Many folks asked for high-resolution and Celsius versions of the chart I posted 10 days ago:

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).

The high-resolution F version is here and the high-resolution C version is here.

As an aside, readers know I have scaled back my coverage of the denier blogs for two reasons. First, their traffic has flat-lined or declined since Climategate, and despite their best efforts, they can’t get any real traction on social media. Second, and no doubt related to the first, they are so darn monotonous. Pretty much every story is, “The latest piece of peer-reviewed science about climate science and/or the danger of unrestricted carbon pollution is false because….”

Science put 12 men on the moon and got them back, science eliminated smallpox, science put massive computing power in the palm of your hand, and science saved the ozone layer with its just-in-time warnings of the dangers of CFCs (that people heeded). Science builds a beautiful edifice on a solid foundation.

Anti-science delayed action on smoking regulations, delayed or rolled back environmental standards, and, now, is working over-time to stop or slow action on carbon reductions needed to prevent needless suffering for billions of people and countless future generations. Anti-science destroys life, by suffocating it in a “foundation” of quick-sand.

For those who read the deniers blogs, you probably know that they have come up with a truly inane way to try to undermine the 2013 Science paper, “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years” by Shaun Marcott et al that is the source of most of the data for the chart above.

They are arguing that the warming of the past century the authors found in their proxy records is in error. What makes this so head-exploding 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 we know is unequivocally is true. That is the quintessence of anti-science.

The fact is Marcott et al doesn’t have findings that are a big surprise to anyone who follows temperature reconstructions. Indeed, as the NY Times pointed out in its post on the paper, “a graph produced by Robert Rohde for his Global Warming Art Web site years ago nicely captures the general picture.” Here it is:

Look familiar? What Marcott et al added to the already imposing edifice of climate science was the most comprehensive reconstruction to date.

And, yes, that chart is by the same Robert Rohde who led the statistical analysis of the Koch-funded BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature) study that confirmed for the umpteenth time the accuracy of the instrumental record — indeed confirmed that “Global Warming Is Real” and “On The High End” and “Essentially All” Due To Carbon Pollution.

You might recall the disinformers said they would abide by whatever that skeptic-led study found. Until it confirmed climate science. Then they would have none of it. Such is the monotonous, flat-lining nature of anti-science.

By Dan Becker and James Gerstenzang via Truth-out

President Obama signaled in his State of the Union address that global warming holds a top spot on his second-term agenda. To rescue a climate under assault, the lessons of the fight that has delivered tough new auto pollution standards can guide us as we tackle the next climate challenges: slashing power plant emissions and oil use.

Those clean-car rules will cut gasoline use in half, create 500,000 jobs, and boost energy independence. The safeguards will deliver new cars in 2025 that average an impressive 54.5 mpg. Most important, compared with 2010 models, these cars will halve their emissions of carbon dioxide, the major heat-trapping pollutant.

The program represents the biggest single step of any nation against global warming. The take-away from the president’s action is unmistakable: We can cut fossil fuel emissions.

But scientists say the United States must make far deeper cuts in carbon dioxide emissions than those of the auto program to avoid the disruption of ever more severe climate change – think Superstorm Sandy, the continuing drought, rising sea levels and the inexorable spread of tropical insects and disease.

We will accomplish this next, critical step by using electricity and oil more efficiently, ultimately lowering demand until we can meet our needs with wind and solar power. As renewable energy is phased in, natural gas may help replace heavily polluting coal, but only if developed and transported cleanly and safely.

The waves of extreme weather gripping the nation align disturbingly with scientists’ warnings that this is what global warming will look like. The auto campaign provides three key lessons on how to take the next steps to fight it.

Lesson 1: Choose the right goal and stick to it.

The clean-car campaign set an ambitious goal in 1989: Cut deeply into global warming pollution by wringing oil from the economy. In 2002, President George W. Bush inched up standards for SUVs and other light trucks by 2.4 miles per gallon, to 24 mpg. He left the car standards unchanged. But science showed us that a safe climate demanded much more.

Not settling for negligible progress, environmentalists pressed for improvements that would genuinely reduce emissions. The stringent new 54.5 mpg standard shows it was worth fighting on.

Next step: Cut oil use in half over the next 20 years and slash emissions from power plants.

Greater efficiency and new technologies will be central to achieving these goals. Utilities must switch from highly polluting coal to renewable energy – wind and solar. Communities can reduce demand for electricity with efficient lighting, and cooling and heating technology. Everything that uses oil must be made more efficient – whether trucks and airplanes or furnaces and factories.

Lesson 2: Fight the fight you can win.

Read more

According to a new report from the New York Times, the ongoing drought in the Midwest is causing the American biofuels industry to begin crumbling around the edges.

The United States has mandated for several years that gasoline contain 10 percent biofuel — a requirement generally met with corn-based ethanol. It also maintained a tax credit for ethanol of 45 cents per gallon, though that was allowed to expire at the end of 2011. That led to the establishment of hundreds of ethanol plants throughout the Corn Belt, and communities which in turn heavily rely on those plants for their livelihoods.

But now it looks like the punishment Midwest corn yields took from the drought — one Cairo, Missouri farmer quoted in the piece said his corn crop last year was just 5.5 percent of his usual yield — has driven the price so high that ethanol plants are being forced to shut down:

Nearly 10 percent of the nation’s ethanol plants have stopped production over the past year, in part because the drought that has ravaged much of the nation’s crops pushed commodity prices so high that ethanol has become too expensive to produce.

The other half of this is falling demand for gasoline — a result of both the recession, and a renewed policy push for electric and hybrid vehicles and tougher fuel economy standards. Most cars can only take a fuel blend of only 10 percent ethanol, and most service stations are set up to only handle that amount, resulting what’s referred to as the “blend wall.” The Environmental Protection Agency allows for blends of up 15 percent, but cars that can take that haven’t caught on in the marketplace. Nor have “flex-fuel” vehicles, which can take up to 85 percent.

That’s left ethanol with a smaller amount of gasoline to be blended with, squeezing the industry:

Thousands of barrels of ethanol now sit in storage because there is not enough gasoline in the market to blend it with — and blends calling for a higher percentage of ethanol have yet to catch on widely in the marketplace….

[Demand for fuel] has shrunk to 8.7 million barrels a day from 9.7 million in 2007, said Larry Goldstein, an economist and a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation. And with corporate average fuel economy rules now in place to double the number of miles that the average car gets per gallon by 2025, “you know we’re on a trend,” he added.

Globally, the combined effect of U.S. and European biofuel policy has been a massive divergence of corn crops into biofuel production, which in turn drove up the price of corn and contributed to global food insecurity. Much of the carbon-reducing benefits of biofuels are diluted if not reversed entirely by the carbon output from the agricultural production required to produce them. Nor does the conversion of more grasslands and forest into biofuel cropland to take advantage of the higher prices help, as those environments actually sequester more carbon that cropland.

Cellulosic biofuels, by relying on crops that don’t double as food, could provide a solution. But whether they can be widely commercialized without requiring high levels of water and land use remains an open question.

All told, our reliance on biofuels as an answer to the challenge of climate change has been an ongoing policy and humanitarian disaster, so there’s a certain irony now that the droughts and extreme weather driven by climate change are starting to eat away at the biofuel industry itself.

Of course, the people paying the price of that irony aren’t the Beltway insiders who developed America’s biofuels policy. They’re the global poor, as well as the everyday working Americans whose communities and towns are being threatened by the loss of the plants. The plant in Cairo, Missouri had been buying 16.5 million bushels of corn per year before it shut down. And the town of Walhalla, North Dakota is bleeding families due to the closure of its plant.

The President loves fossil fuels, at least when they are extracted here — or, rather, anywhere in North America. On Friday the UK Guardian reported, “White House officials … gave strong indications the President is inclined to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.”

On Saturday, Obama gave a big wet kiss to oil and gas in his weekly radio address:

Let’s keep moving forward on an all-of-the-above energy strategy.  A strategy where we produce more oil and gas here at home, but also more biofuels and fuel-efficient vehicles; more solar power and wind power.  A strategy where we put more people to work building cars, homes and businesses that waste less energy.  We can do this.  We’re Americans.  And when we commit ourselves to something, there’s no telling how far we’ll go.

Watch it:

Now it is true that Obama was touting his proposed “Energy Security Trust to fund research into new technologies that will help us” finally “shift our cars and trucks off of oil for good.”

But I’ll bet you didn’t know this included research into vehicles that run on fossil fuels with higher life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions:

We can support scientists who are designing new engines that are more energy efficient; developing cheaper batteries that go farther on a single charge; and devising new ways to fuel our cars and trucks with new sources of clean energy – like advanced biofuels and natural gas – so drivers can one day go coast-to-coast without using a drop of oil.

Yes, in the Energy Security Trust, natural gas vehicles count as replacing oil with “new sources of clean energy.” Not.

As the National Journal reported last year:

“The president has proposed we switch trucks to natural gas, and I’m here to tell you today that every truck we switch to natural gas damages the atmosphere,” Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said at the IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates annual conference here. Krupp said the little data available about how much methane — a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide — escapes during the production of shale natural gas compels him to refuse to support a shift toward more natural-gas vehicles.

Doesn’t exactly make one feel more secure or trusting.

Related Post:

• Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere Absent A Carbon Price AND Strong Standards To Reduce Methane Leakage

In 2010, researchers at the University of South Carolina found that the ranges of blue mussels had shifted 350 kilometers north as summer ocean temperatures rose.

Along the southern portion of its range, intertidal populations of M. edulis have experienced catastrophic mortality directly associated with summer high temperatures. Over the past 50 years, a geographic contraction of the southern, equatorward range edge of M. edulis has occurred, shifting the range edge approximately 350 km north of the previous limit at Cape Hatteras, NC.

So if warming ocean temperatures are causing mussels to shift 350 km northward, no big deal, right? They can just adapt and ship themselves north.

Not if warming temperatures are not the only thing threatening sea life.

In 2011, additional research indicated that, much like other ocean organisms that depend on calcified structures for survival, ocean acidification makes mussel shells thinner.

A study released this week in Nature showed another way climate change threatens mussels: proteinaceous byssal threads. Essentially, they’re the things that mussels use to anchor themselves to rocks. Byssal threads are non-calcified structures, yet the researchers found that as carbon dioxide levels increased, the byssal threads snapped more easily. It’s a hard life for a mussel when it can’t attach itself to the ocean floor.

The mussels will have a tough time adapting their byssal threads and shells if ocean acidification levels are increasing faster than they did over the last 300 million years. Stronger storms hitting the coastline will only make things harder for mussels.

Does it matter to us? According to researchers at the University of Washington, mussels play a crucial part of the aquatic ecosystem, filtering up to a liter of water per hour:

Mussels play a surprisingly large role in marine ecosystems. They provide habitats for smaller organisms and species, as well as shelter and protection from harmful factors such as heat, desiccation, and predators. Stabilizing soft sediment of the ocean floor by attaching to roots, transferring energy by converting algae into tissue, and filtering water are other valuable mussel occupations, in addition to their status as a decent entree for fish, crabs, birds, and people.

“They are often referred to as a foundation species,” said Emily Carrington, UW professor of biology. “They provide several ecosystem services; mussels filter water very effectively, a liter of water per hour.”

Menus will be affected as well. European researchers released a report card last year saying that if ocean temperatures rise by 1 degree Celsius, mussel harvests could fall by half in the Mediterranean.

Senior Fellow Daniel J. Weiss testified before the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources on Thursday:

Chairman Lamborn, Ranking Member Holt, and members of the subcommittee, thank you very much for the opportunity to testify today on “America’s Onshore Energy Resources: Creating Jobs, Securing America, and Lowering Prices.”

Wind, solar, geothermal, efficiency, and other forms of clean energy creates jobs—three times more per dollar of investment compared to oil and gas. These sources are secure—the wind and sun aren’t subject to human disruption. Energy efficiency saves families and businesses money. And renewable fuels are free and shielded from price spikes that occur when fossil-fuel prices rise.

Domestic oil and natural gas are valuable and important commodities. But their production creates fewer jobs compared to renewables. They heavily contribute to climate change, which Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III recently said will “cripple the security environment.” They are vulnerable to sudden price volatility, like the high oil and gasoline prices of this winter. And producing more oil won’t lower gasoline prices.

It is imperative that we continue to invest in energy efficiency and renewable power for jobs, security, and family budgets.

Renewable energy projects on public lands create jobs and improve public health

Clean energy is a critical part of the economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that “In 2010, 3.1 million jobs in the United States were … green goods and services.” The Christian Science Monitor also reported that “the clean-economy sector … includes 2.7 million jobs. The oil and gas industry … has 2.4 million jobs.” Wind and solar industries in particular employ nearly 200,000 people and are expected to grow to nearly 800,000 jobs by 2030.

There are also permits for projects with more than 11,000 megawatts of renewable electricity generation for public lands, enough to power at least 3.8 million homes.These projects will support 13,500 jobs. What’s more, a CAP analysis determined that appropriate public lands in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah could support 34,399 megawatts of wind, solar, and geothermal electricity, enough to power all the homes in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. These projects would create an estimated 34,399 jobs.

Read more

Tom Friedman’s Sunday column says it is ridiculous that the sequester cuts have gone through, yet a carbon tax is not even on the table. [New York Times]

…[I]t strikes me as crazy that one of the obvious solutions to our budget, energy and environmental problems — the one that would be the least painful and have the best long-term impact (a carbon tax) — is off the table. Meanwhile, the solution that is as dumb as the day is long — a budget sequester that slashes spending indiscriminately — is on the table.

Shrinking the tax deduction for charity is on the table. Shrinking Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for the poor are on the table. But a carbon tax that could close the deficit and clean the air, weaken petro-dictators, strengthen the dollar, drive clean-tech innovation and still leave some money to lower corporate and income taxes is off the table. So the solutions that are lose-lose and divisive are on the table, while the solution that is win-win-win-win-win — and has both liberal and conservative supporters — is off the table.

The sequester is endangering scientific research at educational institutions, which could cause brain drain and force scientists to spend less time researching and more time looking for grants. [Washington Post]

The government of Alberta took out an ad in Sunday’s New York Times pushing Keystone XL as “The Choice of Reason.” [Huffington Post]

Ethanol production in the U.S. has dropped 10 percent due to falling gasoline consumption and the drought affecting much of the nation’s crops. [New York Times]

The state of Oregon is showing interest in adopting a carbon tax, and has invited British Columbia’s environment minister down to discuss BC’s system. [Oregon News 1130]

A new report says that proposed EU fuel efficiency proposals could create up to 400,000 jobs and save tens of billions of euros. [Planet Ark]

Geothermal energy is gaining support from some unlikely quarters, and many see it as a growing piece of the pie. [OilPrice.com]

In the UK, new draft curriculum guidelines eliminate most mentions of climate change for children under 14. [Guardian]

The carbon dioxide absorbed by plankton is higher than once assumed, according to a new study. [LA Times]