Senate nominee Gabriel Gomez (R-MA) (Credit: The Republican)

Gabriel Gomez acknowledges that ”science says climate change is real.” But the Republican nominee to fill John Kerry’s open Senate seat in Massachusetts says he is unwilling to take serious steps to combat it, lest it hurt the economy in the short term.

His support for a “serious energy agenda,” including the risky Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, coincides with his own significant investments in dirty energy companies.

On his campaign website, Gomez writes:

Climate change is real. However, while science says climate change is real, addressing the problem must be done rationally. Unfortunately, many solutions offered by politicians in Washington are not rational, and would put America at a competitive disadvantage. We need a serious energy agenda that promotes private sector innovation in both the United States and in other countries around the world.

He also attacks the Obama administration as “wrong in stopping the Keystone pipeline, a project that will create jobs, drive down our energy costs, and help us to become energy independent.” Beyond serious environmental risks, the Keystone XL project would create just 35 permanent jobs, would do little for American energy security, would actually raise energy costs for many Americans.

While his opponent, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), has made clean energy and defending the environment a top priority throughout his tenure in Congress, Gomez repeatedly bashes the Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member for being “focused on everything but the economy.” A 2009 study by the Center for American Progress and the Political Economy Research Institute found that Markey’s proposed American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), combined with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, would have created a net 1.7 million more American jobs.

A ThinkProgress review of Gomez’s personal financial disclosure filings reveals that a significant amount of his own money is invested, directly or indirectly, in Dirty Energy stocks and bonds. These include investments of between $1,000 and $15,000 each in: Read more

(Credit: www.jxnews.com.cn)

A new report out today shows that over 30 million people were displaced by climate-related extreme weather events … [Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre Publications]

The Global Estimates report reveals that 32.4 million people were forced to flee their homes in 2012 by disasters such as floods, storms and earthquakes. While Asia and west and central Africa bore the brunt, 1.3 million were displaced in rich countries, with the USA particularly affected.

98% of all displacement in 2012 was related to climate- and weather-related events, with flood disasters in India and Nigeria accounting for 41% of global displacement in 2012. In India, monsoon floods displaced 6.9 million, and in Nigeria 6.1 million people were newly displaced. While over the past five years 81% of global displacement has occurred in Asia, in 2012 Africa had a record high for the region of 8.2 million people newly displaced, over four times more than in any of the previous four years.

… Just as climate expert Lord Stern predicts that hundreds of millions will be displaced this century. [Guardian]

It is increasingly likely that hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homelands in the near future as a result of global warming. That is the stark warning of economist and climate change expert Lord Stern following the news last week that concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere had reached a level of 400 parts per million (ppm).

Massive movements of people are likely to occur over the rest of the century because global temperatures are likely to rise to by up to 5C because carbon dioxide levels have risen unabated for 50 years, said Stern, who is head of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change.

“When temperatures rise to that level, we will have disrupted weather patterns and spreading deserts,” he said. “Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died. The trouble will come when they try to migrate into new lands, however. That will bring them into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth.”

New research suggests that half of the world’s plants and a third of its animals will lose more than half of their habitats due to climate change this century. [BBC, LA Times, USA Today]

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During the last four years, Congressional action on climate change has been minimal, at best. After the Senate thwarted the cornerstone of the climate change plan, a cap-and-trade bill, a horde of climate-deniers won seats in the 2010 Congressional elections. The government continues to subsidize fossil fuels for an amount larger than the GDP of one-fifth of the world’s countries.

Despite the disappointments of the last term, there are congressional members still willing to fight climate change. One of these members, Rep. Scott Peters (CA-52) is continuing this battle by introducing the Super Pollutant Emissions Reduction (SUPER) Act of 2013.

The SUPER Act reinvigorates the conversation about climate change by addressing “short-lived climate pollutants,” a potent group of gases referred to as SLCPs or “super pollutants.” While carbon dioxide (CO2) is the best-known greenhouse gas, it is certainly not the only one. On the contrary, nearly half of global warming is caused by super pollutants such as methane, tropospheric ozone, hydrofluorocarbons and black carbon.

Super pollutants are far more potent than CO2, with between 25 and 4000 times more global warming potential over a 100-year period. Furthermore, these pollutants remain in the atmosphere for no more than 15 years. Some gases such as black carbon and tropospheric ozone last less than two weeks. CO2 has a much longer atmospheric lifetime. Quick action to reduce super pollutant emissions can have major short-term benefits, slowing down warming by as much as 0.5 degrees Celsius by 2050.

The SUPER Act would take immediate action by streamlining the enforcement of existing federal policies for reducing super pollutants and supporting similar policies, such as California’s extremely successful diesel truck regulations and recent attack on hydrofluorocarbons, at the state and local level.

While the scientific imperative to reduce super pollutant emissions is clear, the optimal policy for doing so is not. That’s why the SUPER Act would also create a task force to drive the policy discussion behind the SUPER Act. The task force, composed of representatives from academia, involved industries and all levels of government, would review existing policies and report a list of best practices for mitigating super pollutant emissions. Such a discussion will be crucial to informing future actions towards developing super pollutant legislation.

Why the SUPER Act is important

Read more

It’s tempting to grade the President on a curve, but future generations won’t – if we destroy the livable climate they’ll need to feed 9 billion people.

“History does not forgive us our national mistakes because they are explicable in terms of our domestic politics….  A nation which excuses its own failures by the sacred untouchableness of its own habits can excuse itself into complete disaster.”  – George Kennan, 1951.

Readers have asked my opinion of Jonathan Chait’s New York magazine column: “Obama Might Actually Be the Environmental President.” His sub-hed tells the tale:

His climate-change policy has been an abject failure, says Al Gore and just about everyone else. They’re wrong. Here’s why.

No.

It’s quite safe to say that, at the very least, it is wildly premature to say Obama hasn’t been an abject failure and pretty safe to say that he is — at least from the perspective of future generations and history’s judgment. That was the point of my election night post, “Obama Wins Reelection, Now Must Become A Climate Hawk To Avoid Dust-Bin Of History, Dust Bowl For America.”

While I usually agree with Grist’s inimitable climate hawk, Dave Roberts, I’m not down with, “Seems to me Chait mostly gets it right.” Like Chait, Roberts wants to grade Obama on a curve, “The question for me is whether Obama has been a success compared to what was (and is) possible.”

As I’ll discuss below, I think Obama is a failure on those grounds, too. But it can’t be repeated too often that Obama’s legacy will be determined primarily by whether we avert catastrophic climate change.

If we don’t, then Obama — indeed, the entire political system, the media and the intelligentsia, heck, all of us — will be seen as failures, and rightfully so. As a 2012 PricewaterhouseCoopers report makes clear, anything other than aggressive efforts to slash carbon pollution starting ASAP likely means 7°F  to 11°F warming globally by 2100 (with more warming next century). That would cause substantially higher warming over most of the U.S. It would leave much of the “breakbasket of the world” (and indeed much of the world’s arable and habitable land) in Dust Bowl conditions much worse than this nation has ever known. By mid-century, the nation and the world will be engaged in a desperate multi-decade effort to figure out how to feed nine billion people on a planet whose carrying capacity has been gutted.

If we don’t stop climate catastrophe, then calling Obama the “environmental president” because of all his other, well-documented environmental accomplishments is like, well, the old line, “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

The point of Kennan’s quote above is that history doesn’t grade us on a curve. And in this case, we’d be graded for a millenium of multiple, simultaneous, ever-worsening, irreversible disasters foisted on future generations because we were too greedy and myopic to devote even a small fraction of our wealth to getting off of carbon a few decades sooner than we were forced to anyway! Not exactly “the greatest generation.”

Here is the only curve future generations will grade us on if we allow it to happen, if we destroy the stable climate of the past 11,000 years that enabled modern civilization:

Temperature change over past 11,300 years (in blue, via Science, 2013) plus projected warming this century on humanity’s current emissions path (in red, via recent literature).

But even if we ignore Kennan and take the narrow, short-term perspective — which, it must be pointed out, is the kind of thinking that has gotten us into this mess — and try to imagine what Obama could have done differently, he still can only get an incomplete (that could convert to a D at best, and an F- in most plausible scenarios).

The entire premise of Chait’s piece is that the failure to pass a climate bill isn’t fatal to Obama’s legacy because, near the end of his 8-year presidency, Obama is going to embrace tough carbon pollution standards for existing power plants along the lines of what the Natural Resources Defense Council has proposed (see here). Modified rapture!

Now I don’t think one can discount the fact that using the EPA to deal with carbon opens the door to significant delay through the courts. Worse, if the Republicans can ever figure out how to win the presidency again, they could slow, stop, or roll back the whole thing.

And why wouldn’t the GOP? Team Obama’s catastrophic climate silence — a silence his White House inanely imposed on much of the progressive and environmental establishment back in 2009 (see here) — coupled with his utter failure to push hard for a Senate vote, has turned a winning political “wedge” issue into something that is mistakenly perceived to be a political loser by much of the political establishment. His embrace of an “all of the above” energy strategy, which is to say no strategy at all, has legitimized a massive expansion of fossil fuel production — and export.

No, I’m not overselling what one man can achieve — I’m simply not ignoring the damage done by an entire administration grotesquely indifferent to — and incompetent at — climate messaging. As Prof. Robert Brulle, one of the country’s leading experts on the environmental movement, put it, “By failing to even rhetorically address climate change, Obama is mortgaging our future and further delaying the necessary work to build a political consensus for real action.”

We are on the brink of losing yet another full 8 years that could have been used to inform the American public about what’s happening now, the bad stuff coming that we can’t stop, and what needs to be done now to avoid the really catastrophic stuff we can.

Churchillian leadership on climate may not be a sufficient condition for avoiding the climate catastrophe, but it is almost certainly a necessary one.

Given that climate change is in fact an existential threat to the nation and modern civilization, I also don’t think that we can ignore the myriad other failures by Obama beyond his failure to use the bully pulpit. Here are four: 

Read more

As Republicans soul-search about how to align themselves with the contemporary values and concerns of the American people, global climate change apparently remains verboten. In fact, the GOP is moving farther away from its own voters on the issue, not to mention the new voters it hopes to attract.

That makes Tuesday’s election of Mark Sanford to the House of Representatives even more interesting. As governor of South Carolina in 2007, Sanford was one of several Republican governors who acknowledged anthropogenic climate change and argued that it could be addressed with conservative market-based solutions.

Sanford’s election to the House already is a fascinating story – a dramatic come-from-behind victory and a dramatic comeback for a man who left his governorship in disgrace. He won this week without the support of the Republican National Campaign Committee, but with the backing of the Tea Party Express.

Therein lies a climate-related subplot. Three years ago, the Tea Party helped defeat another Republican congressman from South Carolina — Bob Inglis – after he acknowledged the reality of global warming. Sanford will have to stand for reelection again next year. Will he be intimidated by the Tea Party and the ideological militancy of the Republican Party, and flip-flop on climate change?

Or will he begin restoring his integrity by remaining true to his past position and joining the small group of Republicans who recognize that ignoring climate change is one of the issues that makes the GOP look like “the stupid party“?

As he contemplates the politics, Sanford might ask himself how voters will react next year to the fact that on big national issues such as gun control, budget sequester and climate change, Congress repeatedly ignores the wishes of the majority of the American people. Rather than the public interest, it routinely serves special interests like the National Rifle Association, the Tea Party, and Big Oil.

Inglis, who now runs a project to persuade conservatives that there are ideologically pure ways to deal with global warming, cites a recent poll in which 60% of respondents who classified themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning want more action on climate change.

Here is what Sanford wrote six years ago in the Washington Post, a time when several Republican governors of coastal states — including Charlie Crist in Florida, Sarah Palin in Alaska, Mitt Romney in Massachusetts and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California — recognized that their states were threatened by climate change:

For the past 20 years, I have seen the ever-so-gradual effects of rising sea levels at our farm on the South Carolina coast. I’ve had to watch once-thriving pine trees die in that fragile zone between uplands and salt marshes. I know the climate change debate isn’t over, but I believe human activity is having a measurable effect on the environment. The real “inconvenient truth” about climate change is that some people are losing their rights and freedoms because of the actions of others — in either the quality of the air they breathe, the geography they hold dear, the insurance costs they bear or the future environment of the children they love…

I am a conservative conservationist who worries that sea levels and government intervention may end up rising together. My earnest hope going forward is that we can find conservative solutions to the climate change problem — ecologically responsible solutions based on free-market principles that both improve our quality of life and safeguard our freedoms.

Romney and Palin flip-flopped when they ran for the presidency. So did former governors Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Jon Huntsman of Utah. Sen. John McCain is the Senate’s most notable climate flip-flopper, although he has been joined by GOP poster-boy Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

So again, aware of what happened to Inglis when he stood with science rather than the Tea Party, will Sanford fall into silence or slip into denial? Or will he join the small group of national Republican realists who agree that we must confront global warming?

It’s a question of whether he is more interested in restoring his integrity or his career in the House. Perhaps with some independence and ingenuity, he will find a way to do both.

Bill Becker is Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), an initiative of Natural Capitalism Solutions to help the President of the United States take decisive action on global warming and energy security.

The Midwest has experienced near record flooding this spring, resulting in four deaths, extensive property damage, and disruptions of agriculture and transportation. Evidence suggests that manmade climate change has increased the frequency of heavy downpours, and will continue to increase flooding risks. But in their ample coverage of Midwestern flooding, major media outlets rarely mentioned climate change.

By Jill Fitzsimmons & Shauna Theel, via Media Matters

Less Than 3 Percent Of Midwest Flood Stories Mention Climate Change

ABC, NBC And CNN Entirely Ignore Climate Connection. ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN devoted 74 full segments to flooding in the Midwest, but only one — on CBS Evening News — alluded to the fact that heavy downpours have increased (one percent of coverage). That segment did not explain that scientists have attributed this to climate change, and did not feature any scientists. MSNBC and Fox News were not included in this analysis because transcripts of their daytime coverage are not available in Nexis. [CBS News, 5/2/13]

USA TODAY Only National Print Outlet To Mention Climate Context Of Floods. USA TODAY, which recently launched a year-long series on the impacts of climate change, was the only national print outlet in our study that mentioned climate change in its reporting on Midwestern floods. The Associated Press, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal never mentioned climate change in a total of 35 articles on the floods. The Washington Post did not cover the flooding independently. In total, only 3 percent of national print coverage mentioned climate change. [USA TODAY, 4/22/13] [Media Matters, 3/1/13]

Local Media Largely Ignore Climate Context Of Floods. Less than 4 percent of local newspaper articles on flooding in the Midwest mentioned climate change — only 4 of 107 articles. The Kansas City Star, Des Moines Register, Detroit Free Press, Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Indianapolis Star never made that connection. Flooding in the area has nearly surpassed records, leading to four deaths, delays in planting agriculture, disruptions in transportation, and potential health impacts. [The Atlantic Wire, 4/25/13] [Union of Concerned Scientists, 4/30/13] [Climate Central, 4/26/13]

No Coverage Of Flooding Contribution To The Gulf “Dead Zone.” Aquatic ecologist Don Scavia told Media Matters in an email that “most media coverage is missing an important aspect of such flooding. These massive spring flooding events push an enormous amount of agricultural pollution down the Mississippi system and into the Gulf of Mexico. That flux will most certainly create a large dead zone.” He added that conservation policies for farmers “may no longer be adequate” as flooding risks increase from climate change. Indeed, our study found that aside from one article in the Des Moines Register, the media overlooked that flooding increases fertilizer runoff from Midwestern farms into the Gulf of Mexico, further contributing to the “dead zone” there. [UPI, 4/10/13]

Evidence Suggests Climate Change Worsens Flood Risks In Midwest

Warming Leads To More Overall Precipitation. As the Environmental Protection Agency explained, basic physics indicates that warming leads to more evaporation and thus more precipitation overall:

As average temperatures at the Earth’s surface rise (see the U.S. and Global Temperature indicator), more evaporation occurs, which, in turn, increases overall precipitation. Therefore, a warming climate is expected to increase precipitation in many areas. However, just as precipitation patterns vary across the world, so will the effects of climate change. By shifting the wind patterns and ocean currents that drive the world’s climate system, climate change will also cause some areas to experience decreased precipitation. In addition, higher temperatures lead to more evaporation, so increased precipitation will not necessarily increase the amount of water available for drinking, irrigation, and industry.”

The EPA created this map, based on 2012 data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, showing that precipitation in most areas of the U.S. including the Midwest has increased over the last century:

Read more

By Jeff Masters, via Weather Underground

The remarkable storm that brought record-breaking May snows and cold to the Midwest last week continues to spin over the Southeast U.S. The storm is unleashing flooding rains, bringing a case of “Weather Whiplash” to Georgia: flooding where extreme drought had existed just a few months ago. The storm formed when a loop in the jet stream of extreme amplitude got cut off from the main flow of the jet over the weekend, forming a “cutoff low” that is now slowly spinning down as it drifts east over the Southeast U.S. On Sunday, the storm dumped 3.4″ of rain on Atlanta, Georgia–that city’s sixth heaviest May calendar day rain storm since record keeping began in 1878. Remarkably, the rains were also able to bring rivers in Central Georgia above flood stage. This portion of the country was in “exceptional drought”–the worst category of drought–at the beginning of 2013.

Figure 1. The record May snowstorm that hit the Midwest U.S. on May 1 – 3, 2013, got cut off from the jet stream and was seen spinning over the Southeast U.S. on Sunday, May 5, in this image from NASA’s MODIS instrument. The 3.4″ of rain that fell on Atlanta, Georgia on May 5 was that city’s sixth heaviest May calendar day rainfall since record keeping began in 1878.

Weather Whiplash

Weather Whiplash — a term originally coined by science writer Andrew Freedman of climatecentral.org to describe extreme shifts between cold and hot weather — is also a excellent phrase we can use to describe some of the rapid transitions between extreme drought and floods seen in recent years. I brought up a remarkable example in mid-April, when a 200-mile stretch of the Mississippi River north of St. Louis reached damaging major flood levels less than four months after near-record low water levels restricted barge traffic, forcing the Army Corp to blast out rocks from the river bottom to enable navigation. As the climate warms, the new normal in coming decades is going to be more and more extreme “Weather Whiplash” drought-flood cycles like we have seen in the Midwest and in Georgia this year. A warmer atmosphere is capable of bringing heavier downpours, since warmer air can hold more water vapor. But you still need a low pressure system to come along and wring that moisture out of the air to get rain. When natural fluctuations in jet stream patterns take storms away from a region, creating a drought, the extra water vapor in the air won’t do you any good. There will be no mechanism to lift the moisture, condense it, and generate drought-busting rains. The drought that ensues will be more intense, since temperatures will be hotter and the soil will dry out more.

Figure 2. Weather Whiplash in Georgia, 2013: the center of the state was in exceptional drought as the beginning of the year, but heavy rains in February, March, and April busted the drought. Heavy May rains have now brought flooding. Image credit: U.S. Drought Monitor.

Weather Whiplash in the Southeast U.S. more likely due to an intensification of the Bermuda High
This year’s “Weather Whiplash” in Georgia is the second time in the past decade the state has gone from exceptional drought to flood. In September 2007, Atlanta, Georgia was in the midst of a 1-in-100 year drought, and was just weeks away from running out of water. Yet just two years later, the drought had been busted, and a phenomenal 1-in-500 year flood ripped through the city, killing ten and causing $500 million in damage. According to a 2011 study by a Duke University-led team of climate scientists, “Changes to the North Atlantic Subtropical High and Its Role in the Intensification of Summer Rainfall Variability in the Southeastern United States”, the frequency of abnormally wet or dry summer weather in the southeastern United States has more than doubled in recent decades, due to an intensification of the Bermuda High. The scientists found that the Bermuda High, which is centered several hundred miles to the east of the Southeast U.S., has grown more intense during summer and has expanded westwards over the past 30 years. Since high pressure systems are areas of sinking air that discourage precipitation, this has made abnormally dry summers more common over the Southeast U.S. However, in summers when the Bermuda High happens to shift to the east, so that high pressure is not over the Southeast U.S., the stronger winds blowing clockwise around the Bermuda High bring an increased flow of very moist subtropical air from the south to the Southeast U.S., increasing the incidence of abnormally wet summers. Thus, the intensification of the Bermuda High has made extreme droughts and extreme floods more likely over the Southeast U.S. Using climate models, the scientists determined that human-caused global warming was likely the main cause of the significant intensification in the Bermuda High. Thus “Weather Whiplash” between drought and flood will probably become increasingly common in the coming decades over the Southeast U.S.

Figure 3. Observed June-July-August departure of precipitation from average over the SE United States for a 60-yr period (mm day−1). Horizontal dashed lines represent 1 standard deviation of the summer rainfall. Note that summer precipitation extremes exceeding one standard deviation have more than doubled during the most recent 30-year period compared to the previous 30-year period. Image credit: Li et al., 2011, Journal of Climate.

– Jeff Masters is the co-founder of the Weather Underground. This piece was originally published at the Wunderblog and was excerpted with permission.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d ?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

– “The Charge Of The Light Brigade,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1854

How will poets memorialize us? How will we be remembered if, like the British light cavalry charging a well-prepared Russian artillery battery in the Crimean War in 1854, we don’t reason why, we just keep on our current path even though it is self-evidently suicidal.

CO2 levels for past 12,000 years and projected to 2100 assuming no change in policies (via Koomey)

“It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.” So ends Field Notes from a Catastrophe, the terrific 2006 book by Elizabeth Kolbert, one of the country’s most thoughtful climate journalists.

Certainly as we hit 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in human existence, with not even a plan to avoid 600 ppm, 800 ppm, and then 1000 — not even a national discussion or an outcry by the so-called intelligentsia – it is worth asking, why? Is there something inherent in homo “sapiens” that makes us oblivious to the obvious?

In his latest analysis, uber-hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham points us in the direction of a new book, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, by William Ophuls. Grantham, a self-described “die hard contrarian,” is one of the few leading financial figures who gets both global warming and growing food insecurity (see “Welcome to Dystopia”: We Are “Entering A Long-Term And Politically Dangerous Food Crisis“).

Ophuls’ treatise, a synthesis of various analyses for civilizations fail, is well worth reading, though it isn’t a sunny book. Grantham’s analysis is a short, marginally-more optimistic version of the book, augmented with his own thinking. Grantham begins:

The Fall of Civilizations

The collapse of civilizations is a gripping and resonant topic for many of us and one that has attracted many scholars over the years. They see many possible contributing factors to the collapse of previous civilizations, the evidence pieced together shard by shard from civilizations that often left few records. But some themes reoccur in the scholars’ work: geographic locations that had misfortune in the availability of useful animal and vegetable life, soil, water, and a source of energy; mismanagement in the overuse and depletion of resources, especially forests, soil, and water; the lack of a safety margin or storage against inevitable droughts and famines; overexpansion and costly unnecessary wars; sometimes a failure of moral spirit as the pioneering toughness and willingness to sacrifice gave way to softer and more cynical ways; increasing complexity of a growing empire that became by degree too expensive in human costs and in the use of limited resources to justify the effort, until the taxes and other demands on ordinary citizens became unbearable, so that an empire, pushed beyond sustainable limits, became vulnerable to even modest shocks that could in earlier days have been easily withstood. Probably the greatest agreement among scholars, though, is that the failing civilizations suffered from growing hubris and overconfidence: the belief that their capabilities after many earlier tests would always rise to the occasion and that growing signs of weakness could be ignored as pessimistic. After all, after 200 or even 500 years, many other dangers had been warned of yet always they had persevered. Until finally they did not.

The bad news is that as I read about these varied scenarios – and I have missed listing several – they all appear plausible and each seems to be relevant to several earlier collapses of empires and civilizations both large and small. Very recently, one of these scholars, William Ophuls, wrote a new book, Immoderate Greatness (a quote from Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), with the subtitle Why Civilizations Fail. It is a straightforward summary and synthesis of all of the ways to fail in 70 small pages, yet with extensive notes and references. It is written in remarkably accessible, simple language and divides the causes of failure into six categories. Unfortunately, all six seem to apply to us today in varying degrees, and where one factor might be manageable – although often has not been – he makes the chances of our managing all six seem slight. It is persuasive and needs to be read. It takes about two hours.

William Ophuls’s conclusion is that we will not resist the impressive list of erosive factors and that, in fact, we are in the fairly late stages of our current civilization’s race for the cliff edge with nothing much to head us off. His study of history leads him to believe that civilizations are actually hard wired to self-destruct: programmed to be overconfident, to keep on pushing for growth until limits are overstepped and risks accumulated to the breaking point. His offer of good news is that after the New Dark Ages, when civilization again rears its head, presumably with a much smaller population, we will have acquired the good sense to be less overreaching, less hubristic, a lot humbler about growth and our use of resources, and more determined to live in balance with the natural energy we receive from the sun and the heat, food, and water with which we can sustainably be provided.

Humanity isn’t making a suicidal charge into an artillery brigade, of course. And what we are accelerating toward is less a cliff than a brick wall — but it is no less self-evident how self-destructive it is:

Temperature change over past 11,300 years (in blue, via Science, 2013) plus projected warming this century on humanity’s current carbon pollution emissions path (in red, via recent literature).

Wikipedia says of the infamous charge, “The semi-suicidal nature of this charge was surely evident to the troopers of the Light Brigade, but if there was any objection to the orders, it was not recorded.” How like Wikipedia to try to deglamorize the whole thing!

I fear our generations’ Wikipedia entry will read much the same. But one can hold out a hope that future generations, when they are done cursing our names, will think we are at least worth a good poem … though not, I think, one celebrating our benighted honor:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse & hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

Those who accept the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists have a simple-yet-scary argument to make:

Humans are changing the climate and making it warmer because we are burning massive amounts of stuff that used to be underground and took millions of years to form.

It is internally and externally consistent and backed up by science. It would be nice if none of those things were true, but unfortunately no one has yet come up with something more compelling that survives anything resembling scrutiny.

Those who argue against climate science consensus (for whatever reason) often trip themselves up with inconsistent statements:

Climate change is not happening. Scientists are lying about the data (for whatever reason). Climate change is a good thing. Climate change is happening but is not our fault.

All of those things cannot be true at the same time. Hearing one, two, or all of those arguments from someone when talk turns to climate change can be exhausting. But instead of getting exhausted, give this flowchart a try, created as a collaboration between the folks at Grist and the folks at Climate Desk.

It’s a good bet that the follow-up flowchart on “so what do we do then” is going to have a few more boxes and arrows.

If you need more granular detail of specific climate myths, give the Climate Reality Project’s Reality Drop, or Skeptical Science’s site a try.

In September, NOAA put together a video showing how climate change means wet areas get wetter and dry gets drier. Now NASA has a video of their own with similar findings.

Here is a screen-shot (NASA didn’t make the video embeddable):

Model simulations spanning 140 years [video here] show that warming from carbon dioxide will change the frequency that regions around the planet receive no rain (brown), moderate rain (tan), and very heavy rain (blue). The occurrence of no rain and heavy rain will increase, while moderate rainfall will decrease. Credit: NASA.

The summer precipitation varies year by year, of course, but as the snapshot above shows, by mid-century there is basically no rain in much of the Southwest and California some years. And the Amazon is not looking too good either (see also “NASA-Led Study Finds Warming-Driven Megadroughts Jeopardizing Amazon Forest“).

NASA’s news release explains

“In response to carbon dioxide-induced warming, the global water cycle undergoes a gigantic competition for moisture resulting in a global pattern of increased heavy rain, decreased moderate rain, and prolonged droughts in certain regions,” said William Lau of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and lead author of the study….

Areas projected to see the most significant increase in heavy rainfall are in the tropical zones around the equator, particularly in the Pacific Ocean and Asian monsoon regions.

Some regions outside the tropics may have no rainfall at all. The models also projected for every degree Fahrenheit of warming, the length of periods with no rain will increase globally by 2.6 percent. In the Northern Hemisphere, areas most likely to be affected include the deserts and arid regions of the southwest United States, Mexico, North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, and northwestern China. In the Southern Hemisphere, drought becomes more likely in South Africa, northwestern Australia, coastal Central America and northeastern Brazil.

“Large changes in moderate rainfall, as well as prolonged no-rain events, can have the most impact on society because they occur in regions where most people live,” Lau said.

This matches the findings of many other climate studies, including those on Dust-Bowlification:

• USGS on Dust-Bowlification
• NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path
• My Nature Piece On Dust-Bowlification And the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security
• NOAA: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe.