm winters, which will become more common in many areas as global warming continues, depress the spread of the flu. Ironically, this can leave populations more vulnerable to infection in the future as fewer people will develop immune system defenses.

As a result, the scientists found a pattern in which average-to-colder winters saw an unusually severe flu outbreak if they had been preceded by an unusually mild winter:

While the underlying causative dynamics of the severity and timing of influenza epidemics are multi-faceted, a primary contributing factor to the mildness of the 2011-12 season was likely the fact that the national meteorological winter of 2011-12 was the fourth warmest on record; several prior studies have shown that influenza transmissibility sharply decreases in warmer temperatures and/or high humidity.

In contrast to the 2011-12 season, the ongoing 2012-13 season is off to an unusually early and severe start, despite the fact that the national climate this past autumn was close to the seasonal average. Here we analyzed the weekly time series of confirmed influenza cases in the US from the 1997-98 influenza season to present. Our findings indicate that influenza epidemic severity and time of onset is significantly associated with the average winter temperature during the previous season, with severe and early influenza seasons being much more likely following a mild winter.

In the event of continued global warming, warmer than average winters are expected to occur more frequently, but variability in seasonal temperatures will of course remain, and average winters will still occur with regularity for some time to come. Our work suggests that mild influenza seasons during unusually warm winters are a harbinger of the likelihood of an unusually severe season to come. Hence, these findings could guide improved prevention efforts, including progressive vaccination programs after a mild winter to achieve high vaccination coverage well in advance of the next influenza season.

“It appears that fewer people contract influenza during warm winters, and this causes a major portion of the population to remain vulnerable into the next season, causing an early and strong emergence,” Sherry Towers, the lead scientist on the team that did the study, told Science Daily. “And when a flu season begins exceptionally early, much of the population has not had a chance to get vaccinated, potentially making that flu season even worse.”

Vaccinations remain the best tool for combating the flu, and the potential for unusually early flu seasons serves to highlight the importance of awareness even out of the flu season when vaccinations will not be at the top of the news cycle. Nor is the situation helped by the fact that 40 percent of America’s private sector workers, and 80 percent of low income workers, do not receive one day of paid sick leave from their employers.

Climate change is a political winner, recent polls make clear (see links below). It is a wedge issue that divides Tea Party extremists from Democrats, independents, and even moderate/liberal Rebuplicans.

As one of the leading experts on public opinion analysis in this area, Stanford’s Jon Krosnick, explained in October, candidates “may actually enhance turnout as well as attract voters over to their side by discussing climate change.”

Providing further support for that view is a new analysis of by The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. They found:

• Concern about the effects of climate change is high across political groups, with majorities of Democrats and Independents expressing concern about global warming and its potential harm for themselves and future generations.

• Across party lines, there is support for taking action to reduce global warming, with pluralities of all groups favoring medium-scale efforts. Even among Republicans, a sizeable majority support making some effort to address global warming.

• Independents more closely resemble Democrats in their attitudes and beliefs about global warming, and like Democrats, most support efforts to address the problem. Thus, the issue of global warming is a political opportunity to connect with most Independents.

• A majority of registered voters (58%) say they will consider candidates’ position on global warming when deciding how to vote.

• Policies to promote renewable energy are favored by the majority of voters across party lines. Majorities support eliminating federal subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, but oppose ending subsidies to the renewable energy industry. Instead, solid majorities of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans support funding more research into renewable energy sources.

• Registered voters support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. They are also willing to support a candidate who promotes a carbon tax but this depends on how the money is used. Candidates garner greater support when the money is used to create jobs, decrease pollution, or pay down the national debt compared to giving a tax refund to American families.

• Democratic and Independent majorities want Congress and President Obama to do more to address global warming, as do increasing numbers of Republicans.

And that was all pre-Sandy polling!

Discovery News notes in its piece about the poll that global warming was a political winner for Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA):

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by Colin Meehan via EDF

An interesting fact seemed to go unnoticed in all the press around the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’s (ERCOT) Long Term System Assessment, a biennial report submitted to the Texas Legislature on “the need for increased transmission and generation capacity throughout the state of Texas.”

ERCOT found that if you use updated wind and solar power characteristics like cost and actual output to reflect real world conditions, rather than the previously used 2006 assumed characteristics, wind and solar are more competitive than natural gas over the next 20 years.  This might seem a bit strange since we’ve been told for years by renewable energy skeptics that wind and solar power can’t compete with low natural gas prices. Let me back up a second and explain what’s going on here, and what it means for both the energy crunch and Texas’ ongoing drought.

Every two years since 2005, ERCOT has used a series of complex energy system models to model and estimate future conditions on the Texas electric grid.  This serves a critical function for legislators, utilities and regulators and others who need to prepare for changes as our electric use continues to expand and evolve.  As with any model of this kind, the assumptions are critical: everything from the price of natural gas, to the cost to build power plants and transmission lines. Facing an acute energy crunch and given that solar and wind costs have come down a great deal since the first study in 2006, ERCOT dug a little deeper into their historical assumptions and developed a version of the model that used current, real-world cost and performance data for wind and solar power.

What they found was astounding: without these real-world data points, ERCOT found that 20,000 MW of natural gas will be built over the next 20 years, along with a little bit of demand response and nothing else.  Once they updated their assumptions to reflect a real-world scenario (which they call “BAU with Updated Wind Shapes”) ERCOT found that about 17,000 MWs of wind units, along with 10,000 MW of solar power, will be built in future years.

*In their Updated BAU scenario ERCOT only specific combined cycle natural gas units built, the inclusion of combustion turbines may increase the total capacity of natural gas built in the scenario.

In addition to demonstrating the economic viability of renewable energy, these results show two drastically different futures: one in which we rely overwhelmingly on natural gas for our electricity, and one in which we have a diverse portfolio of comparable amounts of renewable energy (which does not use water) and natural gas.  All of this is crucial to keep in mind as the Legislature, the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT evaluate proposals to address resource adequacy concerns and the impacts of a continuing drought on our state’s energy supply.

Finally, one ERCOT statement in particular stands out from this analysis, in direct contradiction to renewable energy opponents who say that renewable energy is too expensive: “the added renewable generation in this sensitivity results in lower market prices in many hours [of the year].”  This means that when real-world assumptions are used for our various sources of power, wind and solar are highly competitive with natural gas. In turn, that competition from renewables results in lower power prices and lower water use for Texas.

As state leaders look for ways to encourage new capacity in the midst of a drought, it’s important to realize that renewable energy is now competitive over the long term with conventional resources.  The fact that renewable energy resources can reduce our water dependency while hedging against higher long-term prices means that however state leaders decide to address the energy crunch, renewables need to be part of the plan.

Cold snap or not, drought will continue to be the norm for the U.S. Plains and Midwest, receiving only light showers and snowfall this week. [HuffPo]

• U.S. hard red winter wheat in Plains at risk
• Corn, soybean crops grown in the west also at risk

… Officials in north-central Oklahoma this month declared a state of emergency due to record-low reservoir conditions. Public and private interests throughout the central United States were examining measures to cope with the drought.

The government on Jan. 9 declared much of the central and southern U.S. Wheat Belt a natural disaster area.

The U.S Department of Agriculture made growers in large portions of four major wheat-growing states of Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas eligible for low-interest emergency loans.

The unpredictable precipitation and weather fluctuations that come with climate change are hitting India’s coffee farmers hard. [Seattle Times]

After a Minneapolis utility shut down their $4.7 million battery bank for wind energy over fire concerns, the battery’s manufacturer rebuilt it, and it’s about to come back online. [Clean Technia]

Wind energy has surpassed nuclear as China’s third largest source of electricity. [Clean Technia]

Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan have agreed to an undisclosed “set of measures” to push back against requirements in the Kyoto Protocol that they reduce emissions. [RTCC]