The “virtuous traveler” at the Toronto Star interviewed me for an article on offsetting air travel, “The winds of (climate) change.” The piece is pretty good. Here are some highlights:

Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of Hell and High Water, is a critic of tree-planting as a carbon offset option.

“Trees take a long time to grow and they can be cut down,” he says. “I think planting and preserving trees is a good thing, but it won’t solve global warming.”

Offsets might “leave people with the impression that you can solve the climate problem by spending a few bucks,” he says. “The solution is going to take a lot of hard work for many decades.”

Still, he admits they are a step in the right direction.

“If you get well-credentialled offsets, it’s a good idea,” he says, suggesting that green-minded travellers seek out offset companies focused on clean energy projects.

The article focuses on the two offset companies that testified with me in July, Terrapass and Native Energy, both of whom seem well-credentialed. The article notes that a very high standard for offsets exists:

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So you want some do-it-yourself climate solutions. Popular Science is the place to go.

The magazine details how, for $300, you can build a vertical wind turbine (pictured below) for your home in about 3 days. It will generate 50 kilowatt-hours per month, which might be about 10% of your electricity use, depending on the size of your house and how efficient you are. You can also download plans at windstuffnow.

Or maybe you want something a tad bit easier to make, something to “keep your gadgets powered even when the grid fails you.” Follow these instructions, and for a mere three hours in work and $150 in parts, you’ll have your very own solar charger (pictured below).

But don’t worry, Denyers, it’s all just a grand coincidence that global warming theory predicts record rainstorms and flooding. The fact that the British and the Chinese link their record flooding to global warming should not stop us from burying our head in the sand mud. Still, the news from the Midwest is harsh:

Ferocious thunderstorms, heat and humidity added to the Midwest’s flooding misery Friday as thousands of people returned to damaged homes, many without electricity to run fans or pumps.

A sudden thunderstorm with 70 mph wind slammed into the Chicago area Thursday evening, tearing down huge trees and damaging buildings. In the suburbs, part of an industrial facility’s roof collapsed, injuring 40 people, and a tornado was reported as the storm moved into Michigan.

Early Friday, another band of thunderstorms was dumping more rain along a line from southern Iowa into Wisconsin.

Most of southern Iowa was under a flash flood watch through Friday evening as as much as 8 inches of rain fell, the National Weather Service said.

Apr¨s nous le deluge.

A very good article in the Washington Post lays out the problem we face.

“Global warming will intensify drought, and it will intensify floods,” explains Stephen Schneider, editor of the journal Climatic Change and a lead author for the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Why?

“As the air gets warmer, there will be more water in the atmosphere. That’s settled science…. You are going to intensify the hydrologic cycle. Where the atmosphere is configured to have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long, dry periods. Where the atmosphere is configured to be wet, you will get more rain, more gully washers.”

The droughts will be especially bad. How bad?

Richard Seager, a senior researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, looked at 19 computer models of the future under current global warming trends. He found remarkable consistency: Sometime before 2050, the models predicted, the Southwest will be gripped in a dry spell akin to the Great Dust Bowl drought that lasted through most of the 1930s.

Droughts and water shortages already been driving conflict around the globe:

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Six Western states and parts of Canada join to cut greenhouse gases – San Francisco Chronicle. Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington along with Canadian provinces Manitoba and British Columbia “have set a goal to reduce the region’s greenhouse gas emissions about 25 percent by 2020.”

Priority changes on green policies – LA Times. “Reflecting a shift in priorities under the Democratic majority, Congress is moving to spend as much as $6.7 billion next fiscal year to combat global warming, an increase of nearly one-third from the current year.” Still, I agree with Frank O’Donnell of Clean Air Watch: “Those spending measures are no substitute for better fuel-economy standards and tough caps on greenhouse gas emissions.”

Water Levels in 3 Great Lakes Dip Far Below Normal – New York Times. The reason for the dip is not perfectly understood, but it appears to be a combination of factors including climate change.

U.S. green project enters Canadian home market – canada.com. All about the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for Homes program, an important marketplace innovation.

Heat Spells Trouble for France’s Nuclear Reactors - NPR (Audio). Nuclear power is supposed to fight global warming, but, ironically, “many French reactors have had trouble operating during hot spells.” This story explains why.

Capturing CO2 and injecting it into a well to squeeze more oil out of the ground is not real carbon sequestration. Why? When the recovered oil is burned, it releases at least as much CO2 as was stored (and possibly much more). Therefore, CO2 used for such enhanced oil recovery (EOR) does not reduce net carbon emissions and should not be sold to the public as a carbon offset.

Yet a company, Blue Source, LLC, proposes to do just that, to capture the CO2 from a fertilizer plant, pipe it to an oil field, and inject it into wells for EOR :

The company hopes to profit from the project by earning credits for the carbon reductions in voluntary carbon markets and by selling carbon dioxide to energy companies.

The deal will cut CO2 from the plant by about 650,000 tonnes per year by permanently storing the emissions in the oil fields, he said. The U.S. Department of Energy says that capturing CO2 from power plants for enhanced oil recovery could greatly boost U.S. oil reserves while permanently keeping CO2 from reaching the atmosphere.

Uhh, no. To repeat, if the captured CO2 is used to extract oil that releases CO2 when it is burned, then how is that offsetting anything?

The key ratio is CO2 injected vs. CO2 released from recovered oil. Fortunately, BP and UCLA did that life-cycle analysis (subs. req’d) in 2001 and concluded, “the EOR activity is almost carbon-neutral when comparing net storage potential and gasoline emissions from the additional oil extracted.” And that may be optimistic. The study notes:

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Climate Progress is happy to introduce Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) as the latest guest blogger. Jay has long been a leader on energy and climate issues (his full bio is here). In March, he was appointed to the 15-member Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. He has a forthcoming book on climate solutions with Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Bracken Hendricks — Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy. I’ve known Jay since we appeared on a panel together in January 2007. He is uniquely qualified to provide an insider’s view on climate issues. Welcome, Jay!

We lost a battle but won a war against the Bush Administration’s refusal to address global warming on Tuesday. The battle means little. The war could mean a lot.

As a congressman from Seattle, I joined Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and other plaintiffs in supporting a lawsuit to force the Administration to issue the statutorily required national scientific assessment of global warming. Tuesday, Federal District court Judge Sandra Brown Armstrong ordered the Administration to comply with its legal duty to provide the American people a full and fair assessment of the science underpinning this national threat, as the law requires.

For an administration bound and determined to ignore the clear science of global warming, this is a traumatic event. For America, it is a long overdue win for the environment — and our grandchildren. In its ruling, the court held that Senator Kerry and I would not become parties to the case because we have access to a congressional remedy unlike the other plaintiffs. Since we obtained the result we desired, we can consider it a total victory nonetheless.

This does not mean that we are out of the woods yet, of course. The President’s outright refusal to accept a cap and trade system for carbon dioxide is a major hurdle to an effective global warming strategy. But this ruling means President Bush will not be able to argue that there are no costs to America for his policy of rank indifference to this major threat. In short, he may still be able to run, but he cannot hide.

It is about time the Administration is required to follow science rather than their political allies. This legal ruling means that we are one step forward in being able to require them to do just that.

I’ve argued that scientists are not overestimating climate change and in fact are underestimating it because they are omitting crucial amplifying feedbacks from their models. In this post, I’ll show how these omissions suggest the climate has a “point of no return” that severely constrains the safe level of human-generated emissions.

A major 2005 study (subs. req’d) led by NCAR climate researcher David Lawrence, found that virtually the entire top 11 feet of permafrost around the globe could disappear by the end of this century. Using the first “fully interactive climate system model” applied to study permafrost, the researchers found that if we somehow stabilize CO2 concentrations in the air at 550 ppm, permafrost would plummet from over 4 million square miles today to 1.5 million. If concentrations hit 690 ppm, permafrost would shrink to just 800,000 square miles.

While these projections were done with one of the world’s most sophisticated climate system models, the calculations do not include the feedback effect of the released carbon from the permafrost, which has locked in it more carbon than the atmosphere (and much of that is in the form of methane, a potent greenhouse gas).

That is to say, the CO2 concentrations in the model rise only as a result of direct emissions from humans, with no extra emissions counted from soils or tundra. Thus they are conservative numbers–or overestimates–of how much CO2 concentrations have to rise to trigger irreversible melting.

How do carbon cycle feedbacks constrain future safe levels of CO2 emissions? There’s really only one major climate model that can answer that crucial question. Read more

The Center for American Progress is having a panel Monday at 1 pm at its DC headquarters in conjunction with the release of the report, Forecast: Storm Warnings.

Featured Panelists:
Dr. Peter Webster, Professor in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Tech
Mayor Richard T. Crotty (R), Orange County, Florida
John B. Copenhaver, President and CEO, DRI International
Jane Bullock, Former Chief of Staff, FEMA Director James Lee Witt

Come if you can: I’ve heard Webster a number of times, and he’s a great speaker — plus he is sure to talk about his important new paper, “Heightened tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic: natural variability or climate trend?”

I’ll post the report and the video when they’re available.

NPR’s John Dimsdale interviewed me Monday on Day to Day about “The Cost of Coal.”

Mike Tidwell interviewed me Tuesday on Earthbeat for a climate news round up. I’m at the 40-minute mark, but you might like the earlier discussion on “the vast divide between National Geographic Magazine‘s editorial stance and its advertising.” Don’t miss the part where Mike says Hell and High Water is the best book on climate.

The previous post debunked an article that argued scientists have seriously overestimated climate change. Now let’s look at the evidence they are seriously underestimating climate change.

To do that, the fatal flaw with the IPCC’s over-reliance on the poorly named “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (ECS) must be understood. Recall that the ECS is the “equilibrium change in global mean surface temperature following a doubling of the atmospheric (equivalent) CO2 concentration,” which the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report concluded was 2 to 4.5°C.

You might think that the ECS tells you how much the planet’s temperature will rise if humans emit enough CO2 to double its atmospheric concentration. But it doesn’t. It is just a theoretical construct. It tells you only how much the planet’s temperature will rise if CO2 concentrations double and then are magically frozen.

That’s because the ECS omits key carbon cycle feedbacks that a rise in the planet’s temperature will likely trigger. For instance, a doubling of CO2 to 550 ppm will lead to the melting of the permafrost and the release of huge amounts of carbon currently frozen it it. These amplifying (or positive) feedbacks are the main subject of this post.

The ECS includes only “fast feedbacks” which NASA’s James Hansen defines as follows:

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Yes, Dole announced last week a plan to “produce and market ‘carbon neutral’ bananas and pineapples.” Their effort is “aimed at establishing a carbon neutral product supply chain for bananas and pineapples, from their production in Costa Rica to the markets in North America and Europe.”

The deal is with the National Forestry Financing Fund and Costa Rica’s Ministry of Environment and Energy, so I guess we are talking tree offsets here. Well, Costa Rica is probably better than most countries at delivering real, additional benefits — and the trees will be tropical. The P.R. even has a quote from the Minister, noting that the country aims “to become the first carbon neutral country in the world by 2021.”

I guess Dole really wants to sell you bananas that are really green.

Having grown up far from coasts, hurricanes paralyze me.

Almost as if they have the intention to destroy, they conjure force, take aim and begin a rampage. We watch satellite images of one storm unleash a trail of multiple, major disasters (if it falls on land) with a power it sustains for days. (I’m used to tornadoes — they last hours.)

Such is the case with Hurricane Dean right now, as news coverage briefs us on where the hurricane has been — the Caribbean, the Yucatan Peninsula — and where it’s going — the Mexican Gulf.

Next week, the Center for American Progress is coming out with a report entitled Forecast: Storm Warning. There will be an event on Monday [details to come] to mark its release with experts from the field, including Peter J. Webster from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Mayor Richard T. Crotty of Orange County, FL. While the report’s focus is on how to prepare our communities for hurricanes, it briefly reviews the latest science.

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A study by Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) has the denyers and doubters delighted.

“Overturning the ‘Consensus’ in One Fell Swoop” gloats Planet Gore, which says the study “concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes” and so we “should expect about a 0.6^oC additional increase in temperature between now and 2070″ [0.1^oC per decade] if CO2 concentrations hit 550 parts per million, double preindustrial levels.

Is this possible? Aren’t we already warming up 0.2^oC per decade — a rate that is expected to rise? Has future global warming been wildly overestimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) consensus?

Or, as I argue in my book, has future global warming been underestimated by the IPCC. This is perhaps the central issue in the climate change debate, so this will be a long post. To cut to the chase, it is not possible for one study to overturn the consensus, and in any case this inadequately researched, overly simplistic, and mistake-riddled study certainly doesn’t.

Climate sensitivity expert James Annan points out key mistakes that rip the guts out of Schwartz’s analysis. That is strike one. Now I’ll offer my 2 cents worth.

I have always considered it ironic that the Denyers — who don’t believe the consensus, which is based on hundreds of studies that they obviously reject out of hand — are so enamored of the very few studies that suggest the consensus overestimates climate change (while ignoring the great many studies that suggest an underestimate). Even more ironic, let me quote from the end of the Schwartz paper, which is painfully aware how dubious its main conclusion is:

Finally, as the present analysis rests on a simple single-compartment energy balance model, the question must inevitably arise whether the rather obdurate climate system might be amenable to determination of its key properties through empirical analysis based on such a simple model. In response to that question it might have to be said that it remains to be seen. In this context it is hoped that the present study might stimulate further work along these lines with more complex models…. Ultimately of course the climate models are essential to provide much more refined projections of climate change than would be available from the global mean quantities that result from an analysis of the present sort.

Yes, the Denyers routinely attack the IPCC consensus for using elaborate computer models that they claim are still far too simplistic to model the real climate — claiming those models omit key variables and negative feedbacks that would reduce future climate change. But now they would have us embrace a self-acknowledged “simple model” — one far more simplistic than the climate models the Denyers repeatedly denounce as too simplistic. That’s chutzpah.

There is both a simple reason and a more complicated reason why I firmly believe that IPCC scientists are underestimating future climate change (and hence that Schwartz is very wrong). First, the simple reason — Scientists have underestimated current climate change:

• “The recent [Arctic] sea-ice retreat is larger than in any of the (19) IPCC [climate] models” — and that was a Norwegian expert in 2005. The retreat has accelerated in the past two years.
• The ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.” That was Penn State climatologist Richard Alley in March 2006. In 2001, the IPCC thought that neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.
• The temperature rise from 1990 to 2005 — 0.33°C — was “near the top end of the range” of IPCC climate model predictions.
• Sea-level rise from 1993 and 2006 — 3.3 millimetres per year as measured by satellites — was higher than the IPCC climate models predicted.
• The subtropics are expanding faster than the models project.
• Since 2000, carbon dioxide emissions have grown faster than any IPCC model had projected.

So what are the chances that the IPCC has overestimated the climate sensitivity by a factor of three as Schwartz’s overly simple model would have us believe — that the rate of warming in the next several decades will be under half that of the rate of the past 16 years? Zilch. Does Schwartz mention any of these data points? Not one. Shame on the JGR editors for letting this go by. Strike two.

Now on to the more complicated reason I am convinced scientists are underestimating future climate change.

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I am on a panel this Monday the 27th moderated by ABC’s Stossel. The Independent Women’s Forum Policy Summit, “Energy Today, Energy Tomorrow” takes place at 9:30 AM at GWU’s Jack Morton Auditorium, 805 21st Street, N.W. in DC.

It looks like I’ll be sort of debating Sandy Liddy Bourne of the Heartland Institute, which has received nearly $800,00 from ExxonMobil since 1998. You are all no doubt as shocked as I am that G. Gordon Liddy’s daughter is a Denyer.

Come if you can. They are also going to try to get this on C-SPAN, and I think there will be at least one live blogger.

A decade ago I was on 20/20 interviewed by Stossel. I’ll be amazed if he remembers. I can’t find any reference to it online, which is just as well — it didn’t go well. I’ll blog more on this when it is over.

News Flash (as it were):

Hundreds of people posed naked on Switzerland’s shrinking Aletsch glacier today for US photographer Spencer Tunick as part of a Greenpeace campaign to raise awareness of global warming.

Now that is all the nudes that’s fit to print.

On a more serious note: “Switzerland has about 1800 glaciers and almost all of them are losing ground.” Everyone needs to do their part to raise awareness, even if it is a visibly small part.

Climate Progress is happy to introduce Bill Becker as the first of several new guest bloggers. Bill is Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, an initiative to help the next President of the United States take decisive action on global warming within his or her first 100 days in office. You can read his full bio here. Bill is not only one of the most knowledgeable people on sustainable development, he helped launch one of the first green communities — Soldiers Grove, WI. And he’s also a former newspaper editor — making him uniquely qualified to blog on energy and climate issues. Welcome, Bill!

My PC has been a blog-free zone. Until now.

Joe Romm asked me to become a contributor to Climate Progress and, after some hesitation, I agreed. I hesitated because my time, energy, and mental capacity are dominated these days by an effort to create a climate action plan for the next President of the United States.

But Joe is one of my former bosses at the U.S. Department of Energy, where he amazed us all by becoming one of the all-time champions of the Washington Post‘s weekly humor contest. He did that in his spare time, when he wasn’t creating one of the U.S.’s first comprehensive plans to combat global warming. I admire Joe a lot — his writing and his intellect and his mix of passion and science — so I agreed.

I expect to take advantage of Climate Progress to obtain your help with the presidential plan, sometimes by inciting a blog-riot, other times by gentler means of soliciting your reactions. I will start by telling you the assumptions upon which we’re basing our approach to climate action.

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Popular Science has published a terrific article, “Konrad Steffen: The Global Warming Prophet,” about one of the world’s leading climatologists. Steffen has spent “18 consecutive springs on the Greenland ice cap, personally building and installing the weather stations that help the world’s scientists understand what’s happening up there.” The article notes:

Water from the melting ice sheet is gushing into the North Atlantic much faster than scientists had previously thought possible. The upshot of the news out of Swiss Camp is that sea levels may rise much higher and much sooner than even the most pessimistic climate forecasts predicted.

What is going on in Greenland? Steffen explains what he and NASA glaciologist Jay Zwally figured out from their study of fissures in the ice sheet (called moulins — see figures above and below):

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I have argued previously that the landmark Stern Report got the big picture right — strong action now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is economically justified, since the cost of action (i.e. mitigation), perhaps 1% of GDP, is far less than the cost of inaction (i.e. climate change impacts), which Stern estimates as at least 5% of GDP and possibly as high as 20%.

In particular, I (and others) argued Stern’s much-criticized choice of a low discount rate, 1.4%, was in fact justified — see here and here for a good discussion.

Now perhaps the most mainstream economic policy think tank in the country — Resources for the Future (RFF) — has written a major report, “An Even Sterner Review,” with two key conclusions. First, “we find no strong objections to the discounting assumptions adopted in the Stern Review.” Second,

[T]he conclusions reached in the review can be justified on other grounds than by using a low discount rate. We argue that nonmarket damages from climate change are probably underestimated and that future scarcities that will be induced by the changing composition of the economy and climate change should lead to rising relative prices for certain goods and services, raising the estimated damage of climate change and counteracting the effect of discounting.

What does RFF mean by “rising relative prices”?

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Unstoppable government agents with a talent for killing all seem to have the initials J.B. But do they care about global warming? Jack does.

Fox TV has announced that the seventh season of 24, which starts in 2008, “will incorporate environmentally-friendly messages into episodes.” I’m thinking Bauer will torture the bad guys with electricity from wind power or run over someone in a Prius.

Also “executives have taken several steps toward reducing carbon emissions on the set with the goal of a fully ‘carbon-neutral’ season finale.” Yes, I suppose that means Fox will be buying offsets (hopefully not trees). What other steps will they be taking?

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