By Jessica Goad

Earlier this week, a key legislative committee in Colorado voted down a bill that would give teachers at the state’s schools and colleges legal cover to teach the questioning of climate change and other subjects that “cause controversy” in the classroom.  The bill directed teachers to:

… create an environment that encourages students to intelligently and respectfully explore scientific questions and learn about scientific evidence related to biological and chemical evolution, global warming, and human cloning.

H.B. 13-1089 was sponsored by Rep. Stephen Humphrey (R) who explained:

This bill is not a curriculum change that would force educators to teach intelligent design or creationism.  It simply provides legal protections to those teachers who would like to provide their students with a complete education on both the strengths and weaknesses of these hotly debated scientific subjects.

The Colorado House Education Committee, of which Democrats are the majority, voted down the bill on a party line vote.

Colorado is not the only state to see such bills, even if their radical anti-science message did not gain traction there.  Legislators in five other states have introduced bills allowing teachers to deny evolution and climate change.  Interestingly, they all bear resemblance to “model” legislation that has been promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative corporate front-group that puts together draft bills for use by state legislators.

In the past, ALEC has drafted model bills such as the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act,” which requires teachers to “encourage an atmosphere of respect for different opinions and open-mindedness to new ideas.”  ALEC has also been behind bills that block putting a price on carbon, turn over public lands to states and private companies, and roll back state renewable electricity standards.  One of the co-sponsors of the bill in the Colorado Senate is a dues-paying member of ALEC.

The Heartland Institute, an extremist group that once compared people who believe in global warming to the Unabomber, has also been linked to these types of bills.  Heartland is still a member of the ALEC task force that originally wrote the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act, and is also designing climate-denial curriculum.

The fight over teaching climate change denial in schools has just begun.  As Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education put it:

This victory in Colorado was too close. People in Colorado and elsewhere need to understand that these bills would be nothing but trouble: scientifically misleading, pedagogically unnecessary, and likely to produce administrative, legal, and economic headaches.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Center for the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

An epic blizzard is bearing down on New England — fed in part by relatively warm coastal waters.

I asked Dr. Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to comment on the role climate change has on this storm. He explained:

1. This is a perfect set up for a big storm, with the combination of two parts: a disturbance from the Gulf region with lots of moisture and a cold front from the west.
2. Ingredients for a big snow storm include temperatures just below freezing. In the past temperatures at this time of year would have been a lot below freezing but the ability to hold moisture in the atmosphere goes down by 7% per degree C (4% per deg F), and so in the past we would have had a snow storm but not these amounts.
3. The moisture flow into the storm is also important and that is enhanced by higher than normal sea surface temperatures (SSTs). These are higher by about 1 deg C [almost 2°F] than a normal (pre-1980) due to global warming and so that adds about 10% to the potential for a big snow.

Every storm and “event” is unique. It always has unique ingredients. So it is hard if not impossible to take apart, because any piece missing means the storm behaves differently. So event attribution is not well posed. Instead we look for the environment in which the storm is occurring and how that has changed to make conditions warmer and moister over the oceans.

Like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace. And like a baseball player on steroids, it’s the wrong question to ask whether a given home run is “caused” by steroids. As Trenberth wrote in his must-read analaysis, “How To Relate Climate Extremes to Climate Change,” the “answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”

On the warmer SSTs, Climate Central’s Andrew Freedman explains:

As was the case when Hurricane Sandy struck in late October, sea-surface temperatures are running a couple degrees above average off the East Coast, which according to climate scientists may reflect both natural climate variability and the effects of manmade global warming.

The presence of unusually warm waters could aid in the rapid development of the storm system, and infuse it with additional moisture, thereby increasing snowfall totals.

Heavy precipitation events in the Northeast, including both rain and snowstorms, have been increasing in the past few decades, in a trend that a new federal climate report links to manmade global climate change. As the world has warmed, more moisture has been added to the atmosphere, giving storms additional energy to work with, and makingprecipitation extremes more common in many places.

Sea surface temperature anomalies off the East Coast. Credit Wunderground/NOAA via CC.

The blizzard is also pulling in an extraordinary amount of moisture, which is consistent with recent trends in the Northeast toward more frequent one-day precipitation extremes during the cold season, including snowstorms. The satellite-derived image of total precipitable water shows that the storm has been drawing tropical moisture from the Pacific Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean

Trenberth’s second point is an important one — warmer than normal winters favor snow storms (See “We get more snow storms in warm years“). A 2006 study, “Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States“ found we are seeing more northern snow storms and that we get more snow storms in warmer years:

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By Tom Kenworthy

When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, power plants are the 800-pound gorilla in the room. But a new report from the Environmental Protection Agency shows that oil and natural gas are a pretty sizable monkey on our climate back as well.

Reporting for the first time on GHGs from petroleum and natural gas systems, the EPA this week said that the oil and gas sector ranked second in emissions to power plants, releasing 225 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2011. More than a third of that came from methane, the main constituent of natural gas, and a far more potent global warming gas than carbon dioxide.

The oil and gas sector was responsible for 40 percent of total U.S. methane emissions. In terms of greenhouse gas equivalent, the sector’s overall emissions were only about 1/10^th those of power plants.

Emissions from petroleum and natural gas systems come from a range of activities from drilling oil and gas wells both onshore and offshore, and the processing, transmission, storage and distribution of natural gas.

This was the second year that EPA, directed by Congress, has reported U.S. GHG emission data. The 2011 data includes a total of 41 sources, 12 of them new in the second year of the program.

This year’s release of the data shows that power plant emissions, which account for about one-third of all U.S. emissions, were abut 4.6 percent lower than 2010 levels.

Refineries ranked number three on the list of biggest emitters, with about 182 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Tom Kenworthy is a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) may hold up Senate confirmation of President Obama’s nominee for Interior secretary because the Interior Department won’t approve construction of a road in Alaska. [The Hill]

Interior announced this week that it does not intend to allow a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, a project advocates say is needed so residents of King Cove can reach an all-weather airport in Cold Bay for medical evacuations.

Murkowski told The Hill Thursday she would consider placing a procedural “hold” on the nomination of Sally Jewell over the proposed road. “It may be that I have got to make threats, it may be that I have got to hold something up, I am hoping that I don’t have to,” Murkowski said in the Capitol.

She noted that the road decision is not final and that outgoing Interior Secretary Ken Salazar can reverse course. Interior this week said that allowing the road would imperil a vital wilderness area that’s home to many species, and that there are other options for medical evacuations.

The Environmental Protection Agency is set to release its draft Climate Change Adaptation Plan today, in Friday’s edition of the Federal Register. The pollen is meant to guide the agency’s response to global warming, which it says is occurring at a rapidly increasing rate. [The Hill]

A series of scientific papers, most prominently the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have laid out the ways rising sea levels, devastating storms, and drought are threatening economies across America. [National Journal]

A Duke University online survey released Thursday found the share of Americans who say climate change is occurring — 50 percent say definitely and 34 percent say probably — has rebounded, reaching what may be its highest level in national polls since 2007. [USA Today]

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the country’s first multi-state system for capping carbon emissions and creating a market in carbon allowances, proposed a 45 percent reduction next year in the total carbon dioxide emissions allowed. [NYTimes]

New research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance suggests Australia’s electricity can be provided from wind farms at a lower cost than from new coal or gas plants. [BusinessGreen]

In an outcome hailed by environmentalists, European Union lawmakers voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to overhaul the region’s troubled fisheries policy to end decades of overfishing. [NYTimes]