Al Gore’s new book, The Future, isn’t mostly about climate change. In fact, global warming is only one of the “Six drivers of global change.”

Others drivers include globalization, the internet (surprise, surprise) and “the reinvention of life and death” from the genomic, biotech, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions.

Any Gore book is worth reading — Our Choice is one of the best books on climate solutions — and The Future is no exception. Let me cut to the chase on climate and energy.

In his discussion of why the climate bill failed after passing the U.S. House, Gore takes a different view of one recent academic essay and slams the White House:

… the obsolete and dysfunctional rules of the U.S. Senate empowered a minority to kill it in that chamber. Senators in both parties said privately  that passage of the climate plan might have been within reach but it seemed to them that President Obama was not prepared to make the all-out effort that would have been necessary to build a coalition in support of the plan. Earlier, he had chosen to make healthcare reform his number one priority, and the badly broken U.S. political system produced a legislative gridlock on his health plan that lasted until the midterm campaign season began, leaving no time for even Senate discussion of the climate change issue.

By then, Obama and his political team in the White House had apparently long since made a sober  assessment of the political risks involved in states where the power of the fossil fuel industries would punish him for committing himself to the passage of this plan.  So, instead, when his opponents in Congress took up the cry “drill, baby, drill,” the president proposed expansion of oil drilling–even in the Arctic Ocean–and opened up more public land to coal mining. For these and other reasons, the positive impacts of the energy and climate proposals with which he began his presidency were nearly overwhelmed by his sharp turn toward a policy that he described as an “all of the above” approach–one that has contributed to the increased reliance on carbon-rich fossil fuels.

Precisely.

Gore has a long discussion on one new source of fossil fuels in particular, natural gas from fracking. The whole discussion is thoughtful and well worth reading.

Here is what the Nobel-Prize winning former VP concludes:

Years ago I was among those who recommended the greater use of conventional natural gas as a bridge fuel to phase out coal use more quickly while solar and wind technologies were produced at sufficient scale to bring their price down even more. However, it is increasingly clear that the net effect of shale gas on the environment may ultimately be inconsistent with its use as a bridge fuel. Global society as a whole would find it difficult to make the enormous investments necessary to switch from coal to gas, and then turn right around and make equally significant investments to substitute were nubile technologies for gas. It strains credulity. In other words, it may be a bridge to nowhere.

Again, precisely.

So many recent futurist books ignore or downplay the polar bear in the room, which isn’t a mistake Gore makes. I highly recommend The Future as one of the most comprehensive and readable books on the subject written in recent years.

Related Post:

• Bridge To Nowhere? NOAA Confirms High Methane Leakage Rate Up To 9% From Gas Fields, Gutting Climate Benefit

By Dr. Mark Boslough, via HuffPost

Benjamin Franklin, the first American Ambassador to France, was both a statesman and a scientist. On September 3, 1783 he co-signed the Treaty of Paris at the Hotel d’York, in which the British acknowledged the American Colonies to be free and independent States, ending the American Revolution.

Franklin’s political eye was focused, but his scientific eye was attentive too. All was not well in the French countryside, where one of the worst environmental calamities of modern history was just beginning to unfold. That summer was the hottest on record, and a mysterious “dry fog” had settled across Europe. The combination of heat and air pollution was too much for the weak and elderly. Mortality spiked among farm workers and laborers across the continent.

According to British naturalist Gilbert White, “the sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon.” When rising and setting, it was “particularly lurid and blood-coloured.” The heat was so intense that meat went bad the day after it was butchered, and swarms of flies made life miserable.

The seeds of climate science in America were very possibly being planted as Franklin observed the changes 200+ years ago. Conditions went from bad to worse as Europe and North America were plunged into a deep freeze that winter. In its first peacetime year as an independent nation, the United States had to contend with more extreme weather than the colonies had ever experienced. New England suffered a record below-zero weather streak. The Mississippi River froze as far south as New Orleans. Ice appeared in the Gulf of Mexico.

Other parts of the world were also in trouble. Monsoons in Africa and India were extremely weak, and rain barely moistened the African Sahel. Agriculture collapsed in the Nile Valley leading to mass starvation. Volney, the French historian, wrote, “Soon after the end of November [1784], the famine carried off, at Cairo, nearly as many as the plague; the streets, which before were full of beggars, now afforded not a single one: all had perished or deserted the city.” Within a year, Egypt had lost a sixth of its population.

Franklin watched this extreme weather with great interest and concern. In December, 1784, he presented his ideas in a paper entitled “Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures.” He described the dry fog, even though he was uncertain of its source, “During several of the summer months of the year 1783, when the effect of the sun’s rays to heat the earth in these northern regions should have been greatest, there existed a constant fog over all Europe, and great part of North America.” He observed the effect the fog had on the sun’s rays: “They were indeed rendered so faint in passing through it, that when collected in the focus of a burning glass, they would scarce kindle brown paper. Of course, their summer effect in heating the earth was exceedingly diminished.”

He drew some important conclusions: “Hence the surface was early frozen. Hence the first snows remained on it unmelted, and received continual additions. Hence the air was more chilled, and the winds more severely cold. Hence perhaps the winter of 1783-4 was more severe, than any that had happened for many years.” Franklin was arguably the first American scientist to recognize the sensitivity of climate to changes in radiative forcing, and to propose that the Earth can respond in a way that reinforces the change (now known as ice-albedo feedback).

Franklin speculated about the source of the fog.

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Many weather reporting outlets are still hesitant to discuss connections between intensifying extreme weather events and global warming. But one 24-hour station is not. The “Dirty Weather Report,” the latest project from Al Gore and the team at the Climate Reality Project, will air tonight and take viewers around the world on a 24-hour trip to examine how humans are warming the planet and “dirtying” the weather.

The day-long event comes as climate change emerges as a more serious political topic in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.

The streaming live program of “24 Hours of Reality: The Dirty Weather Report” airs at 8pm EST tonight through 8pm EST Thursday. You can watch it here.

George Monbiot has a new piece in the Guardian titled “The day the world went mad,” which looks at the underwhelming reaction in the press and political sphere to the August 27th announcement of record Arctic ice melt.

As Arctic sea ice faces a death spiral due to human-caused global warming, Monbiot points to the complete lack of attention: Instead of focusing on the Arctic, a British parliament committee on climate change debated building new runways for Heathrow Airport; meanwhile in the U.S., the Republicans were holding a convention celebrating fossil fuels and the party’s active denial of climate change:

“I wonder whether we could be seeing a form of reactive denial at work: people proving to themselves that there cannot be a problem if they can continue to discuss the issues in these terms….When your children ask how and why it all went so wrong, point them to yesterday’s date, and explain that the world is not led by rational people.”

Well, not everyone was ignoring the insanity of the situation. Speaking on Current TV’s coverage of the National Republican Convention, Al Gore had some strong words for the press:

“The whole North polar ice cap is disappearing in  front of our eyes. Twelve massive million dollar plus climate related disasters…and they keep coming…Just as [the media] did not report the truth about the proposal to invade Iraq, we are not getting the accurate impression about this challenge that we have to face. To stop putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution up into the atmosphere every single day… They aren’t only doing nothing about it, there’s hardly any discussion about it. It drives me crazy.”

Watch it:

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Even as extreme weather worsens and the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change gets more alarming, it was hard to find any television outlets touching the subject this Earth Day.

However, there was one show that addressed climate change with a sense of urgency.

While CNN ran stories about “acts of green” and Fox News hilariously lamented that the earth “is not friendly to human beings,” former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm devoted a large portion of her show, The War Room, to the most pressing environmental story in history.

Granholm featured three segments on climate and energy issues, bringing in Al Gore, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Jeffrey Sachs to talk about the consequences of inaction. She also gave her own forceful monologue urging people to put politicians in office that “will allow your children to have a future on this planet.” As Granholm put it, “Your thinking small does not serve the world”:

“Across the political spectrum Democrats, Independents and Republicans now see that the climate is changing….

The climate is changing. But excuses for inaction have not. And nature doesn’t care about excuses.”

Watch it:

Al Gore appeared on the show, saying that he believes the small group of vocal climate deniers will eventually lose their voice: “We have got to win this. And we will win this. Because the reality is what it is.”

Watch it:

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Zee Evans, National Science Foundation

by Al Gore, reposted from the Climate Reality Project

After crossing the legendary Drake Passage, we came in sight of the Antarctic continent. It is a majestic, otherworldly place. The Antarctic Peninsula, which juts northward toward South America, is lined with ice-covered mountains and surrounded by abundant wildlife in the sea. But even on this continent that looks and feels pristine, a troubling process is underway because of global warming.

The ice on land is melting at a faster rate and large ice sheets are moving toward the ocean more rapidly. As a result, sea levels are rising worldwide. Most of the world’s ice is contained in Antarctica – more than 90 percent. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which lies south of the Peninsula, contains enough water to raise sea levels worldwide by more than 20 feet. Part of the ice sheet, the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf, is among the many in Antarctica that are shrinking at an accelerating rate. This has direct consequences for low-lying coastal and island communities all over the world – and for their inland neighbors.

In analyzing the relationship between melting ice and sea level rise, it is important to distinguish between two kinds of ice: the ice on land and the ice floating on top of the sea. When floating ice melts, sea level is not affected, because its weight has already pushed the sea level upward. But the melting of glaciers and ice sheets resting on land does increase sea level rise. So far, the melting of small mountain glaciers and portions of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland has been the main contributor to sea level rise from the loss of ice. (As the oceans warm up, their volume naturally expands, and this too has been a contributor to a small portion of the sea level rise that has occurred in the age of global warming).

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Former Vice President Al Gore is heading to Antarctica to highlight the extraordinary changes greenhouse pollution is causing even in our most remote continent. When Gore visited Antarctica in 1988, scientists were predicting it could warm more rapidly than the global average. “This prediction has proven true,” Gore writes. “Today, the West Antarctic Peninsula is warming about four times faster than the global average.”

Although the vast ice sheets of the frozen continent are remote from almost all of human civilization, their warming has drastic implications for billions of people. With the melting of those almost inconceivable reserves of ice, the planet’s sea levels are rising. Scientists now expect 21st-century sea level rise — on the scale of three to six feet or more — will be dominated by the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps.

Gore is leading an expedition of “civic and business leaders, activists and concerned citizens, as well as “many of the world’s leading climate scientists” to see how man’s negligence is transforming the forbidding continent:

To better understand the changes taking place near the South Pole and the impacts those changes will have around the world, I will be returning to Antarctica this month with The Climate Reality Project. A large number of civic and business leaders, activists and concerned citizens from many countries on this voyage will be joined by many of the world’s leading climate scientists and Antarctica experts to see firsthand and in real time how the climate crisis is unfolding in Antarctica.

The Climate Reality Project is asking everyone to host their own expeditions wherever they live. As the new plant hardiness zone maps from the USDA remind us, we don’t even need to leave our backyards to see the effects of the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon pollution we have pumped into the atmosphere with the profligate burning of fossil fuels.

Nor do we have to leave our neighborhoods to see the signs of positive change — community gardens, electric cars, solar panels, wind turbine manufacturers, and more in the growing mass movement to build a sustainable, resilient civilization on our changing planet.

Polarization on Climate Jumped in 2009 — Long After Gore’s 2006 Movie

Percent of Americans Who Believe the Effects of Global Warming Have Already Begun to Happen, by Political Ideology, from McCright and Dunlap

Conservative columnist Michael Gerson broke sharply from right-wing orthodoxy today when he ended an op-ed on climate change with this bombshell:

The extraction and burning of dead plant matter is not a moral good — or the proper cause for a culture war.

As evidenced by the presidential debates and recent Congressional hearings and speeches, it is in fact an article of faith for much of the national GOP that extracting and burning fossil fuels is a moral good, a matter of national security and economic security.  Drill, Baby, Drill!

Imagine Gerson telling the attendees of the Republican National Convention that what they are chanting for isn’t a moral good.  He’d be drummed out of the movement.

And in his op-ed, “Climate and the culture war,” Gerson gets that the planet is warming rapidly, creating many dangerous impacts, and the best explanation is human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Unfortunately, accompanying this bombshell is a dud, Gerson’s tired — and erroneous — blame-the-messenger strategy for the culture war:

No cause has been more effectively sabotaged by its political advocates. Climate scientists, in my experience, are generally careful, well-intentioned and confused to be at the center of a global controversy. Investigations of hacked e-mails have revealed evidence of frustration — and perhaps of fudging but not of fraud. It is their political defenders who often discredit their work through hyperbole and arrogance. As environmental writer Michael Shellenberger points out, “The rise in the number of Americans telling pollsters that news of global warming was being exaggerated began virtually concurrently with the release of Al Gore’s movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’”

Obviously, any “fact” offered up by confusionist Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute is likely to be a nonsensical myth — and this one most certainly is.  There is no polling data to support that view, as is clear from the chart above from the 2011 journal article, “The polarization of climate change and the polarization and the American publics view of global warming.”  I confirmed this with co-author Riley Dunlap when the study came out, which I’ll discuss further in a later post.

And yes, it is laughable that Gerson has the nerve to blame Gore or anybody else for the culture war or the polarization of any issue.  Gerson “served as President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter from 2001 until June 2006, as a senior policy advisor from 2000 through June 2006, and was a member of the White House Iraq Group.”  Gore just made a movie and then use the proceeds to try to depolarize the issue whereas Bush/Cheney politicized science, and specifically climate science,  more than any administration in history.

As an aside, blaming the messenger is certainly an emerging climate strategy for many in the conservative movement since it lets them off the hook.  You see, folks, it isn’t the  disinformation campaign — which Gerson never mentions — or the power of the fossil fuel lobby — which Gerson never mentions.  It’s those darn “defenders” of scientists who are to blame.  I wonder who scientists could possibly need defending from?  But I digress.

Let me go back to the polling data because it is certainly a widely held myth that Gore is responsible for polarizing this debate.  That is a myth conservatives love to tout, of course, and it is one the Breakthrough bunch has repeated again and again.  But it just isn’t true.

As an important aside, it is pretty well-known from social science research that people take crucial cues (as to their beliefs) from elites and that Republicans tend to take their cues from Republican elites and Democrats tend to take their cue from Democratic elites.  So it would be hard for Gore by himself to polarize the debate in any case.  Indeed, Gerson himself notes that:

In 2005, then-Gov. Mitt Romney joined a regional agreement to limit carbon emissions. In 2007, Gingrich publicly endorsed a cap-and-trade system for carbon.

Many, many Republicans embraced cap-and-trade around that time and didn’t flip flop on climate until 2009, suggesting again it was something other than Gore’s advocacy to blaim (see Tim Pawlenty: “Every one of us” running for president has flip-flopped on climate change).  Let’s remember that the GOP presidential nominee ran on a platform of climate action and cap-and-trade — even his conservative VP, Sarah Palin, endorsed it.  That’s a key reason again that you see in the top chart that the liberal-conservative polarization did not accelerate until 2009, when a certain person got elected with overwhelming majorities and the prospect of an actual climate bill became quite real.

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