by Brian Kahn, via Yale Climate Media Forum

What do astrophyscist Neil Degrasse Tyson, Congressman Daryl Issa (R-Calif.), and fomer Man Vs. Wild host Bear Grylls have in common?

They’ve all let strangers ask them anything on Reddit, a social news website. Climate scientist Tony Barnston of Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) also recently tested the “Ask Me Anything” waters and found them to his liking.

The experience turned out to be enlightening not only for the Reddit community, but also for Barnston, who discovered a new opportunity to talk shop about climate in an informal setting. His experience may provide lessons for other climate scientists looking to engage the public about their work.

What exactly is Reddit?

Reddit has been referred to as “an Internet firehose” because of the massive amount of information that regularly moves through the site. Users generate all of that information, as they do on Facebook and Twitter, but there are some big differences. For one, most users are anonymous. For another, rather than following specific users — though they can do that — most users manage that firehose of information through “subreddits,” in effect communities where users post on specific topics.

Nearly 1.5 million users post on Reddit daily in one of some 144,000 subreddits. Of those 144,000 subreddits, one of the most active is “IAmA.” That’s where users with interesting stories can share their insights and also participate in an “Ask Me Anything” or AMA. An AMA is basically what it sounds like: users pose questions, usually germane to the original poster’s background, and the original poster answers them.

To further turn the firehose of information into a manageable stream, users can up-vote or down-vote questions. As a result, for users sorting the queue of questions by popularity, the cream generally rises to the top and the most off-topic questions end up at the bottom.

Testing Crowd-Sourcing in the Reddit Waters

Having a climate scientist participate in an AMA came at the initiative of Arif Noori, the assistant Web director at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, which houses IRI.

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A cyber-penny for you thoughts.

It’s a Little Late for That…

By Mike Luckovich, From the Cartoonist Group.

Estimated rainfall totals for July 25, showing the dry weather in areas under the influence of the large "heat dome" over the Central States. Click on the image for a larger version. Credit: NOAA/Climate Central.

by Andrew Freedman, via Climate Central

The massive U.S. drought, which is already driving food prices skyrocketing and prompting federal disaster declarations, has only grown worse during the past week. According to the latest edition of the U.S. Drought Monitor, released Thursday morning, between July 17 and July 24, the portion of the country affected by “extreme” to “exceptional” drought jumped from 14 percent to about 21 percent. The portion of the country affected by exceptional drought, which is the most significant drought category, rose from 1 percent last week to 2.4 percent this week.

In all, 33 of the lower 48 states were experiencing moderate drought or worse, with every state in the lower 48 experiencing at least “abnormally dry” conditions. For the fourth straight week, the U.S. set a record for the largest area of moderate drought conditions or worse since the U.S. Drought Monitor began in 2000. And climate outlooks for the next few months don’t offer much hope for sustained rainfall in the most severely affected drought regions, with above-average temperatures and below-average precipitation likely during the rest of the summer.

As it has for most of the summer so far, the weather pattern across the U.S. was dominated by a huge dome of High Pressure, more popularly referred to as a “heat dome,” that brought stifling air to the Central states. High temperatures were in the 100s Fahrenheit from the Great Plains to the Midwest. St. Louis, Mo., for example, set a record for the most days with a high temperature of 105°F or greater in a single calendar year with 11. That beat the record of 10 such days, set during the Dust Bowl year of 1934, and included a high temperature of 108°F on July 25.

While the drought is likely related to natural climate variability, including a long-lasting La Niña event that is still winding down, manmade climate change has likely made the drought worse by making the drought hotter than it otherwise would be. Extreme heat can help perpetuate drought conditions, since soils dry faster during periods of higher temperatures. This dynamic occurred during the 2011 Texas drought and heat wave, which cost farmers and ranchers in that state billions in losses.

“This drought is two-pronged,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Minitgation Center in Lincoln, Neb., said in a press release. “Not only the dryness but the heat is playing a big and important role. Even areas that have picked up rain are still suffering because of the heat.”

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romleys, via Flickr

by Noreen Nielsen and Jackie Weidman

Chevron, the second largest oil company in the United States and eighth largest in the world, announced earning $7.2 billion in profits in the second-quarter of 2012, bring their total profits for the first six months of this year to $13.7 billion. The slight drop in profits is being attributed to “weakened oil prices from the year before, though fatter refining margins cushioned the blow.”  Chevron’s production has decreased by nearly 5 percent (4.7%) compared to this time last year, from 1.88 billion barrels of oil (+ liquid natural gas) to a current rate of 1.78 billion barrels per day.

Below is a glimpse at where Chevron is spending its billions in profits:

• Chevron has already spent over $5 million on lobbying in 2012, coming in as the fourth highest spender of the oil and gas industry. Collectively, the oil and gas industry has already spent nearly $70 million on lobbying this year, with Exxon, Shell, Koch Industries, Chevron and BP topping the list.
• Chevron has already contributed nearly $700,000 to federal campaigns this year, with 89 percent of contributions going to Republicans.
• Chevron paid a 19 percent effective federal tax rate in 2011, well below the statutory corporate rate of 35 percent.
• Chevron spent 18 percent of its Q2 profits buying back stocks ($1.3 billion), which enriches the largest shareholders.
• Chevron CEO John Watson received over $17 million in compensation last year.
• Chevron is sitting on cash reserves totaling $21.2 billion, up from $15.8 billion in January.

With just BP left to report its profits on Tuesday, four of the five Big Oil companies have already made over $57 billion in the first half of 2012.

By Jessica Goad

Sometimes it takes a bit of humor to reveal the core of bad policy ideas.  This is just what happened on the Daily Show two nights ago, when former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain stopped by for an interview with Jon Oliver on energy policy.  As part of the interview, Cain called for selling off national parks:

Jon Oliver:  Gas prices are strangling Americans.

Herman Cain:  Yes.  Let’s sell some of these federal lands that contain newly discovered oil shale resources.  Let’s sell some of these parks that are nice to have but do we really need millions of acres of parks in order to say that we are environmentally friendly?

Oliver:  How much can one family picnic?

Cain:  Exactly.  And in today’s world, where we are a 24/7, 365 information overload society, how much picnicking are the kids doing if they are texting while picnicking?

Oliver:  That’s what I’m talking about right there!

Cain:  So we don’t need as many parks.

Oliver:  That’s just an ecological fact.

Watch it:

While it’s no surprise that Cain’s policy ideas are often radically far right, the truth is selling off national parks and other public lands has recently been proposed by a handful of Republicans.

In March, Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) told a town hall gathering that “we don’t need more national parks in this country, we need to actually sell off some of our national parks.”  And former Rep. Richard Pombo proposed selling national parks to mining companies in 2005, which likely contributed to his election loss.

Also, Mitt Romney told the “Reno Gazette Journal” that he doesn’t know “the purpose of” public lands, which include 397 national park units on 84 million acres.  National parks provide $31 billion in economic contributions every year and support 258,000 jobs.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress.

Powerhouse Museum, via Flickr

Apple is producing enough clean power, through solar panels and fuel cells, at its data center in North Carolina that it says it can cover 60 percent of the total energy needs of the data center. Will the tech giant be doing the same thing at its new planned $1 billion data center just outside of Reno, Nevada? While details are few at this point, it sure looks like Apple is looking to have a significant amount of its data center power needs met with clean, and grid-independent, power. [GigaOM]

The percentage of buyers willing to consider an all-electric model has deteriorated since January from a bit over 5% to about 4.5% as of last month, CNW Research says. That might not sound like much until you consider it translates into 25,000 to 40,000 potential sales a year. The other bad news for electric car fans is that buyers say they aren’t willing to pay more than $800 for an electric car compared to a conventional car. In January, it was $850, CNW says. [USA Today]

The oil and natural-gas production boom sweeping the U.S. may be good for the country’s economic health, but it hasn’t recently been much help to energy giant Exxon Mobil Corp. Lackluster second-quarter financial results from Exxon’s U.S. oil and natural-gas production cast a shadow on the record global profit the company reported Thursday. [Wall Street Journal]

A U.S. Energy Department program designed to promote use of alternative fuels for vehicles gave out about $5 million in grants to individuals with conflicts of interest, the agency’s inspector general said. [Bloomberg]

Strong summer thunderstorms that pump water high into the upper atmosphere pose a threat to the protective ozone layer over the United States, researchers said on Thursday, drawing one of the first links between climate change and ozone loss over populated areas. [New York Times]

“Greenhouse gas emissions are overwhelming the [Arctic] system,” explained the coauthor of a 2009 Science article, “Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling.” The blue line is the estimate of Arctic temperatures over the last 2,000 years, based on proxy records. The green line is the long-term cooling trend. The red line is the observed warming in recent decades.

Another day, another bad New York Times headline:

‘Unprecedented’ Greenland Surface Melt – Every 150 Years?

The New York Times then launched into a critique of:

1. NASA — for what they asserted was an “inaccurate headline” in its press release, “Satellites See Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt”;
2. Most of the media coverage — for supposedly “hyperventilating” by accepting NASA’s use of the word “unprecedented”;
3. Me — for using James Hansen’s term “reticent” for one of the NASA scientists who said, “if we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome.”

I interviewed one of the country’s top climatologists, Michael Mann, by phone, and another, Gavin Schmidt, by email. The bottom line is:

1. People who live in greenhouses definitely should not throw stones
2. Ditto.
3. Not. Mann explained to me that “it’s absolutely worrisome” what’s happening in Greenland already.

Before I elaborate on all three, let me make a point about headlines, which I discuss at length in my forthcoming book “Language Intelligence.”

Headlines are important because research shows that most newspaper readers don’t get much beyond them. And NY Times headlines sweep across the internet through twitter, facebook, news aggregators and search engines.  Probably 10 to 50 times as many people see the headlines as read any substantial portion of the story.

I would define a flawed headline as one that, standing alone, is inaccurate or misleading or, as in this case, both. Indeed, this headline is so bad I’d urge the NY Times to change it. I write virtually all of the headlines on Climate Progress, and since I’ve had several thousand posts, I’ve had to change a few headlines over the years.

There’s nothing wrong with fixing a headline — most major news outlets do it on a regular basis. The only thing that would be wrong would be to leave a wrong headline unchanged.

Let’s run through why the NASA headline is fine and why the NY Times headline is not.

The NY Times asserts that “the space agency badly blew it earlier this week with this headline,” claiming:

Unprecedented means “never done or known before.” Yet the news release beneath the headline directly undercuts that description of this melting event, saying that it is rare — the last wide surface melt was in 1889, recorded in separate ice cores at the Greenland ice-sheet summit and in the northwestern part of the vast frozen expanse — and has happened roughly every 150 years over a long stretch of centuries, as recorded deeper in the ice. (Here’s a figure from a 1994 Science paper pointing to a series of such melt layers, reflecting summer warmth. Please see the postscript below for the key reference, provided by Lora Koenig of NASA.)

And yet Dr. Jason Box, a leading Greenland expert with “19 expeditions to Greenland since 1994, more than 1 year camping on the inland ice,” used the following headline on his blog, Meltfactor.org, “Greenland ice sheet record surface melting underway.” Hard for something to be a record if it isn’t unprecedented.

The most thorough response comes from NASA’s own Gavin Schmidt in a comment posted on the NY Times story (one he confirmed with me):

The NASA results are clearly unprecedented in the satellite record (and this is obviously what was being referred to), and come at the tail end of a strong increasing trend in summer surface melt area (as seen in data from the Steffen and Tedesco groups).

However, we know Greenland was warmer than today at many intervals in the past – the Early Holocene (from isotopes and borehole temperatures), the last interglacial, the Pliocene etc. so there is no claim that this is something that has never happened in the history of the planet.

Furthermore, the ‘every 150 years’ quote is very strange. The data on Summit melt layers – (discussed in the paper you reference http://www.igsoc.org/annals.old/21/igs_annals_vol21_year1995_pg64-70.pdf ) and more easily visible here:http://www.gisp2.sr.unh.edu/DATA/alley1.html – indicates that the [1889] event was actually the only event in the last ~700 years, and there have only been 6 in the last 2000 years (4 of which were associated with the Medieval Climate Anomaly btw 750 and 1200AD). Hardly a frequently recurring ‘cycle’!

The all-Holocene average that Koenig is referring to includes the warmer Early Holocene where orbital variability was driving warmer northern high latitude summers — and which is not relevant to the expected frequency in today’s climate.

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By Peter Anderson

Landfills, the current destination for a majority of our trash, are a major source of methane.

Recent accounts that have filtered back to Climate Progress from Rio+20 suggested satisfaction with a World Bank Report concluding “Integrated waste management” (which purports to prioritize recycling over landfilling), is being implemented in the developed countries.

We have been left with the impression it is just the undeveloped world landfills still present a problem.

But, stripped of its window dressing, “integrated” is just bureaucratic speak for a blank check to the U.S. disposal industry. Sagaciously, the national firms duly consider all options, and then,\ select the one that is most profitable to them (other than in green cities that insist upon better than that). Morgan Stanley Dean Witter reports that the industry’s view is: “recycling has long been the enemy of the solid waste industry, stealing volumes otherwise headed for landfills … their most promising assets.”

Fortunately, one organization did not ignore the waste sector. In 2009, the Sierra Club undertook a year-long due diligence. Peeling back the onion layers, its technical experts found that industry’s claims – that their operators captured most of the methane generated in landfills, and that landfill-gas-to-energy (LFGTE) miraculously converted lemons into lemonade – were as bogus as the ethanol deceit. In fact, landfills were responsible for almost five times more GHG emissions than understood. Attempts to recover energy from inherently low Btu and dirty gas only made bad things worse.

Methane is so potent a greenhouse gas, even small leaks from major generators of methane are a huge concern – depending how much escapes.

Major volume of methane generated

Over the 100 years or so that landfills generate gas, methane equivalent to roughly 472 million tons of carbon dioxide will be generated from just one year of municipal trash in the U.S. That is a third more than from heating and cooling all of the homes in the country.

Most landfill gas escapes

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Using The Clean Air Act To Cut Aviation Emissions And Create An Alternative To The European Union Emissions Trading System

By Nathan Richardson, Samuel Grausz

International aviation generates more than 3 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions per year. This amount is relatively small but growing quickly, with worldwide aviation emissions projected to increase 300 percent to 700 percent by 2050. Until recently the sector faced no limits on these emissions. But starting this year, 2012, the European Union began regulating emissions from all flights to and from EU airports. Crucially, the European Union law covers both foreign and EU airlines and their emissions produced over their entire flight path, not just over EU airspace.

The new law, which is opposed by much of the aviation industry, has led to an ongoing legal and diplomatic conflict with the United States and other countries and threatens to trigger a trade war. Opponents contend that the law violates Europe’s international obligations and will substantially increase aviation costs. Supporters argue that the law is legal and will do little to harm airlines and could even benefit them in the short run. (We discuss the economic impacts in greater detail in our first Blue Skies Project report, “Is the Sky Falling for Airline Projects in the European Union?”)

Many U.S. airlines and the U.S. government have been leading opponents of the EU law. Three U.S. airlines and their trade association pursued legal claims against the EU that the European Court of Justice ultimately rejected in late 2011. The U.S. aviation industry is also calling on the federal government to challenge the EU law in international court. The U.S. government helped to convene two meetings (in Delhi, India and in Moscow) of opponents of the EU law and spearheaded a resolution in the International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, declaring the EU law illegal.

Despite this opposition, the U.S. airlines and government have so far complied with the EU law, unlike China and India, who refuse to allow their airlines to comply. In retaliation, China also recently cancelled an order of airplanes from European plane manufacturer Airbus. The U.S. stance could soon change: In October 2011 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a measure that would prevent U.S. airlines from complying with the EU law. The U.S. Senate held hearings on the measure in June. The conflict with the EU could quickly escalate into a trade war and do significant harm to the weak U.S. and European economies.

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The top two corporations on the Fortune 500 Global ranking, Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, announced their 2012 second-quarter earnings today, bringing the total profits for three Big Oil companies to $44 billion for 2012 or $250 million every day this year. Exxon profited by $16 billion this quarter, bringing its earnings for 2012 to $25 billion.

The New York Times wrote that Exxon and Shell’s earnings “disappoint,” because energy prices unexpectedly dropped for consumers this summer. Put their profits in the appropriate context, however, and Exxon and Shell still made a combined $160,000 per minute last quarter, even though the top five oil companies benefit from $2.4 billion federal tax breaks every year.

Below we look at what Exxon and Shell spends its earnings on:

ExxonMobil:

– Exxon spent 42 percent — or $10.7 billion — of its 2012 profits buying back its stock, which enriches executives and largest shareholders.

– Exxon has spent $17 million lobbying for the past 18 months, making it the top spender in the oil and gas industry. It has spent more than $52 million lobbying for the first three years of the Obama presidency, 50 percent more than in the Bush administration.

– Exxon is sitting on $18 billion in cash reserves.

– Exxon send federal candidates $1.3 million in campaign contributions so far this campaign cycle, sending 91 percent to Republicans.

– Exxon paid just 13 percent in federal taxes last year, lower than the average American family. Right after Mitt Romney, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is the top recipient of Exxon federal contributions.

– Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson received $24.7 million total compensation.

Royal Dutch Shell:

– Shell will start drilling in the Arctic this summer, but its oil spill response plan is still behind schedule. It’s off to an inauspicious start in the Arctic, recently losing control of an Arctic drilling rig.

– Shell has spent nearly $22 million for the past 18 months, making it the second-biggest spender of the oil and gas industry.

– Shell has more than $17.3 billion in cash reserves.

– Shell bought back 15 percent of its second-quarter profits, or $900 million.

– Shell CEO Peter Voser’s compensation more than doubled in 2011 to $15.3 million. His salary increased (in euros) by 113 percent.

– In its annual report, Shell noted that the number of oil spills increased from 195 in 2010 to 207 during 2011.

While these companies already benefit from billions in tax breaks, Mitt Romney has offered the industry even more. A Center for American Progress Action analysis finds that Romney’s tax plan could lower five companies’ annual tax bill by another $2.3 billion, virtually doubling what they already receive in tax breaks.

Chevron and BP are the last two of the Big Oil companies to announce profits.

The radical decline in sea ice around the Arctic is at least 70% due to human-induced climate change, according to a new study, and may even be up to 95% down to humans – rather higher than scientists had previously thought.

The loss of ice around the Arctic has adverse effects on wildlife and also opens up new northern sea routes and opportunities to drill for oil and gas under the newly accessible sea bed.

The reduction has been accelerating since the 1990s and many scientists believe the Arctic may become ice-free in the summers later this century, possibly as early as the late 2020s.

So begins the UK Guardian story on a new open access (!) study in in the journal Environmental Research Letters, “Sources of multi-decadal variability in Arctic sea ice extent.”

This study appears consistent with a recent Geophysical Research Letters paper, “Observations reveal external driver for Arctic sea-ice retreat” (see Study: ‘Virtually’ Certain Impact Of Manmade ‘Climate Change Is Observable In Arctic Sea Ice Already Today’).

Arctic ice loss has many harsh negative consequences for humanity and the local biodiversity. First, it eliminates a primary habitat for polar bears and other species. “The survival of polar bears as a species is difficult to envisage under conditions of zero summer sea-ice cover,” concludes the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, by leading scientists from the eight Arctic nations, including the United States.

Second, a 2008 study led by David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) concluded (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“):

We find that simulated western Arctic land warming trends during rapid sea ice loss are 3.5 times greater than secular 21st century climate-change trends. The accelerated warming signal penetrates up to 1500 km inland”¦.

In other words, if it continues, the recent trend in sea ice loss may triple overall Arctic warming, causing large emissions in carbon dioxide and methane from the tundra this century (for a review of recent literature, see “Nature: Climate Experts Warn Thawing Permafrost Could Cause 2.5 Times the Warming of Deforestation!“). Such accelerated warming would also presumably accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

Third, its greatest near-term impact on humans may its effect on our own weather, as recent scientific studies suggest:

• Arctic Warming Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events ‘Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves’
• Our Extreme Weather: Is Arctic Sea Ice Loss Partly to Blame?
• Must-See Video: Has Global Warming Caused A Quantum Jump In Extreme Weather?

So homo “sapiens” would be rather foolish to knowingly take steps that would lead to an ice free Arctic. Only brainless frogs would do that.

A good non-technical discussion on the new study can be found in the University of Reading’s news release, excerpted below:

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Nancy Wimmer, via Sierra Club’s Compass

In one of the poorest countries on the planet a renewable energy service company is installing [nearly] one thousand solar home systems — a day. Not in its capital or busy urban centers, but where 80 percent of the population lives — in rural Bangladesh.

The company, Grameen Shakti, literally translates as rural energy. By the end of the year it will have installed a total of one million solar systems and now has expansion plans to install five million systems by 2015. Shakti  is succeeding where business as usual has failed, and in the year of Sustainable Energy for All, it’s a success story we should all know by heart.

As in other developing countries, the rural market is incredibly tough to serve and villagers are very poor. So how is Grameen Shakti selling them ‘expensive solar’?

Mr. Majid a food vendor

Shakti solved part of the problem by tailoring a solar system to exactly what people like the traveling food vendor, Mr. Majid needed: a 25W solar system to light his grocery cart and power his cassette player. They then coupled tailored solutions with finance providing him with a loan he could afford to repay because he doubled his monthly income by working after dusk and attracting more customers with popular Bangla music. But the problems don’t stop here. Read more

By Brad Johnson, campaign manager for Forecast the Facts.

Sign the petition asking Sec. Vilsack to tell farmers the facts about climate change.

In multiple press appearances last week, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack dodged questions about what drought-stricken farmers need to know about climate change. Speaking before the White House press corps, Vilsack refused to answer questions by Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times and Bill Plante of CBS News about the connections between climate change and the current drought.

Although the USDA has a Climate Change Program Office, Vilsack refused to talk about the science because, he said, “I’m not a scientist“:

STOLBERG: Could you talk a little bit about the drought itself? Is it very unusual? Did anyone see it coming? Is it from climate change? Is there anything you can do to prepare?

VILSACK: I’m not a scientist so I’m not going to opine as to the cause of this. All we know is that right now there are a lot of farmers and ranchers who are struggling. And it’s important and necessary for them to know, rather than trying to focus on what’s causing this, what can we do to help them. And what we can do to help them is lower interest rates, expand access to grazing and haying opportunities, lower the penalties associated with that, and encourage Congress to help and work with us to provide additional assistance. And that’s where our focus is.

Watch it:

“I’m not an expert on climate change so it probably wouldn’t be appropriate for me to respond specifically to that question,” Vilsack dodged in a Thursday interview on Marketplace.

In petitions organized by Forecast the Facts and Food Democracy Now, over ten thousand Americans are calling on Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to directly address the massive implications of manmade climate change for our entire farming sector. Many of the signatories are farmers and ranchers. Rebecca E., of Manitou Springs, CO, wrote: “My family has a family farm AND a cattle operation in Kansas. We DESERVE to know the science behind what we are being dealt by the weather!” Read more

A round-up of the top climate and energy news.

The drought affecting much of the continental United States — not to mention the heat and dryness around the globe — has sent corn and wheat prices skyrocketing, scientists said today (July 25). And the current weather could be a taste of what to expect in future decades.[Live Science]

“Global warming helps make droughts hotter and drier than they would be without human influence,” said Heidi Cullen, the chief climatologist for Climate Central, a non-profit organization dedicated to communicating the science of climate change. Cullen and Stanford University food security expert David Lobell spoke to the media on Wednesday about the effect of the current drought on agriculture.

The price of corn has risen by 50 percent, to $8 a bushel, from where it was last month. And a U.S. Department of Agriculture report released today suggests that consumers can expect to see the price of meat and dairy products rise as feed for livestock becomes more expensive.

Kansas cattleman Ken Grecian sold 20 pairs of cows and calves a few weeks after drought had sucked his pastures dry and no rain was in the forecast. He sold 20 more pairs Friday. Other cattlemen throughout the middle and western part of the United States also are selling animals they can’t graze or afford to buy feed for. Beef from the animals now flooding livestock auctions will start showing up in grocery stores in November and December, temporarily driving down meat prices. But then prices are expected to rise sharply by January in the wake of dwindling supplies and smaller livestock herds. [Columbia Tribune]

Green technology is the answer to the declining fortunes of France’s auto industry, according to a new government plan to turn the sector around. Francois Hollande’s administration hopes France can carve out a space for its auto industry by driving hard into environmentally friendly cars — a sector the country’s automakers are already prominent in. The plan includes a variety of measures aimed at rewarding companies that invest in green technology and drivers who buy environmentally-friendly cars. [Washington Post]

From highways in Texas to nuclear power plants in Illinois, the concrete, steel and sophisticated engineering that undergird the nation’s infrastructure are being taxed to worrisome degrees by heat, drought and vicious storms. [New York Times]

The news that an unusually widespread melt occurred in Greenland during mid-July, when 97 percent of the Greenland ice sheet — including normally frigid high-elevation areas — experienced some degree of melting, has made international headlines, and for good reason. Such a widespread melt event has not occurred there since at least 1889, and may be yet another sign of the consequences of manmade climate change. [Climate Central]

The European Union moved to shore up the faltering price of carbon dioxide emissions on Wednesday, amid widespread concern that the current low price is failing to encourage companies to reduce their greenhouse gas output. [Guardian]

With monsoon rains late and lackluster, swaths of the India’s most fertile farmlands are parched, including areas in the south and west that grow sugarcane, corn and rice—and parts to the north that grow grain. Out of 36 meteorological subdivisions across India, 21 have received below-normal rains; rainfall for the country as a whole is 22% below average. Rain has been most plentiful on the coasts and in the hills, away from the farming heartland.[Wall Street Journal]

-Max Frankel

I testified last Friday at a House hearing on the ever-growing crisis of bark beetles, drought, and wildfires. The full C-Span video is here.

My written testimony is here. I decided to practice what I preach in my forthcoming book and use the figures of speech to make my points in the oral testimony (which you can see here, with transcript).

Congressman Ed Markey, a man who understands the figures, especially metaphors, had a great chart on the explosion of players hitting more than 40 home runs during the steroid era. He and I talk about that chart in the clip below.

I also discussed the GOP strategy of dealing with our Western wild fires and droughts and bark beetles solely through thinning, while reject climate science and climate solutions. Apparently, the GOP missed the day in school when they read the Lorax (see “The Lorax Speaks For The Trees — Get Over It Conservatives“).

Here’s the video (and a partial transcript follows):

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by Andrew deLaski, via ACEEE

A new report published last week by the anti-regulatory Mercatus Center (an advocacy outfit associated with the Koch brothers) took aim at appliance and vehicle efficiency standards. In the report, the authors argue that standards reduce consumer choice and are not justified because the environmental benefits are small and consumer benefits are non-existent.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Efficiency standards have a long record as a commonsense way to save money for consumers and provide important societal benefits at the same time. The Mercatus report, entitled Overriding Consumer Preferences with Energy Regulations, is by two economists, Ted Gayer and Kip Viscusi. It’s so full of false claims, inaccurate assumptions, and misleading statements that it’s hard to know where to start refuting them. But I thought it would be useful to rebut some of their most egregious claims.

False claim #1: “[C]urrent energy efficiency initiatives do very little to address climate change”

Taking into account all U.S. appliance standards starting with the original round signed into law by Ronald Reagan and including those updated by the Department of Energy (DOE) under two Republican and two Democratic administrations and those added by both Republican- and Democratic-controlled Congresses, U.S. standards reduced greenhouse gas emissions by about 200 million metric tons in 2010, and annual reductions will increase to about 450 million metric tons by 2025. That works out to about 3.5% of actual U.S. 2010 emissions and 8% of projected 2025 emissions. (See Figure 4 in the ACEEE report, The Efficiency Boom.) Vehicle fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards for model years 2012-2016 are projected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 307 million metric tons in 2030, lowering car and light truck emissions by 21%. Standards now under consideration for model years 2017-2025 would deliver similar reductions. Undoubtedly, more can and should be done to address climate change, but to suggest that standards “do very little” is absurd.

False claim #2:  Efficiency standards restrict consumer choice

Refrigerators are the most regulated appliance in America, having been subject to no fewer than six rounds of improved state and federal efficiency requirements over more than 30 years.  Think about it for a moment. Do you have fewer choices in refrigerators than you did 10 years ago? For those who can remember, than 30 years ago? How about for clothes washers? Or for light bulbs?

For each of these products, consumer choices have increased even as standards have eliminated energy-inefficient models from the market. Refrigerators come with a wider array of configurations (the latest rage is French doors—GE just added a second shift at its Louisville, Kentucky plant to keep up with demand), ice and water dispenser options, built-in designs, and other features than have ever existed. Clothes washer buyers have an array of energy- and water-efficient front-loading and top-loading designs covering price points from $400 and up to choose from, many with features like steam cleaning unheard of a decade ago. For light bulbs, manufacturers report that the standards spurred them to introduce a whole new generation of energy-efficient incandescent bulbs so that consumers can now choose among energy-efficient incandescent, compact fluorescent, and newly-introduced LED options. Consumers have more choice than ever.

False claim #3:  Consumer savings are non-existent

The crux of the authors’ argument is that consumers and businesses maximize their own welfare in their everyday decision making, so, by definition, any government action that results in different decisions cannot make them better off. However, DOE has identified and assessed a variety of widely-recognized market and behavioral realities that explain why efficiency standards yield benefits for consumers. One such reality is that efficiency-related cost savings is only one of many features that define a product, and that optimizing across multiple attributes is complex, time-consuming, and costly for consumers. Another reality is that there are often transaction costs that get in the way of recovering investments in more efficient products, as in the case of split incentives among landlords and tenants, and for homeowners who are considering selling their property within a product’s lifetime. Energy cost savings for an individual consumer would often not justify the time and cost to gather and assess information, and when appropriate, to compensate for the transaction costs. It is by no means irrational for consumers to apply ”bounded rationality” in making decisions, a concept that explains reasonable consumer behavior in complex environments.

Oddly, Gayer also mentions that various “market failures” could result in underinvestment in energy efficiency (i.e., the “energy efficiency gap”): Read more

By Melanie Hart and Jing Shen

The air in Beijing has been a hot topic this past year. Beijing residents are generally quite stoic about local air pollution, and willing to turn a blind eye to differences between the grey air they see outside and the “blue sky days” the local government is reporting.

Last fall, however, the situation reached a breaking point. Beijing was hit with two waves of unusually severe pollution that grounded planes at China’s national airport. But the local government, instead of acknowledging the severity, claimed the city was only experiencing “minor” pollution.

Local people could see with their own eyes that was not the case. They could also see the data. The Beijing government’s statistics were only tracking air particles down to the 10 micron (micrometer) level. That left the more dangerous, smaller particles (2.5 microns in diameter and below) out of their statistics. In this case, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing was providing its own air quality reports that included the more dangerous PM 2.5 particles. Beijing residents compared the two reports, declared the local government reports invalid, and demanded a new monitoring system.

Those demands seem to be working. The Chinese government began issuing PM 2.5 reports for Beijing in January, and now Beijing officials are planning to switch all local power plants from coal to natural gas over the next four years to meet higher air quality standards based on more stringent PM 2.5 readings. There are similar monitoring and improvement plans for other areas across China.

This recent Beijing air pollution debacle is a fascinating case because it shows how critical technical information is in the battle against industrial pollution.

Read more

The Oxygen Planet Struts Its Stuff
Not a “Perfect Storm” But the New Norm in the American West

By William deBuys via TomDispatch

Dire fire conditions, like the inferno of heat, turbulence, and fuel that recently turned 346 homes in Colorado Springs to ash, are now common in the West. A lethal combination of drought, insect plagues, windstorms, and legions of dead, dying, or stressed-out trees constitute what some pundits are calling wildfire’s “perfect storm.”

They are only half right.

This summer’s conditions may indeed be perfect for fire in the Southwest and West, but if you think of it as a “storm,” perfect or otherwise — that is, sudden, violent, and temporary — then you don’t understand what’s happening in this country or on this planet. Look at those 346 burnt homes again, or at the High Park fire that ate 87,284 acres and 259 homes west of Fort Collins, or at the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire in New Mexico that began in mid-May, consumed almost 300,000 acres, and is still smoldering, and what you have is evidence of the new normal in the American West.

For some time, climatologists have been warning us that much of the West is on the verge of downshifting to a new, perilous level of aridity. Droughts like those that shaped the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the even drier 1950s will soon be “the new climatology” of the region — not passing phenomena but terrifying business-as-usual weather. Western forests already show the effects of this transformation.

If you surf the blogosphere looking for fire information, pretty quickly you’ll notice a dust devil of “facts” blowing back and forth: big fires are four times more common than they used to be; the biggest fires are six-and-a-half times larger than the monster fires of yesteryear; and owing to a warmer climate, fires are erupting earlier in the spring and subsiding later in the fall. Nowadays, the fire season is two and a half months longer than it was 30 years ago.

All of this is hair-raisingly true. Or at least it was, until things got worse. After all, those figures don’t come from this summer’s fire disasters but from a study published in 2006 that compared then-recent fires, including the record-setting blazes of the early 2000s, with what now seem the good old days of 1970 to 1986. The data-gathering in the report, however, only ran through 2003. Since then, the western drought has intensified, and virtually every one of those recent records — for fire size, damage, and cost of suppression — has since been surpassed.

New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains are a case in point. Over the course of two weeks in 2000, the Cerro Grande fire burned 43,000 acres, destroying 400 homes in the nuclear research city of Los Alamos. At the time, to most of us living in New Mexico, Cerro Grande seemed a vision of the Apocalypse. Then, the Las Conchas fire erupted in 2011 on land adjacent to Cerro Grande’s scar and gave a master class in what the oxygen planet can do when it really struts its stuff.

The Las Conchas fire burned 43,000 acres, equaling Cerro Grande’s achievement, in its first fourteen hours. Its smoke plume rose to the stratosphere, and if the light was right, you could see within it rose-red columns of fire — combusting gases — flashing like lightning a mile or more above the land. Eventually the Las Conchas fire spread to 156,593 acres, setting a record as New Mexico’s largest fire in historic times.

It was a stunning event. Its heat was so intense that, in some of the canyons it torched, every living plant died, even to the last sprigs of grass on isolated cliff ledges. In one instance, the needles of the ponderosa pines were not consumed, but bent horizontally as though by a ferocious wind. No one really knows how those trees died, but one explanation holds that they were flash-blazed by a superheated wind, perhaps a collapsing column of fire, and that the wind, having already burned up its supply of oxygen, welded the trees by heat alone into their final posture of death.

It seemed likely that the Las Conchas record would last years, if not decades. It didn’t. This year the Whitewater Baldy fire in the southwest of the state burned an area almost twice as large.

Half Now, Half Later?

In 2007, Tom Swetnam, a fire expert and director of the laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, gave an interview to CBS’s 60 Minutes. Asked to peer into his crystal ball, he said he thought the Southwest might lose half its existing forests to fire and insects over the several decades to come. He immediately regretted the statement.  It wasn’t scientific; he couldn’t back it up; it was a shot from the hip, a WAG, a wild-ass guess.

Swetnam’s subsequent work, however, buttressed that WAG. In 2010, he and several colleagues quantified the loss of southwestern forestland from 1984 to 2008. It was a hefty 18%. They concluded that “only two more recurrences of droughts and die-offs similar or worse than the recent events” might cause total forest loss to exceed 50%. With the colossal fires of 2011 and 2012, including Arizona’s Wallow fire, which consumed more than half-a-million acres, the region is on track to reach that mark by mid-century, or sooner.

But that doesn’t mean we get to keep the other half.

Read more

Relax and have a drink, old chap; the planet has managed to look after itself so far without any fuss.

by Clive Hamilton, via The Conversation

We are familiar with the tactics, arguments, and personnel of the denial industry. Yet there is a perhaps more insidious and influential line of argument that is preventing the world from responding to the warnings of climate science.

“Luke-warmists” may be defined as those who appear to accept the body of climate science but interpret it in a way that is least threatening: emphasising uncertainties, playing down dangers, and advocating a slow and cautious response.

They are politically conservative and anxious about the threat to the social structure posed by the implications of climate science. Their “pragmatic” approach is therefore alluring to political leaders looking for a justification for policy minimalism.

Among the notable US luke-warmists are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute. They have been accused of misrepresenting data on the energy savings of investment in energy efficiency and have criticized almost every proposed measure to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions. Their Institute has allied itself with anti-climate science organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute.

Another prominent luke-warmist is Roger Pielke Jr, a scientist who was bracketed by Foreign Policy journal with well-known deniers such as Richard Lindzen and Christopher Monckton in its guide to climate sceptics.

Daniel Sarewitz has a track record of attacking climate science, accusing it of mixing politics and values with factual analysis. In the UK, Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, has branched out with a peculiar and incoherent argument about science being based on values and ideology.

The effect of luke-warmers’ contributions has been to sow doubt in the public mind about the credibility of the scientific warnings and the need to respond, just as Exxon-funded think tanks have.

Perhaps the pre-eminent luke-warmist is the Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, who gained notoriety because his claim to be an environmentalist who had seen the light made him a poster boy of the conservative media. (That he was young, gay and Scandinavian only added to his value as a defector.) Nowadays Lomborg does not reject the principal conclusions of climate science but works assiduously to water down their implications and to boost “sensible” and cautious economic solutions that would allow continued exploitation of fossil fuels. In short he favours adapting to any change in the climate rather than trying to prevent it.

Although more high-brow and nuanced than literal deniers, the lines of argument of luke-warmists are remarkably similar. In 2010 several leading luke-warmists—including Nordhaus, Schellenberger, Pielke, Sarewitz, Hulme, and Oxford University anthropologist Steve Rayner—came together at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, UK, to write a paper advocating a “new direction for climate policy”.

The Hartwell paper claims to present a “radical” alternative to the failed UN process, although why the authors felt it necessary to describe a slow, cautious and conservative approach to climate policy as “radical” is a puzzle.

The paper begins by repeating allegations that the “Climategate” emails suggest that climate scientists cannot be trusted. The authors drew this conclusion before the string of official inquiries that vindicated the science and exonerated the scientists. Others, noting the emails had been selectively released just before the Copenhagen conference, smelt a rat and reserved judgement.

The Hartwell authors seem to have fallen for the Climategate spin because they wanted it to be true. They were also taken in by the campaign in the Murdoch press to undermine the IPCC by accepting uncritically alleged errors in its reports. Errors in IPCC reports, they opined, are proof of the need to “restore trust in expert organizations” even though none of the claimed errors, manufactured by deniers in all but one case, dented the body of knowledge.

Following the deniers’ lead, the Hartwell authors emphasize the “inherent unknowability” and “systematic doubt” in the body of scientific knowledge. They express misgivings about the desirability of investments in renewable energy, referring to their “chilling history” and “serious financial and social consequences”, a theme pursued by the Breakthrough Institute and more recently taken up by Tea Party Republicans.

Climate tranquilizer

The purpose of the Hartwell report is to administer a bromide to the climate policy debate, a kind of sedative to slow the world down, dispensed at a time when those with most scientific expertise are saying the evidence calls for urgent action.

While climate research rings the alarm bells ever more loudly, the Hartwell authors argue the “best line of approach” to global warming would be to adopt the design principle for English country gardens developed by Lancelot “Capability” Brown. They express their approach to climate policy this way:

Read more

By Jessica Goad

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Department of Energy released a final plan to speed up the process for getting solar projects built on public lands.  The “Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement” for solar (PEIS) identifies which areas will and will not be open to development.

It also codifies a radically different way of developing energy projects on public lands by identifying zones that have fewer environmental conflicts and other issues that have slowed progress in the past.  In order to steer development to these zones, the plan puts incentives in place like faster permitting, lower fees, and better access to transmission lines.

The solar PEIS has been lauded by a number of different stakeholders, including public utility commissioners, environmentalists, and industry advocates.  As former Colorado governor Bill Ritter put it:

Smart planning that identifies the best places for large solar projects will help provide the tools we need to keep building renewables here and across the west—putting Americans to work and protecting conservation values.

And Nancy Pfund of DBL Investors, a venture capital firm, stated that the document “holds the promise of using appropriate federal lands to serve the public good, by providing clean energy at scale to power our economy.”

The plan identifies 17 zones that together cover about 285,000 acres across Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. But development is not restricted solely to these zones. In all, approximately 19 million acres outside of the zones across the states will be made available to solar energy development under a “variance process” that will make it more difficult to build there due to less agency attention and more environmental analyses.

Encouraging the responsible use of our public lands for renewable energy development is highly needed.  A recent report from the Center for American Progress called “Using Public Lands for the Public Good” found that 66 percent of the resources from public lands used for electricity are from coal, while only 1 percent is from wind, solar, and geothermal combined.  Currently, only one solar project is operating on public lands, although a number of others have been permitted.

One way to continue encouraging renewable energy development on public lands is for the Obama administration to establish a “clean resources standard” to set a target for renewable electricity specifically on those lands.  The Center for American Progress has called for a standard of 35 percent by 2035.

Promoting renewables on public lands is critical, especially since Congressional Republicans have focused almost exclusively on promoting oil and gas development on our taxpayer-owned lands and waters.  In fact, just yesterday the House debated a plan to drastically increase drilling offshore, even after the Obama administration held two lease sales offshore offering approximately 60 million acres for drilling.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.