The major media continue to sow confusion on one of the central questions of our time: How much warming will we subject our children and countless future generations to?

The answer to that question depends primarily on four factors:

1. The so-called “equilibrium climate sensitivity” – the sensitivity of the climate to fast feedbacks like sea ice and water vapor. The ECS is how much warming you get if we suddenly adopt a super-aggressive effort to cut carbon pollution and only double CO2 emissions to 560 ppm — and there are no major “slow” feedbacks.  We know the fast feedbacks, like water vapor, are strong by themselves (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius” and Skeptical Science piece here).
2. The actual CO2 concentration level we hit, which on our current emissions path is far, far beyond 550 ppm (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories are being realised” — 1000 ppm).
3. The real-world slower (decade-scale) feedbacks, such as tundra melt (see “Carbon Feedback From Thawing Permafrost Will Likely Add 0.4°F – 1.5°F To Total Global Warming By 2100“).
4. Where they live — since people who live in the mid-latitudes (like most Americans) are projected to warm considerably more than the global average.

The media, perhaps aided by some scientists who aren’t great at communications, tend to focus on just #1, a number the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report pegged as “likely to be in the range 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. Values substantially higher than 4.5°C cannot be excluded, but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values.” While the majority of studies tend to be in the middle of the range, a couple have been near the low end, though some have been at the higher end.

In any case, focusing on the fast-feedback sensitivity perhaps made sense in the distant past when there was some reasonable chance of stabilizing at 560 parts per million atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (double the preindustrial level) and some hope the slow feedbacks might not matter.

Indeed, the scientific community focused on a doubling I think in part because they didn’t believe humanity would be as self-destructive as brainless frogs and ignore the increasingly dire warnings for over two decades now.

As I explained in Nature online back in 2008 (here), once you factor in carbon-cycle feedbacks, even the uber-cautious Fourth Assessment report (AR4) of the IPCC makes clear we are headed toward 1000 ppm (the A1FI scenario). That conclusion has been supported by just about every major independent analysis, including a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (see Study: We’re Headed To 11°F Warming And Even 7°F Requires “Nearly Quadrupling The Current Rate Of Decarbonisation“). That means it doesn’t matter terribly much whether the ECS is 3C, or, say, only 2.5C.

It is worth noting that while the Thawing Permafrost Could Cause 2.5 Times the Warming of Deforestation (!) and add up to 1.5°F to warming in 2100 by itself, “Participating modeling teams have completed their climate projections in support of the [IPCC's] Fifth Assessment Report, but these projections do not include the permafrost carbon feedback.” D’oh!

Given that the Arctic is already losing ice decades faster than any AR4 model had projected, we should expect that the permafrost will go faster than the models suggest. Indeed a 2008 study by leading tundra experts found “Accelerated Arctic land warming and permafrost degradation during rapid sea ice loss.” The study’s ominous conclusion:

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….

Anyone who tells you the recent literature suggests things will be better than we thought, hasn’t read the recent literature. In a 2010 AAAS presentation, the late William R. Freudenburg of UC Santa Barbara discussed his research on “the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge“: New scientific findings since the 2007 IPCC report are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.”

“Projections of global warming relative to pre-industrial for the A1FI emissions scenario” — the one we’re currently on. “Dark shading shows the mean ±1 s.d. [standard deviation] for the tunings to 19 AR4 GCMs [IPCC Fourth Assessment General Circulation Models] and the light shading shows the change in the uncertainty range when … climate-carbon-cycle feedbacks … are included.”

Again, we are headed to 11F and just keeping to 7F will take a major effort. But warming beyond 7F is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level,” as climate expert Kevin Anderson explains here.

Everyone interested in what we face should should read the recent World Bank Climate Report, which concluded, “A 4°C [7°F] world can, and must, be avoided” to avert “devastating” impacts. Also worth reading is the Royal Society Special Issue on Global Warming, which details the “hellish vision” of 7°F (4°C) world (and is the source of the figure above). The concluding piece in the issue notes soberly:

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A recent poll found Americans would prefer a carbon tax to cutting spending for deficit reduction by a huge margin.

Commissioned by Friends of the Earth and conducted by the Mellman Group in December, the poll is the latest evidence that actions on climate change — and efforts to tax or cap carbon emissions specifically — are not the inevitable political losers assumed by beltway pundits. Another recent study by The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication determined that bipartisan majorities of voters felt action on global warming should be a priority, would consider a politicians’ views on the matter when voting, and support regulating carbon as a pollutant.

Among other things, the Friends of the Earth poll found that on the carbon tax:

• Voters overwhelmingly prefer it to cutting spending. When presented with two options for reducing the deficit — a carbon tax on “big polluters such as oil, gas, and other companies,” versus spending cuts for “programs like education, Social Security, Medicare and environmental protection” — 67 percent favored the carbon tax. 59 percent favored it “strongly.”
• Voters support it regardless of how it’s used. If revenue from the carbon tax is used to close the budget deficit, 70 percent favored a carbon tax, with 51 percent favoring it “strongly.” If revenue was to both shore up the budget and invest in clean energy jobs and programs to fight climate change, 72 percent favored the tax, with 54 percent in the “strongly” camp.
• Voters support it even after hearing the counter-arguments. After being presented with suggestions that “this is the wrong time to pass a new tax on every business and consumer in America,” that consumers will pay higher prices for gas and groceries, and that it might even fail to reduce emissions, over two-thirds of voters still favored the carbon tax — and once again, most who favored it did so “strongly.”
• Voters support it even when they’re Republican. Not surprisingly, 93 percent of Democrats favored a carbon tax. What was surprising was that 66 percent of Republicans did.

Another poll in December 2012, sponsored by the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund and conducted by YouGov, uncovered very similar numbers: When presented with various options for reducing $900 billion from the deficit by 2022, 56 percent favored a carbon tax that would bring in $159 billion in revenue over that time period — and favored it even with the knowledge it would raise the average cost of living by about $600 a year. The carbon tax option as favored over cutting Medicare benefits (34 percent) or cutting Social Security benefits (27 percent), and even favored over repealing ObamaCare (52 percent).

These results really shouldn’t be that surprising. While voters often support “cutting spending” or “shrinking government” in the abstract, multiple polls over the last few years have found that as soon as voters are asked about specific programs that meet concrete and particular needs, the enthusiasm for spending cuts vanishes entirely. Context matters enormously, and in the real world policies are always considered and passed in lieu of alternatives. So simply asking voters their opinion on a policy in a vacuum doesn’t provide a useful picture of their preferences. As Slate pointed out when discussing the YouGov poll, “People may hate the idea of a carbon tax in the abstract, but when faced with the alternatives for raising revenue, more than half of them support it.”

Meanwhile, the same shift is occurring internationally as well: In Britain, the number of voters there who see themselves as worse off under a carbon tax dropped in mid-2012 to a new low of 38 percent.

Senator Tom Carper (D-DE)

By Michael Conathan

During an hour-long conversation about offshore wind energy hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) repeatedly channeled Stephen Stills and his Buffalo Springfield bandmates when talking about climate change.

There’s something happenin’ here,” Carper quoted, before paraphrasing in reference to his climate-denier colleagues on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. “To some people, maybe it ain’t exactly clear,” he said. “To me it is.”

Carper has long been a proponent of offshore wind, in part for the economic opportunity it represents for his home state of Delaware, but more pressingly for the role he believes the technology can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And he’s backed up that support with action.

In the last Congress, he introduced legislation cosponsored by now-retired Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) that would make the first 3,000 megawatts of offshore wind generation capacity eligible for the investment tax credit, or ITC. This would effectively provide a 30 percent tax credit for money invested in construction of these facilities. Yesterday, Carper said he would reintroduce that bill later this year, even though he successfully included language in the fiscal cliff deal making offshore wind projects eligible for the ITC through the end of this year.

The offshore wind industry has identified the ITC as the policy most integral to its future development, and Carper spoke persuasively of the need to ensure potential investors have the “predictability and certainty” that the credit will be available to them:

Carper also talked at length about the need to “level the playing field” for offshore wind and other renewable energy technologies. He cited both the need to eliminate existing subsidies to the mature and highly profitable fossil fuel industries — Exxon Mobil alone made $45 billion in 2012 — and the need to account for the externalities of fossil fuel pollution. To bolster his latter point, he spoke of his time as Governor of Delaware and his experience fighting against Midwestern coal plants whose pollution fell not in the Midwest, but along the eastern seaboard, saying:

I could [have] literally shut down my state – our economy – in order to meet clean air requirements, and we couldn’t have met them. And it wasn’t our fault. It was all this stuff blowing on to us from other places.

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After President Obama won reelection, Fox News headlined that Obama’s reelection triggered “mass layoffs” in the coal industry. So far, the facts defy the war on coal hype.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, coal mining employment has stayed relatively flat since the election. Employment was constant for the last two months, at 82,000 workers. It dipped slightly between November and December, from 83,000 to 82,000 — far from the drastic times that conservatives predicted.

Murray Energy may have accounted for some of the drop in November. The coal company politicized miner layoffs throughout the election, but they recently quietly rehired workers.

“War on coal” nonsense does not end there: Coal employment hit a 15-year high at the same time Republicans slammed Obama in ads.

I routinely repost climate de-crocks from Peter Sinclair. But last week, the uber-videographer turned the camera on me:

It is amazing how much more persuasive anyone sounds when they get professionally edited with graphs and clips thrown in. Which coincidentally segues me into my book Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga, which is available on Kindle and print-on-demand paperback and audio book.

By Bill Becker [Part 1 is here]

As President Obama decides how to tackle the growing threat of climate disruption, he might look to precedents set by the two Roosevelts when they occupied the White House during the last century.

Theodore Roosevelt, who served as president from 1901 to 1909, subscribed to the “stewardship theory” of executive power. As legal scholars describe it, he believed he was “a steward of the American people and it was his responsibility to improve their situation.”

Roosevelt explained his obligation this way:

My belief was that it was not only (the president’s) right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the Nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or its laws…In other words, I acted for the common well being of all our people whenever and in whatever measure was necessary, unless prevented by a direct constitutional or legislative prohibition.

Twenty years later, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt resolved to attack the Great Depression as though it was the invasion of a foreign enemy. FDR made full use of the authorities delegated by Congress and pushed for more. He sometimes acted first and asked for permission later. Because he enjoyed popular support, Congress often complied. However, Roosevelt also said this in an address to Congress:

In the event that Congress should fail to act, and act adequately, I shall accept the responsibility and I will act.

In taking the oath of office, each president promises to defend the Constitution. Under Article II, Section 3, the Constitution requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”. Theodore Roosevelt interpreted this to mean the president should enforce the nation’s laws in general rather than only implementing specific directives from Congress. What are those laws today?

There are at least 112 relevant statutes in which past Congresses have delegated powers to the Executive Branch related to energy or the environment, including 96 that specifically address global warming, climate change or greenhouse gas emissions. The delegations appear in laws dealing with agriculture, commerce, education, foreign relations, public health and transportation, among other topics. Other statutes – for example the Clean Air Act – contain requirements and authorities for the Executive Branch to deal with climate change without mentioning it.

For example:

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By Kevin Grandia via DeSmogBlog

A new video featuring four energy experts, outlines the issues surrounding the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, the Alberta tar sands and climate change.

The video describes the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline as a “lynchpin enabling the climate intensive tar sands industry to grow unimpeded.”

Watch it:

The video features Dr. Danny Harvey, a Climatologist at the University of Toronto, Dr. John Abraham, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of St. Clair, Lorne Stockman, Research Director at Oil Change International and Nathan Lemphers, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Pembina Institute. The four experts recently traveled to Washington, DC for an event at the National Press Club to send a message to political leaders that any response by the US government to reduce climate change pollution must include the rejection of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

On February 17, tens of thousands of people are expected to turn out for the Forward on Climate Rally that will call on US President Barack Obama to “move forward on climate action.” Rally organizers say that, “from rejecting the toxic Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to moving beyond coal and natural gas and firing up our clean energy economy, Barack Obama’s legacy as president will rest squarely on his response, resolve, and leadership in solving the climate crisis.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), the top GOP member on the Senate’s energy panel, laid out a sweeping blueprint today that includes opening up more federal lands and waters to oil drilling, launching a new green energy “trust fund,” and general revamping of U.S. green energy policy — but no serious climate action. [The Hill]

The blueprint – which Murkowski hopes will launch a broad discussion of energy and resource policy direction in coming years – includes some proposals that are extremely unlikely to advance any time soon, such as opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

But the blueprint also contains an array of other ideas, such as expediting liquefied natural gas exports to U.S. allies; promoting use of small modular nuclear reactors and creating a new quasi-federal agency for nuclear waste management; and bolstering energy storage R&D, to name just a few.

It calls for steering some revenues from expanded oil-and-gas development into a new federal “Advanced Energy Trust Fund” to finance programs on renewable power and alternative fuels, energy efficiency and advanced vehicles.

Rural communities in Colorado are coming out against the Obama Administration’s decision to open up nearby public lands to oil and gas exploration, while some of the more solidly Republican urban areas in the state are lining up to support the proposal. [NYTimes]

The International Energy Agency has a new report out detailing how Europe’s Nordic region could achieve a carbon-neutral energy system by 2050. [IEA]

By driving out coal here in the United States, the shale gas boom is driving a big increase in the burning of coal by European utilities, despite EU environmental policies designed to curb the share of polluting fossil fuels in the energy mix. [Financial Times]

Bureaucratic fighting between China’s environment ministry and China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) and Sinopec Group has thwarted stricter emission standards for diesel trucks and buses — a main cause of air pollution blanketing dozens of China’s cities. [Reuters]

Two new papers highlight how the hole in the ozone layer, which is beginning to recover because of limits imposed on CFCs, is influencing major wind patterns, ocean circulation, concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, and even rainfall in the Amazon. [NYTimes]

Using climate models, researchers determined that certain areas could enjoy cooler and wetter summers if currently deforested areas are replanted with trees. [Khaleej Times]

A battery-powered train capable of traveling 600 miles on a single charge is now possible, if not immediately likely to pull into a local station, according to research commissioned by the British Government. [The Guardian]

The Western Australia Greens have unveiled a $68 million plan to install solar panels on all public housing homes, in what could be an interesting test of the ability of solar to gain traction as an election issue. [Clean Technia]