While I was in the hospital for surgery, Climate Progress passed a real milestone: 50,000 total followers on Twitter and Facebook.

Social media aren’t just a convenient way for you to keep up with CP or share content with your friends. They are our most rapidly growing sources of traffic, and the core reason Climate Progress had its best year yet in 2012. Overall, traffic is up 30% to 50% on most days.

Social media are particularly effective at disseminating headlines, which are the most important part of any blog post, as I discuss in my book Language Intelligence.

The traffic of WattsUpWithThat, like ever other major denial site, has been flat or declining since Copenhagen (check it out at quantcast.com). A large part of the reason is that the disinformers’ social media efforts are flops, especially compared to climate hawks, as I wrote in January.

For instance, two months ago, CP had 36,900 followers on Twitter (subscribe here). I compared that to the self-proclaimed “world’s most viewed climate website” (not!) WattsUpWithThat, with its astounding 6,130 followers.

So what happened after Watts launched a big effort to boost his social media following? WUWT is at a slightly more astounding 6,430 followers. CP is at 40,700. Yes, we added over 10 times as many. I guess WUWT is not the most viewed via social media.

I don’t think that is an accident. The Internet was made possible by scientists, with a little help from Al Gore. More importantly, science is inherently a social enterprise — whereas denial, being anti-science, is in some sense an anti-social activity whose goal is to stop society from listening to the scientific community about the ever-growing risks to society posed by unrestricted emissions of carbon pollution.

Science is an inherently fascinating voyage of discovery in which people build on each others’ work toward a better and better understanding of life and the world around us. As Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

For deniers, who are on an inherently monotonous treadmill of anti-truth, misunderstanding, and disinformation that builds only toward nihilism, the quote might be, “If I have seen nothing, it is by standing with my head in the ground” (or maybe, “… it is by standing on my own shoulders”).

According to the latest report from U.S. Drought Monitor, drought conditions expanded in Florida and West Texas last week.

While storms and heavy precipitation rolled into much of the eastern United States, several weeks of low rainfall have pushed Florida’s peninsula into “abnormally” — and in some areas “moderate” or “severe” — dry conditions. And much of Texas remains blanketed by “moderate” to “severe” drought, with significant areas sliding all the way into “extreme” and “exceptional.” The state’s climatologist has warned that if the drought persists through the summer, only the record cumulative dry spell Texas suffered in the 1950s would be worse.

The latest outlook shows drought conditions persisting in both states through the spring, and possibly expanding in California and Oregon as well. And the massive drought conditions that’ve been pummeling the midwest remain as brutal as ever, as Climate Central reported late last week:

Although this is the climatological dry season for Florida, the current level of dryness is more intense than in normal years. Since Nov. 1, 2012, Daytona Beach has received just a little more than 40 percent of its normal rainfall, making it the 7th driest period in 80 years.

The past several weeks saw the drought in Texas intensify as well, which is a troubling sign moving into spring. Texas typically receives little widespread, steady precipitation during the spring and summer months and relies on the rains from the fall and winter to carry it through the year. Most of Texas has been under drought conditions since the summer of 2011, and that prolonged aridity has left reservoir levels across the state at record low levels, leaving the state vulnerable to water shortages and restrictions if conditions do not improve. [...]

According to the latest drought outlook, also released on Thursday, drought is forecast to develop and persist in both Texas and Florida this spring, but also may expand in the West and intensify in California and southern Oregon. The normal wet season in California begins to wind down in March, and precipitation is usually scarce by May. Parts of the West have already had well below normal amounts of precipitation for the winter season, and if that trend continues through spring, the drought could intensify significantly.

These droughts have hit Texas especially hard — a bitter irony, given that the state’s politics remain a hotbed of climate change denialism. Texas Republican leaders are begrudgingly supporting a bill to prop up the state’s struggling water infrastructure by tapping the rainy day fund, and Texas is actually involved in a web of suits with Oklahoma and New Mexico over water rights and river access, at least one of which will be heading to the Supreme Court.

Texas is the fifth largest rice-producer in the United States, with the crop’s farmers concentrated in three counties, and the Lower Colorado River Authority has been forced to cut them off from irrigation water for the second year in a row, thanks to the drought’s effect on reservoirs. The loss to rice production for the coming year is estimated to be roughly 55,000 acres.

The drought has also run Texas cattle herds down to their lowest level since 1952, shutting down beef production plants in the process.

A new report from the Illinois’ Department of Employment Security has concluded that “the 2012 summer drought could become the second most expensive weather event ever, behind only Hurricane Katrina.” Lower water levels may impact tourism and recreation along the Midwest’s ricers, and is already stifling shipping traffic on the Mississippi. Corn crops are being hit hard throughout the country, with Illinois taking the brunt of it:

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The Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command has identifued climate change as the most likely threat to the Pacific region, as ThinkProgress reported:

Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, gave a striking answer when asked about the greatest threat the region faces: climate change.

Locklear told the Boston Globe, the changing climate “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.”

Among the issues that the Admiral cited as most concerning was the possibility that rising sea-levels result in the disappearance of whole countries, producing influxes of ‘climate refugees‘ in neighboring states.

It’s surprising to hear the head of PACOM talk so starkly about the threats we face from climate change, but not surprising to hear this from the military. In 2010, the Quadrennial Defense Review made it clear that climate change impacts U.S. military resources:

While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world. In addition, extreme weather events may lead to increased demands for defense support to civil authorities for humanitarian assistance or disaster response both within the United States and overseas.

Peter Sinclair made a good video on national security impacts in 2010:

Most of those interviewed in that video are retired or former military, which makes Admiral Lockclear’s comments that much more striking.

It’s good to see climate hasn’t slipped from all national security considerations. Last year the CIA closed down its Center on Climate Change and National Security which opened in 2009.

Admiral Locklear went on to describe in his interview how important it was to coordinate multilaterally with China and India to respond to climate impacts:

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I guess you don’t need anyone to tell you gas prices are back on the rise:

But then what do we need local media for?

So maybe those folks who said there’s just one person writing all the news were right….

Add your punchline in the comments.

By Jessica Goad and Tom Kenworthy via CAP

Despite the many problems that states and municipalities face today—from budget shortfalls to unemployment—seven western states have decided to embark on unconstitutional and quixotic battles attempting to force the federal government to turn millions of acres of public lands over to the states. Doing so, however, would result in the eventual exploitation for private profits of these beautiful parks, refuges, forests, and other lands because the leaders driving such efforts would prefer to see quick economic gains from resource extraction rather than prioritizing these areas’ more sustainable economic uses such as recreation.

Rather than being managed so that all Americans can enjoy them, turning our public lands over to states would result in their management on the whims of governors and state legislatures, who in the West are often quite conservative and tend to ideologically favor limited regulation and private profits. According to one state lands commissioner, these bills would be “catastrophic” to the public lands that Americans know and love.

Clashes between states and the federal government over their respective authorities have long been a regular feature of our politics, especially when it comes to issues regarding control over federal public lands in the West. More than 700 million acres of federal public lands, including national parks, national forests, and national monuments, belong to all Americans, and are tremendous economic generators—the Department of the Interior stimulated $385 billion in economic development and more than 2 million jobs in 2011 alone. At times, conflicts over ownership of the federally managed parks, forests, refuges, and other properties have grown into a regional cause in the West, as they did during the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” a political movement demanding the turnover of federal lands to the states that arose in the 1970s but eventually fizzled out in the late 1980s.

We are now seeing yet another iteration of that hardy but misguided western impulse. These state legislative efforts are nothing more than corporate-backed messaging tools that can be traced to conservative front groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, and Americans for Prosperity, as we discuss further below. The proposals run directly contrary to abundant evidence that Americans and westerners support federal management of their public lands and value the economic benefits those lands provide, especially when they are protected from mining and drilling and are used instead for recreation and other more sustainable purposes.

In the past year, legislatures in seven western states — Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho — have passed, introduced, or explored legislation demanding that the federal government turn over millions of acres of federal public lands to the states. If successful, these bills could be disastrous: Rather than being managed for the benefit and use of the American public, these lands will instead be managed in whatever way each state wants to use them—which generally means maximizing private profits through mining, drilling, and other resource extraction.

These lawmakers are waging a losing battle that amounts to little more than political grandstanding to rally their extreme conservative base and feed an antigovernment narrative. Such bills contradict the majority of public opinion in these states, as well as economic realities and constitutional precedent dating back to the mid-19th century.

ALEC and Americans for Prosperity have been fanning the fire under these efforts to “reclaim” federal public lands. ALEC is a conservative corporate front group funded by fossil-fuel interests such as the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil that develops model legislation for state legislators to introduce in their legislatures, and it has endorsed many of the bills turning public lands over to the states. As the Associated Press reported, “Lawmakers in Utah and Arizona have said the legislation is endorsed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that advocates conservative ideals, and they expect it to eventually be introduced in other Western states.”

That should come as little surprise, considering that one of ALEC’s “model bills” — those that it drafts and develops to shop to various state legislators — is the “Sagebrush Rebellion Act,” which was “designed to establish a mechanism for the transfer of ownership of” non-state lands “from the federal government to the states.”

Further evidence that ALEC is the puppet master behind these performances: Utah State Rep. Ken Ivory (R), who is leading the charge for states to “take back” public lands through his “American Lands Council,” has been presenting the idea of turning federal land over to the states at ALEC conferences such as the one in Salt Lake City last summer. Additionally, Rep. Ivory has been promoting this idea to various state legislatures — he spoke, for example, with Wyoming’s Joint Minerals, Business and Economic Development Interim Committee in October 2012.

Proponents of these bills claim that the states do not receive tax revenue from federal lands and argue that the proceeds from turning the land over to the states to then be further developed can help fund essential state services such as education. They also argue that the federal government promised to turn public lands over to the states at the establishment of their statehoods more than 100 years ago.

This issue brief provides an overview of each state’s attempt to force the turnover of public lands, and then describes why this is not only bad policy that is not in accordance with what westerners actually believe, but is also unconstitutional based on numerous Supreme Court decisions.

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By Peter Gleick, via Science Blogs

Sometime, about one year from now, the front pages of whatever decent newspapers are left will carry a headline like the one above, announcing that for the first time in human existence (or in nearly a million years, or 3 million years, or 15 million years), the global atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide — the principal gas causing climate change — will have passed 400 parts per million (ppm).

That’s a significant and shocking figure. Unfortunately, it’s only a temporary marker on the way to even higher and higher levels. Here are the most recent (March 2013) data from the Mauna Loa observatory showing the inexorable increase in atmospheric CO2 and the rapid approach to 400 ppm.

There is a range of estimates around the detailed time record of atmospheric composition, and the study of changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the billions of years of the Earth’s existence is an exciting area for research. A commonly cited figure with strong evidence comes from measurements of air trapped in ancient ice cores obtained from Antarctic ice. We now have a detailed 800,000 year record, which shows clearly that atmospheric CO2 levels never approached 400 ppm during this period.

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The last decade was the hottest on record. And the data make clear the planet is still warming, despite deniers’ disinformation to the contrary. But a new study does explain one reason surface temperatures did not rise quite as much as scientists expected in the past decade – JR.

Eyjafjallajokull volcano

CIRES News Release

In the search for clues as to why Earth did not warm as much as scientists expected between 2000 and 2010, researchers have discovered the answer is hiding in plain sight. The study, led by a scientist from NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), showed that dozens of volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide have tempered the warming.

The findings essentially shift the focus away from Asia, including India and China, two countries that are estimated to have increased their industrial sulfur dioxide emissions by about 60 percent from 2000 to 2010 through coal burning, said lead author Ryan Neely, a CIRES scientist working at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory. Small amounts of sulfur dioxide emissions from Earth’s surface eventually rise 12 to 20 miles into the stratospheric aerosol layer of the atmosphere, where chemical reactions create sulfuric acid and water particles that reflect sunlight back to space, cooling the planet.

Neely said previous observations suggest that increases in stratospheric aerosols since 2000 have counterbalanced as much as 25 percent of the warming scientists attribute to human greenhouse gas emissions. “This new study indicates it is emissions from small to moderate volcanoes that have been slowing the warming of the planet,” said Neely.

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This morning’s editorial in the New York Times says the overriding reason President Obama should reject the Keystone XL pipeline is climate change. [New York Times]

“The State Department’s latest environmental assessment of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline makes no recommendation about whether President Obama should approve it. Here is ours. He should say no, and for one overriding reason: A president who has repeatedly identified climate change as one of humanity’s most pressing dangers cannot in good conscience approve a project that — even by the State Department’s most cautious calculations — can only add to the problem.”

It goes on to say that the assessment

“… fails to consider the cumulative year-after-year effect of steadily increasing production from a deposit that is estimated to hold 170 billion barrels of oil that can be recovered with today’s technology and may hold 10 times that amount altogether. It is these long-term consequences that Mr. Obama should focus on. Mainstream scientists are virtually unanimous in stating that the one sure way to avert the worst consequences of climate change is to decarbonize the world economy by finding cleaner sources of energy while leaving more fossil fuels in the ground. Given its carbon content, tar sands oil should be among the first fossil fuels we decide to leave alone.”

India’s breakneck pace of industrialisation is causing a public health crisis with 80-120,000 premature deaths and 20m new asthma cases a year due to air pollution from coal power plants, a Greenpeace report warns. [UK Guardian]

API and the Chamber of Commerce will be coordinating rallies and running “grassroots” campaigns across the country following the draft State department review of Keystone. [The Hill]

A new study finds that climate change is causing seasons in the Arctic to be more like those in southern regions. [Ottawa Citizen]

Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, Chief of US Pacific forces, said significant upheaval related to the warming planet his biggest worry.[Boston Globe]

Wonkblog asks ‘Can the world fight climate change and energy poverty at the same time?’ and finds the two goals are in tension with each other, but can be done. [Washington Post]

Two years after the Fukishima accident, the Union of Concerned Scientists has issued a report saying nearly one in six U.S. nuclear reactors experienced safety breaches last year, due in part to weak oversight. [Wall Street Journal]

Global climate change means portions of the Antarctic have less ice, which in turn means there’s less food to eat for Adelie penguins. [NBC News]

A study looking into the effectiveness of different batteries has found that the environmental savings from switching over may be negligible until better storage technology is developed. [Wired.co.uk]

A report in Nature Geoscience looked at rainfall data between 1979 and 2010 and found that the wet seasons were already clearly getting wetter while the dry seasons became drier. [Climate Central]