Earlier this month, we reported on a new study by Marcott et al. in Science: Recent Warming Is ‘Amazing And Atypical’ And Poised To Destroy Stable Climate That Enabled Civilization. It was the source of most of the data in this popular, jaw-dropping graph:

Temperature change over past 11,300 years (in blue, via Science, 2013) plus projected warming this century on humanity’s current emissions path (in red, via recent literature).

Now Real Climate has posted a summary and FAQ by Shaun Marcott and colleagues, which I’ll excerpt below. As the real climate scientists at RC note:

Our view is that the results of the paper will stand the test of time, particularly regarding the small global temperature variations in the Holocene. If anything, early Holocene warmth might be overestimated in this study.

The main, stunning conclusion we can draw from the paper is that the rate of warming since 1900 is 50 times greater than the rate of cooling in the previous 5000 years, which undermines the whole notion of adaptation.

But the study also means the famous “Hockey Stick” graph is correct (and indeed too optimistic — even by mid-century, the hockey stick actually looks more like a brick wall for humanity, as the figure shows).

Of course, the deniers can’t stomach any independent support for the hockey stick, even though countless studies have now backed it up. So the lemming-like disinformer blogs continue to press the most inane attack on Marcott et al., arguing that the warming of the past century the authors found in their proxy records is in error.

What makes this so anti-scientific is that the uptick just happens to match the uptick in the heavily documented and independently verified instrumental record. So the disinformers are spending most of their time attacking the one part of the paper that we know unequivocally matches reality — see, for instance, Koch-Funded Study Finds ‘Global Warming Is Real’, ‘On The High End’ And ‘Essentially All’ Due To Carbon Pollution. See also Tamino, who has some good posts on the paper. And see NOAA (2013): ‘Robust, Unambiguous’ Independent Evidence Confirms The Recent Global Warming Measured By Thermometers.

And speaking of inane, there is a manufactured dust-up on twitter that somehow posting a blog piece on Easter Sunday is like making an unpopular political announcement on a Friday. But in fact, unlike Friday afternoon, Sunday is a great day to post a piece if you want high readership and traffic, as anyone who blogs regularly should know. If someone didn’t want a blog article to be read, they simply wouldn’t post it!

Here is an excerpt of the RealClimate post by Sean Marcott and his coauthors about their paper:

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One week after the Senate held a symbolic vote in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline, the U.S. saw two different oil spills involving Canadian tar sands crude oil.

An ExxonMobil pipeline ruptured Friday, leaking approximately 10,000 barrels of tar sands crude in an Arkansas town. As a result, 22 homes have been evacuated as officials clean up of the world’s dirtiest oil:

Exxon shut the Pegasus pipeline, which can carry more than 90,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil from Pakota, Illinois, to Nederland, Texas, after the leak was discovered on Friday afternoon, the company said in a statement.

The Keystone XL pipeline would carry almost nine times the barrels of oil as the Pegasus pipeline.

The first oil spill came Wednesday, when a train reportedly carrying tar sands oil spilled 15,000 gallons in Minnesota. Also this week, Exxon was hit by a $1.7 million fine for a pipeline that dumped 42,000 gallons of oil in the Yellowstone River in 2011 (the fine itself is a small hinderance for a company that earned $45 billion profit last year).

As one of the companies to profit from Canadian tar sands, Exxon often takes to its blog to defend its so-called safety. Big Oil lawmakers then repeat those myths despite evidence to the contrary. On Friday, the same day as Exxon’s oil spill, Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE) claimed the pipeline is a “no-brainer” and passes environmental “muster.” The State Department recently issued a draft report claiming the pipeline will have no environmental impact, authored by a contractor with extensive ties to oil companies.

The media are debating if the decrease in  Arctic ice  is related to this winter’s cold weather in Germany. This post discusses the most recent current research about this including the most important figures from relevant studies.

Translated from an article by Stefan Rahmstorf [] are translation notes via Rabett Run

First, what does the unusual temperature distribution observed this March actually look like? Here is a map showing the data (up to and including March 25, NCEP / NCAR data plotted with KNMI Climate Explorer):

There was unusually high air pressure between Scandinavia and Greenland. Since circulation around a high is clockwise [anticyclone], this explains the influx of arctic cold air in Europe and the warm Labrador Sea.

Arctic sea ice

Let us now discuss the Arctic sea ice.  The summer minimum in September set a new record low, but also at the recent winter maximum there was unusually little ice (ranking 6th lowest – the ten years with the lowest ice extent were all in the last decade). The ice cover in the Barents sea was particularly low this winter.  All in all until March the deficit was  about the size of Germany compared  to the long-term average.

Is there a connection with the winter weather?  Does the shrinking ice cover influence the atmospheric circulation, because the open ocean strongly heats the Arctic atmosphere from below?  (The water is much warmer than the overlying cold polar air.) Did the resulting evaporation of sea water moisten the air and thus lead to more snow? These questions have been investigated by several studies in recent years.
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On Tuesday, the Obama administration released the National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Adaptation Strategy, a document that provides recommendations for the country to address the threats climate change poses to wildlife and natural resources.

The strategy, which was developed by federal, state and tribal leaders and is meant to be implemented over the next five years, highlights the observed impacts that increased atmospheric CO2 and a changing climate have had on the environment, including ocean acidification, changes in phenology, the spread of invasive species and the shifting of the geographic range of native species. It also lists seven non-binding goals that would help wildlife adapt to climate change. Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the list should serve as an “urgent call to action” for government officials.

Here are the priorities the strategy outlines:

• Conserve habitat to support healthy fish, wildlife, and plant populations and ecosystem functions. Since many endangered and threatened species don’t occur naturally in already protected areas, the strategy aims to identify new areas to protect, keeping the effects climate change will have on species’ ranges in mind. Recommendations include: mapping and conserving high-priority conservation areas that are most likely to withstand the effects of climate change; developing natural corridors, such as tunnels and natural bridges, to allow species to move safely between key habitats; developing market-based incentives to encourage habitat restoration and conservation.
• Update or develop species, habitat, and land and water management plans, programs and practices to consider climate change. Many agencies don’t take climate change into account when managing their natural resources, and the strategy aims to remedy that. Recommendations include: incorporating climate change effects into species and area management plans; protecting native seed sources by collecting and banking seeds.
• Enhance capacity for effective management in a changing climate. Natural resource managers often lack a clear understanding of climate change, and most existing conservation laws and regulations weren’t developed to include possible effects of climate change. Recommendations include: identifying gaps in climate change knowledge among natural resource professionals; prioritizing funding for protection programs that incorporate climate change considerations; working with agricultural and business interests to identify impacts of climate change on crop production.
• Support adaptive management through integrated observation and monitoring and use of decision support tools. The strategy aims to increase the knowledge of the impacts of climate change on natural resources and the effectiveness of mitigation actions. Recommendations include: Collaborating with the National Phenology Network to facilitate monitoring of seasonal plant and animal cycles; conducting risk assessments for priority species and habitats.
• Increase knowledge and information on impacts and responses of fish, wildlife, and plants to a changing climate. Recommendations include: bringing managers and scientists together  to prioritize research needs; conducting research on establishing the value of ecosystem services and how climate change will impact communities; improving modeling of climate change impacts on vulnerable species.
• Increase awareness and motivate action to safeguard fish, wildlife, and plants in a changing climate. The strategy aims to gain public interest and awareness of the effects climate change has on wildlife. Recommendations include: developing educational materials and teacher training for k-12 classrooms on impacts and responses to climate change; developing outreach efforts aimed at local, state, tribal, and federal government authorities, as well as business and cultural leaders.
• Reduce non-climate stressors to help fish, wildlife, plants, and ecosystems adapt to a changing climate. Recommendations include: working with farmers to develop and implementing livestock management practices to reduce habitat degradation; implementing the 2011 National Bycatch Report recommendations to increase information of bycatch levels; determining and implementing sustainable harvest levels in a changing climate.

Climate change is already altering ecosystems throughout the world: warmer summers, for instance, mean crops like strawberries and tomatoes can now be grown on the Arctic Circle. It’s also threatening species’ survival, especially migratory species that depend on the cycles of bud burst and insect arrival to feed themselves and their young. A rare possum in Australia could soon be the continent’s first climate change-induced extinction, and one study found dozens of species of lizards could be extinct within the next 50 years due to climate change. But the adaptation strategy may present a chance to lessen these extinction risks; as the LA Times notes, efforts to protect wildlife and natural resources from climate change’s effects have not yet spurred the political backlash that other proposed actions have.

This is a piece I did for CAREEREALISM, which is an excellent website for anyone looking for a job or thinking of changing careers.

Few skills are more important for success at work and life than the ability to be persuasive and memorable. And yet the tricks for effective speaking and writing, which have been known for twenty-five centuries and verified by modern social science research, are hardly taught today.

As I explain in my book Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga, those tricks are the figures of speech, originally developed by the ancient bards like Homer to help them remember their epic poems and to make sure audiences would remember them.

Systematic use of the figures is the best way to be both pithy and profound. In this world of information overload, you have to capture people’s attention. In this media menagerie, you have to stand out like a peacock. Mastering the figures will help you grab people with the most eye-popping headlines, the catchiest catch-phrases, and the sweetest tweets.

Modern corporations have spent billions trying to hone in on which words will persuade people to remember and purchase their products. Their expensive studies have shown that the use of the figures “leads to more liking for the ad, a more positive brand attitude, and better recall of ad headlines.”

Advertising research finds that for certain figures, such as puns or metaphors, the act of decoding the figure, of figuring it out, “is necessary to produce its positive incremental effects on attitudes and memory.” The subtext is as important as the text.

Studies reveal that “virtually all of our abstract conceptualization and reasoning is structured by metaphor.” A single, well-crafted metaphor, like a well-crafted building, can endure for ages, as when Churchill said in 1946, “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Lady Gaga, the first musician in history to reach one billion views on YouTube. Half of those views were from two songs, “Poker Face” and “Bad Romance,” which, not coincidentally, are both extended metaphors.

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Is your bracket busted? Perhaps you should have looked at that fourth seed’s carbon footprint instead of counting seniors and freshmen.

There are dozens of methods to filling out a March Madness bracket. You can pick based on the combat abilities of team mascots. Or by colors, or your devotion to the schools, or how much you like each city or region. Some people have even watched a game or two, and try to base their choices on a studied understanding of college basketball.

There’s a new approach that tries to answer the question, “What bracket would expend the least amount of greenhouse gas emissions?” It tells you which teams could get to the championship using the most carbon-neutral path.

Hint: going to school near tournament sites helps a lot. The analysis, conducted by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, bases their calculation on projected team and fan travel between the school and the tournament site, combined with the assumption that higher seeds will draw larger fan bases. Though traveling by plane rather than coach bus means a higher carbon footprint, fan travel represents a much higher impact than team travel.

So how’d they do? Louisville, Davidson, Northwestern State, and Mississippi filled out this bracket’s Final Four, with each team’s journey projected to emit nearly 152,000 metric tonnes of CO2. St. Mary’s had the largest projected footprint, with a little over 166k. Florida Gulf Coast ranks 50 out of 68. Both Wichita State and Lasalle snuck into the top half of the pool ranked 33 and 31, respectively.

The women’s bracket got the same treatment as the men’s, with Maryland, Tennessee Chattanooga, Baylor, and LSU representing the carbon-friendly Final Four and UCLA bringing up the rear.

I spoke to Joe Marriott at Booz Allen, who worked on this analysis, to ask him more about how he did the analysis and what it means.

Q. Did you find yourself rooting for teams based on their carbon footprint?

A. After doing the analysis, it’s hard not to. I taught at the University of Pittsburgh for a few years, so I was rooting for them until they lost in the first round. Ironically, I’ve been so busy with our carbon footprint analysis of the tournament that I’ve paid less attention to my own bracket. The Louisville story, being a tournament favorite and having a small carbon footprint, has made following them pretty compelling.

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Opine away.

Turns out “climate change” isn’t the only thing you can’t say in Idaho biology class.

The headline grabber, as Raw Story covered it, was “Idaho teacher investigated for saying ‘vagina’ during biology lesson.” That would be Tim McDaniel, who has been teaching in the Dietrich, Idaho biology department for almost two decades. Here’s the part of the Twin-Falls’s Times-News story that is germane to Climate Progress:

According to McDaniel, the commission is also investigating a complaint that accuses him of using school property to promote a political candidate. The complaint was because he showed the climate change film “An Inconvenient Truth,” also in his science class. McDaniel said he includes the film to spark a discussion on climate change among the students. After watching the film, he asks students to write a response paper explaining their thoughts on climate change. “I’m not looking for one answer, I just want them to be able to explain what they believe,” he said.

How do you stop a teacher from showing one of the most popular documentaries of all time? Assert Al Gore is a political candidate. I wonder where they teach people to come up with that kind of logic.
Students have set up a “SAVE THE SCIENCE TEACHER!!” Facebook page and online petition here.

On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency finally proposed a new set of regulations — known as Tier 3 Vehicle Standards. The rules would reduce the amount of sulfur present in gasoline before our cars burn it. It brings the rest of the country in line with the environmental standards that have regulated California’s automobile industry for years.

Cutting back on the use of sulfur in gasoline by two thirds will have indirect environmental and public health benefits. While sulfur dioxide is not itself a greenhouse gas, reducing the amount of sulfur in gasoline will increase the efficiency of catalytic converters, reducing emissions and gasoline consumption. (Video explanation of how catalytic converters pull pollutants out of engine exhaust before it hits the air.)

When catalytic converters aren’t doing their jobs well, then they are emitting more pollutants like smog, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and carbon monoxide. As the EPA puts it:

“The proposed gasoline sulfur standard would make emission control systems more effective for both existing and new vehicles, and would enable more stringent vehicle emissions standards. Removing sulfur allows the vehicle’s catalyst to work more efficiently. Lower sulfur gasoline also facilitates the development of some lower-cost technologies to improve fuel economy and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which reduces gasoline consumption and saves consumers money.”

The proposed Tier 3 regulations go into effect in 2017, at the same time the auto-industry will have to be in compliance with the EPA’s newer, higher emissions standards.

Health advocates immediately applauded the new regulations as well. The American Lung Association issued a release applauding the health benefits of reducing the amount of smog-causing pollutants released by car emissions. These rules are expected to achieve the same environmental impact as removing some 33 million cars from the road.

The Obama administration also had a key ally in their push for stricter regulations: car manufacturers. For years, automakers had to navigate the disparity between California’s tougher requirements and the more relaxed federal laws, leading to costly changes in the way companies like Ford and General Motors built their cars that would be sold in the nation’s largest state.

It is also a significant victory given the strength of the opposition. Predictably, the oil and gas industry had their well-funded lobbyists urging the White House to at least delay the new standards, touting cost estimates that the industry warned would be passed down to the consumer at the pump. The EPA estimates that the new regulations will cost less than a penny per gallon, and add approximately $150 to the total price of a new car, or less than half of one percent of the average cost of a new vehicle.

The American Petroleum Institute also said that refiners would emit more carbon pollution in getting sulfur out of gasoline. The bottom line is that the EPA says methane and nitrogen oxide benefits from implementing the new rule outweigh any increases in refinery emissions. In fact, within a few decades the net greenhouse gas benefit will be a reduction equivalent to about two coal power plants.

Between directly lowered prices, tax breaks, and the failure to properly price carbon, the world subsidized fossil fuel use by over $1.9 trillion in 2011 — or eight percent of global government revenues — according to a study released this week by the International Monetary Fund.

The biggest offender was by far the United States, clocking in at $502 billion. China came in second at $279 billion, and Russia was third at $116 billion. In fact, the problem is so significant in the U.S. that the IMF figures correcting it will require new fees, levies, or taxes totaling over $500 billion a year, or more than 3 percent of the economy.

The most significant finding is that most of the problem — a little over $1 trillion worth — is the failure to properly price carbon pollution. Global warming is the ultimate example of a “negative externality” — a market failure in which one market actor enjoys the benefits of an exchange while another actor pays the costs.

When we burn gasoline to power our cars or coal-fired electricity to run our homes, we enjoy the benefits of that energy use. But someone else — a farmer facing increased drought, coastal populations facing rising seas, or the global poor facing food supply disruptions — shoulders the burden of the added carbon pollution we’re dumping into the atmosphere. It’s the global ecological equivalent of tapping into your neighbor’s electrical wiring so that they wind up paying your utility bill.

The world’s advanced economies consume huge levels of fossil fuels, so the failure to properly build pollution costs into the consumer price of fossil fuel use — through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade-style system, or some other policy — is what makes these economic giants the biggest contributors to worldwide fossil fuel subsidies. Emerging and developing economies in Asia (which mainly means China) come in a decent second. “Pre-tax” subsidies, which are breaks built into the tax code along with other policies, contributed another $480 billion, mostly from countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The pre-tax subsidies of the advanced countries were negligible.

Finally, lots of countries have a national consumption tax called a VAT (or value added tax), and often offer breaks through it for energy purchases. The IMF had to calculate those separately for methodological reasons, and found they contributed several hundred billion dollars more, again largely from the advanced countries.

It’s worth noting that western Europe has an (admittedly troubled) carbon pollution reduction program, so the big externality subsidy created by the advanced economies can likely be blamed mostly on the United States.

In calculating the value of the externalities subsidy, the IMF assumed the global warming damages of carbon emissions at $25 per ton. They then went through the policies of various countries to see who is and isn’t making an attempt to work that price back in through taxation, and to what extent. But the report notes that various studies have pegged the price as high as $85 per ton — and other studies have put it much higher than that — in which case the size of the externality subsidy would be much larger. Beyond global warming, the IMF also attempted to account for other externalities, particularly the pollution and health effects of coal burning.

All told, the analysis found that eliminating all externality subsidies entirely would reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as 13 percent, along with having lots of positive ripple effects by reducing fossil fuel demand and increasing investment and jobs in clean energy.

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This video produced by the Climate Reality Project featuring Reggie Watts demonstrates the argument that because carbon pollution costs us money, the world should put a price on carbon.

It’s important to remind viewers that it should be the polluters paying for what their products cost all of us — that they should not simply pass on the costs to everyone else. These companies already know carbon emissions will affect their bottom lines. But it’s difficult to ask consumers to pay double for fossil fuel addiction when these large companies and utilities slow-walk toward renewable energy. Especially when polluters’ products cause so many dangerous and expensive impacts.

So what’s the answer? The Center for American Progress has a report detailing what a carbon tax should look like, including ways to “minimizing harm to vulnerable consumers and businesses, growing the economy with investments in clean energy infrastructure and other infrastructure that makes communities more resilient in the face of climate change, and reducing the deficit burden on future generations.”

What do you think a price on carbon should look like?

By Kristin Meek, via World Resources Institute

New data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reveals a troubling trend: Coal-fired power generation — and its associated greenhouse gas emissions — were on the rise as 2012 came to an end.

According to the data, which was released this week, natural gas prices have risen significantly since April of 2012, prompting a rise in coal-fired electric generation (see figure below). This increase marks a dramatic change from the trends we’ve seen in the United States over the past several years. U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the power sector had been falling, mostly due to more electricity being generated by renewables, slowed economic growth, and a greater use of low-cost natural gas, which produces roughly half the CO2 emissions of coal during combustion.

The new uptick in gas prices and coal use suggests that we cannot simply rely on current market forces to meet America’s emissions-reduction goals. In fact, EIA projects that CO2 emissions from the power sector will slowly rise over the long term. To keep emissions on a downward trajectory, the Administration must use its authority to prompt greater, immediate reductions by putting in place emissions standards for both new and existing power plants.

What Happens if Market Forces Continue Changing?

Over the past several years, low natural gas prices, along with increased gas extraction, have contributed to the power sector shifting away from coal-fired generation toward natural gas-fired generation. In fact, the U.S. produced less than 40 percent of its electricity using coal for most of 2012. The last time this occurred was for a very brief period of time in 1978.

However, the most recent data from EIA shows that natural gas prices for the power sector have increased by more than 50 percent since April 2012. Over the long-term, EIA expects that natural gas prices for the power sector will increase by about 3.4 percent each year from 2012 through 2040. On top of these price increases, electricity demand is expected to grow by 28 percent by 2040. EIA projects an increase in both natural-gas fired generation (30 percent), as well as coal-fired generation (18 percent) between now and 2040 to meet this demand. Without additional regulations, these trends are poised to increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

EPA Regulations Can Help Prevent a Backslide in Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The good news is that the Obama Administration has the tools to not only prevent an increase in CO2 emissions, but to put the country on track to achieve its goal of reducing emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. Emissions standards for new power plants, like those proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last year, can help ensure that our climate’s future is not subject to the vagaries of fossil fuel markets, and that new coal plants will not be built unless they contain greenhouse gas emissions controls like carbon capture and storage.

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Confusion over what cutting carbon emissions will do is complicating the whole issue, says a new article in Science. [Climate Central]

There is widespread confusion about the near-term benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and that misunderstanding may be complicating the formidable task of reducing manmade global warming, argue two climate researchers in Science in a story published Thursday.

The scientists, Damon Matthews of Concordia University in Montreal and Susan Solomon of MIT, make the case that policymakers, the media, and to some extent the public have misunderstood the implications of two key concepts — the “irreversibility” of climate change, and the amount of global warming already in the pipeline due to historical greenhouse gas emissions.

The duo challenge what they say have become pervasive misinterpretations of recent scientific results, including findings from a 2010 National Research Council report they helped write that said that the amount of global warming to date is essentially irreversible on the timescale of about 1,000 years. That study has been repeatedly cited by policymakers to justify delays in tackling carbon emissions by making global warming appear to be inexorable, regardless of what actions are taken.

But Matthews and Solomon rebut that justification, writing instead that, “the irreversibility of past changes does not mean that future warming is unavoidable.”

In addition, they said the notion that global warming would continue to take place even if the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were to be frozen at current levels — rather than increasing year-after-year as they are now — has also helped justify inaction.

Automakers are embracing hybrid technology, with more models increasing their efficiency in response to mandates. [Detroit News]

EPA is moving forward with rules for limiting sulfur in gasoline and fleet-wide pollution limits on new cars by 2017. [Washington Post]

A new survey finds Americans acknowledge the risks and impacts of climate change, yet little desire to pay to adapt to them. [Guardian]

Central Texas is slipping into extreme drought, with low lakes and reservoirs straining water supplies. [Austin American-Statesman]

The last three months in California have been the driest January-March on record, and the Sierra Nevada has half the snowpack as normal. [LA Times]

The extended drought is also extending into New Mexico, Oregon, Montana, Oklahoma, and much of the Western U.S. [Climate Central]

The House GOP released their energy plan which calls for more drilling and mining and fracking. [Washington Post]

A new study says that it’s possible Sandy-like superstorms could make their way to Europe this century as greenhouse gas emissions affected storm formation in the Atlantic. [New Scientist]

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)

Gail Collins has a terrific piece in how the GOP used to be concerned about the environment, but now, not so much.

The whole column, “Cooling on Warming,” is worth reading, but one thing in particular caught my eye:

… earlier this month, a deeply noncontroversial Senate resolution commemorating International Women’s Day had to be taken back and edited because someone objected to a paragraph — which had been in an almost identical version passed in the last Congress — stating that women in developing countries “are disproportionately affected by changes in climate because of their need to secure water, food and fuel for their livelihood.”

You may be wondering who the objecting senator was. Normally, these things are supposed to be kind of confidential, but in this case the lawmaker in question is proud to let you know that he is — yes! — Ted Cruz of Texas.

“A provision expressing the Senate’s views on such a controversial topic as ‘climate change’ has no place in a supposedly noncontroversial resolution requiring consent of all 100 U.S. senators,” a Cruz spokesman said.

Note that the offending statement doesn’t even spell out what caused these “changes in climate.” It merely states that when such changes occur, women in developing countries are disproportionately affected. Kind of a “duh” statement.

But not for the Senator from drought-stricken Texas. Thank goodness Cruz swooped in to make sure that even purely ceremonial resolutions don’t contain any words that people might associate with the threat of human-caused global warming. I suppose his ultimate goal is to erase any Congressional reference to climate change whatsoever because what you don’t know can’t hurt future generations, right?

And speaking of future generations Collins notes:

There was a time, children, when the Republican Party was a hotbed of environmental worrywarts. The last big clean air act of the Bush I administration passed the House 401 to 21. But no more, no more. You’re not going to get any sympathy for controlling climate change from a group that doesn’t believe the climate is actually changing. As Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, used to say, “Only nature can change the climate — a volcano, for instance.”

It’s sort of ironic. These are the same folks who constantly seed their antideficit speeches with references to our poor, betrayed descendants. (“This is a burden our children and grandchildren will have to bear.”) Don’t you think the children and grandchildren would appreciate being allowed to hang onto the Arctic ice cap?

I’m sure our children and grandchildren would like to live in a world with a livable climate that could actually sustain its projected population, too, but that isn’t where we are headed if Cruz has his way.

And yes, the see-no-climate-burden Cruz is also one of the GOP’s hate-the-debt-burden hypocrites, as this recent tweet shows:

Seriously, we need a reminder to put an end to our irresponsible life-style that threatens our children’s future….

Residents of Washington, DC are used to jokes about metaphorical hot air, humidity, and the swampy history of their city. But there’s something they may not know about the District: it’s overrun with methane, which sometimes makes manhole covers explode.

Natural gas is mostly methane, and it is carried through underground pipes to heat buildings and cook food. Those pipes are often old, and this led ecologist and chemical engineer Robert Jackson of Duke University to drive around DC over a period of two months, regularly measuring the air to take methane levels.

He and his research team found methane leaks everywhere, with thousands of places having significantly higher than normal methane concentrations, and some places reaching 50 times normal urban levels (100 ppm vs 2 ppm). A similar study in Boston last year found essentially the same results. In DC, the source wasn’t the swamp on which the city was built — it was fossil fuel. (The methane they measured had more carbon-13 rather than the normal, modern carbon-12.)

Methane leaks mapped as 3,356 spikes along 785 miles of road in Boston. Yellow indicates methane levels above 2.5 parts per million.

There are sources of methane all over the planet: landfills, swamps, rice paddies, gas wells, melting permafrost, and livestock all contribute. Jackson’s research found another major source: aging infrastructure. Methane isn’t immediately physically harmful, though it does lead to ground-level ozone which is known to harm tree growth and reduce lung function

But what about the exploding manholes? Science Now explains:

Even more disturbing than the thousands of large leaks on the street were the levels of methane in manholes. In some, the researchers found levels as high as 100,000 ppm. Natural gas companies typically consider 40000 ppm to be the threshold for a risk of explosion. D.C. manholes have a tendency to blow up — there are an average of 38 “manhole incidents” per year in the district, according to a report by Stone & Webster Consultants in Boston, including one yesterday on 33rd Street in Georgetown that forced the evacuation of a cupcake shop. Although Jackson cannot say for certain that leaking natural gas is the reason for these blasts, the leaks certainly don’t contribute to safety.

What usually happens is a spark from an exposed cable sets off an explosion of pressurized gas — what remains unclear is how much of this gas is methane. DC’s utility, Pepco, investigated a manhole explosion in 2000 and though their press release ruled out natural gas, their report to the DC Public Service Commission indicated otherwise, according to a February 26, 2000 article in the Washington Post.

Pepco issued a report to the D.C. Public Service Commission yesterday that strongly indicated a natural gas leak may have led to the fire and explosions last week that blew three manhole covers in Georgetown, an incident that shut down the 3100 block of M Street NW for 24 hours.

“We may never know what gas caused the fire — whether it’s sewer gas, gas emitted by burning rubber cable or natural gas,” said Nancy Moses, a spokeswoman for Potomac Electric Power Co. But the report said sewer gas “has historically not been a significant problem in [Pepco] manholes” and “the strength and location of the manhole explosions . . . raises questions as to whether the explosion could have been caused solely by gasses [caused] by burning of low voltage cable insulation.”

Tim Sargeant, a spokesman for Washington Gas, said yesterday that the utility was “disappointed that Pepco speculation and finger-pointing would continue. The report is more innuendo than investigation.”

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No wonder Trump doesn't like wind!

While the U.S. wind market surged and GE Wind was the top producer last year, nations across the pond are finding success with wind turbines as well.

Over the last 20 years in Ireland:

• More than 2,200 jobs have been created in developing wind power.
• The wind sector has contributed a total €83m to councils, money which has been ploughed into the development of regional economies. Last year alone, up to €11.5m was delivered to local county councils through rates.
• A total of €2.8bn has been invested in wind farms, a staggering sum by any standards. In 2011 alone the investment figure was €372m. A further €4bn is expected over the next eight years to meet domestic targets alone.
• Wind is now no longer a niche product across Europe where wind capacity 23 times the national demand of Ireland has been installed. Last year wind energy accounted for more than 15pc of our electricity demand. Wind energy also has the capability to supply 1.3 million homes in Ireland.

In the UK, wind power has topped 5 gigawatts per day and is sufficient to power 10% of total electricity demand. This rough guide to the geology and geography of offshore wind shows that the British Isles have an enormous amount of potential in the North Sea.

In 2012, Scotland’s wind power generation totals increased 19 percent, to comprise 39 percent of the region’s needs. It will only get stronger as a wind farm offshore from a golf course moves forward despite the tweeted protestations of Donald Trump.

This week, the government of Scotland decided to go ahead with a large scale offshore wind farm. Scotland, which has been reffered to as the ‘Silicon Valley’ for wind energy, makes this move in spite of personal and business motivated pleas from Donald Trump.

Nevertheless, Trump vowed to bring a lawsuit to stop the $349 million (USD) development, which consists of 11 wind turbines planned off the coast near Aberdeen in northeastern Scotland. Trump declared: “We will spend whatever monies are necessary to see to it that these huge and unsightly industrial wind turbines are never constructed”, and frequently refers to wind turbines as ‘monstrosities’.

The wind farm, owned by Swedish energy company Vattenfall and a local business consortium, still needs to obtain a marine license and approval for an onshore substation.

And in this piece, EarthTechling notes that wind power is becoming more and more reliable, even during a cold snap:

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Most of manmade global warming is ending up in the ocean, just as scientists had predicted (see “Global Warming Has Accelerated In Past 15 Years“). And while recent “observations support predictions of extreme warming” this century, even sophisticated media outlets, like “The Economist,” get the story wrong (see “Memo To Media: ‘Climate Sensitivity’ Is NOT The Same As Projected Future Warming, World Faces 10°F Rise“). Former Hurricane Hunter Jeff Masters has a good chart-filled piece reviewing the latest temperature observations.

Tavurvur volcano in New Guinea erupting in 2009. A 2011 study found its 2006 eruption, combined with one on Montserrat Island, hurled a huge amount of sulfur into the stratosphere, helping reduce global temperatures. Image: Taro Taylor.

By Dr. Jeff Masters, via Weather Underground

One often hears the statement in the media that global warming stopped in 1998, or that there has been no global warming for the past 16 years. Why pick 16 years? Why not some nice round number like 20 years? Or better yet, 30 years, since the climate is generally defined as the average weather experienced over a period of 30 years or longer?

Temperatures at Earth’s surface undergo natural, decades-long warming and cooling trends, related to the La Niña/El Niño cycle and the 11-year sunspot cycle. The reason one often hears the year 1998 used as a base year to measure global temperature trends is that this is a cherry-picked year.

An extraordinarily powerful El Niño event that was the strongest on record brought about a temporary increase in surface ocean temperatures over a vast area of the tropical Pacific that year, helping boost global surface temperatures to the highest levels on record (global temperatures were warmer in both 2005 and 2010, but not by much.) But in the years from 2005 – 2012, La Niña events have been present for at least a portion of every single year, helping keep Earth’s surface relatively cool.

Thus, if one draws a straight-line fit of global surface temperatures from 1998 to 2012, a climate trend showing little global warming results. If one picks any year prior to 1998, or almost any year after 1998, a global warming trend does result. The choice of 1998 is a deliberate abuse of statistics in an attempt to manipulate people into drawing a false conclusion on global temperature trends. One of my favorite examples of this manipulation of statistics is shown an animated graph called “The Escalator”, created by skepticalscience.com (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Average of NASA’s GISS, NOAA”s NCDC, and the UK Met Office’s HadCRUT4 monthly global surface temperature departures from average, from January 1970 through November 2012 (blue), with linear trends applied to the time frames Jan ’70 – Oct ’77, Apr ’77 – Dec ’86, Sep ’87 – Nov ’96, Jun ’97 – Dec ’02, Nov ’02 – Nov ’12. Climate change skeptics like to emphasize the shorter term fluctuations in global temperatures (blue lines) and ignore the long-term climate trend (red line.) The global surface temperature trend from January 1970 through November 2012 (red line) is +0.16°C (+0.29°F) per decade. Image credit: skepticalscience.com.

Correcting for natural causes to find the human contribution to global temperature changes

We know that natural global warming or cooling on time scales of 1-11 years can be caused by changes in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle, dust from volcanic eruptions, and changes in solar energy. For example, a study published in March 2013 in Geophysical Research Letters found that dust in the stratosphere has increased by 4-10 percent since 2000 due to volcanic eruptions, keeping the level of global warming up to 25 percent lower than might be expected. So, it is good to remove these natural causes of global temperature change over the past 34 years for which we have satellite data, to see what the human influence might have been during that time span.

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Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris and SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive marking the installation of solar panels at a baseball stadium. (Photo credit: Solar Home & Business Journal)

On Tuesday, the City Council of Lancaster, California approved a mandate that most new homes must produce solar energy. This is the first such mandate in the nation.

Lancaster is a suburb in northeast Los Angeles county, and this new rule had no bigger advocate that Mayor Rex Parris, who is a Republican. He has long sought to make Lancaster “the solar energy capital of the world.”

Lancaster isn’t your prototypical hotbed of greenie environmentalists. Yet Mayor Parris said the rule wasn’t controversial: “It serves as a model. Here I am in an extremely conservative area, and there was almost no push-back.”

The mandate requires for any new home construction permit issued after January 1, 2014, builders must meet a minimum number of kilowatts of solar energy produced per house. This gives builders flexibility, allowing a larger solar installation on a few homes rather than a cookie-cutter solution to every home. The rate would be 1 to 1.5 kilowatts of solar per 7,000 square foot lot. Rural homes on 100,000 square feet must have at least 1.5 kilowatts. Prospective home buyers will be able to see the solar system offered in the builder’s model home.

Some home builders are not happy because they see this as something that puts them at a disadvantage with their main competitor: the resale market. But the mandate does not necessarily mean that a project cannot move forward if the builder doesn’t want to install solar panels: they can “choose to meet the solar energy generation requirement off-site by providing evidence of purchasing solar energy credits from another solar-generating development located within the City.”

And Parris says that the opposition just part of the process: “I understand the building industry is not happy with this. We will just have to take the heat.” The Mayor didn’t pursue this mandate simply to make Lancaster a solar hub. According to E&E News, he also sees climate change as a pressing problem that his fellow Republicans would be smart to acknowledge.

“The one thing we have to recognize is just how desperate this situation is with global warming,” Parris said, “and at the same time recognize that we can actually fix it. We have tremendous capability if we just have the courage to do it.” …

“The Republican Party is in a quandary because the polling shows that the voters support environmental protection. It’s the leadership that doesn’t,” Parris said. “You’d have to be a moron to discount global warming. I don’t know anybody that doesn’t recognize it’s occurring.”

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(Photo credit: AP)

By Bill Becker

Would the Keystone XL pipeline make America more secure or less? What contribution would it make, if any, to stabilizing our energy supplies or keeping us out of messes elsewhere in the world? Would it have an adverse impact on global climate disruption, or no impact at all? Informed people want to know.

Unfortunately, some of the pipeline’s supporters are fogging up the issue with deceptive numbers and claims, including vastly inflated job estimates and assurances that the pipeline would make America more secure.

The State Department and Cornell University, among others, have deflated the job claims. But will Canada’s carbon-intensive tar sands oil increase America’s security?

Not according to the people who know security best, including high-ranking retired American military leaders who are no longer gagged by their uniforms.

Among those invoking national security are 14 Republicans from the House of Representatives who wrote to President Obama to argue that his rejection of the project would raise “dire national security concerns” by prolonging our dependence on oil from countries like Venezuela.

A study commissioned by the company that wants to build the pipeline — TransCanada Corp. — makes a similar statement, concluding that the pipeline would give America greater energy independence with more oil from a neighbor who’s friendlier than Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. Jack Gerard, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, argues that building the pipeline will show the world that the United States is “serious about securing its energy future.”

They are wrong. There is only one certain way for the United States to achieve sustained national and domestic security related to energy. Rather than increasing our supplies of fossil fuels, we have to begin leaving them in the ground. It makes no difference what country they come from.

Listen to Army Brig. Gen. Steven M. Anderson, who oversaw logistics for allied troops in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. In an interview last December, he said, “all Americans should be outraged” about the national security liabilities of the Keystone project because it “keeps us hopelessly addicted to oil.” He continued:

I want to stop paying big oil and I want to start seeing a green economy in this nation. And big oil is pushing Keystone, and Keystone is essentially going to maintain the status quo for another 25 years. And during that time I can only imagine the impact it’s going to have on our environment and, indeed, our national security.

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Vast majorities of Americans want to prioritize the development of renewable energy, compared to minorities that was to prioritize fossil fuels. [Gallup]

No fewer than two in three Americans want the U.S. to put more emphasis on producing domestic energy using solar power (76%), wind (71%), and natural gas (65%). Far fewer want to emphasize the production of oil (46%) and the use of nuclear power (37%). Least favored is coal, with about one in three Americans wanting to prioritize its domestic production.

Where Americans live makes a difference in their views about which sources of domestic energy they want the U.S. to emphasize more. Those living in the South tend to be more supportive of traditional energy sources such as oil and coal than are those in other regions.

Still, for Americans in every region, including the South, solar power is the top choice, or is tied for the top spot, among the energy sources tested.

The world’s coffee growers are scrambling to adapt to global warming to ensure that billions of coffee drinkers can stay caffeinated. [U.S. News and World Report]

Ocean acidification is affecting oyster beds all over the world — as one oysterman put it: “We are looking into the future happening now.” [USA Today]

A new report from the IMF says the best way to cut carbon emissions is to properly price fossil fuels and stop $1.9 trillion in energy subsidies. [Washington Post]

Several of the Democratic Senators the Wall Street Journal dubbed the “Keystone converts” said their votes on a budget amendment should not be seen as an endorsement of the pipeline. [The Hill]

Scientists forecast another bleak year for drought, saying this pattern is “uncomfortably similar to the most severe droughts in recent U.S. history, including the 1930s Dust Bowl.” [Inside Climate News]

Scotland has chosen to proceed with an offshore wind farm despite Donald Trump’s Twitter protestations about the view at his golf course. [Energy Collective]

Scientists have developed a material from plant extract that could be used for solar panel manufacturing, which would make disposal of solar PV much easier. [CleanTechnica]

Ecuador is planning to auction off 3 million acres of their rainforest to a Chinese oil company. [Guardian]

After a Washington Republican state senator stripped language that mentioned climate change from Governor Inslee’s climate bill, he said the bill is “not really a climate change bill anymore, it’s really a cost-benefit analysis of environmental actions bill.” [Seattle Times]

Despite warmer-than-average years and broken records, the globe would actually be even warmer than it is now because much of the heat is going into the deep ocean. [Climate Central]