by Brad Johnson

Koch Industries billionaire David H. Koch is the wealthiest man in New York City, with a net worth of $31 billion. His fortune is built on polluting the climate system, from refining, pipeline, chemical, fertilizer, cattle, and forestry operations. The rising seas and superheated oceans made Hurricane Sandy into a monster that has caused upwards of $50 billion of damage to the greater New York area, by early estimates. Constructing a sea barrier to defend against future sea level rise will cost another $10 billion.

Not only has Koch Industries dumped billions of tons of carbon into the air, David Koch has spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting climate deniers and Tea Party ideologues who fight regulation of carbon pollution.

In 2010, Koch told New York Magazine that global warming should be welcomed, even as coastlines dwindle from the rising seas:

Koch says he’s not sure if global warming is caused by human activities, and at any rate, he sees the heating up of the planet as good news. Lengthened growing seasons in the northern hemisphere, he says, will make up for any trauma caused by the slow migration of people away from disappearing coastlines. “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food,” he says.

In January 2011, ThinkProgress reporter Lee Fang confronted Koch as he left the swearing-in ceremony for Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). Fang questioned why Koch’s Tea Party front group, Americans for Prosperity supported climate denial and what his own position on climate science was:

FANG: Why does Americans for Prosperity focus so much on the science of climate change? I’m just curious why they spread so much information that denies the existence of climate, of global warming?

KOCH: Well… I think it’s uh, regulating CO2 excessively is going to put — uh really damage the economy.

FANG: Do you believe in climate change yourself? [...] Do you believe in climate change yourself, Mr. Koch?

KOCH: Climate does fluctuate. It goes from hot to cold. We have ice ages.

FANG: But do you believe carbon pollution affects climate change? [Koch shrugs]

Watch it:

David Koch should pledge his fortune to pay the government of New York City for all necessary repairs and investments to guard against future sea level rise and fossil-fueled storms.

Brad Johnson is the campaign manager of Forecast the Facts and ClimateSilence.org

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by Brad Johnson

Will the Frankenstorm be the moment that galvanizes Americans to recognize climate change as an urgent threat to our economic and national security?

Only if the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties end their silence when climate disasters strike.

The silence of our leaders in both parties on global warming amid billion-dollar disasters is a key reason the American people are not better mobilized to address the threat. Even as communities across the nation work at the local level to build climate resilience, even as American voters connect the dots between the disasters they’ve faced and carbon pollution, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have missed repeated opportunities to provide leadership over the course of the presidential campaign.

Below are the candidates’ responses to four different billion-dollar climate disasters during the campaign season:

August 2011: Hurricane Irene. Obama delivers a statement on Hurricane Irene at the White House and addresses victims in Paterson, NJ, but does not mention that the storm’s impact was intensified by oceanic warming, sea level rise, greater atmospheric vapor, and increased extreme precipitation in the Northeast connected to global warming.

Romney cancels fundraisers in Martha’s Vineyard, South Hampton, and East Hampton, two days after telling voters, “I can’t tell you how much of the warming I think we’re experiencing is caused by human beings. It may be a lot. It may be a little.”

June 2012: Colorado Wildfires. Obama announces an “all-hands-on-deck” response in his weekly address to the nation from Colorado Springs, after visiting the devastating wildfires, but does not mention the role climate change had in fueling the fires, including higher temperatures, more intense drought, and bark beetle infestations.

A week later, Romney visits the wildfires, and recommends that Americans help the victims by vacationing in Colorado. He does not mention climate change.

August 2012: National Drought. Obama announces an “all-hands-on-deck” response in his weekly address to the nation. He notes that “the month of July was the warmest month on record — warmer than any other month since we began keeping track more than a century ago,” but does not connect that to climate change.

Romney visits Iowa, says he’s “a little concerned about the drought,” and says “we’re looking for more rain.”

In October, Romney jokes about the Iowa drought: “It used to be that there was rainwater in Iowa, and people cared about it – we hope it’s coming back soon.”

September 2012: Hurricane Isaac. Mitt Romney tours damage in Louisiana with Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), but does not mention climate change.

Obama tours the “enormous devastation” in Louisiana, but does not mention climate change.

Mitt Romney’s climate silence is carbon-fueled. His energy adviser is oil baron Harold Hamm, and his running mate is an anti-science conspiracy theorist, so there’s little chance Romney will connect the dots between this Frankenstorm and greenhouse pollution.

Furthermore, Romney believes that federal disaster relief efforts are “immoral” and should be privatized:

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

By Brad Johnson, campaign manager of Forecast the Facts

On Fox Business Network this Tuesday evening, Neil Cavuto argued that we should respond to the deadly heat wave that is gripping the nation by drilling for more oil:

It is hot and I’m bothered. Nothing like a heat wave to burn my energy butt. This country is roasting, screaming for energy and we’re still blocking so much energy. We’ve got no drilling, just spending more green on green that invariably comes up red.

In fact, U.S. oil production is at its highest level in a decade!

Watch it:

“Climate science is in shambles,” claimed fellow FBN anchor David Asman, who has compared climate scientists to Hitler. “In fact, it’s been cool for the past couple of years.”

“The longer this [heat wave] drags on, the more the issue of climate change will be raised,” moaned Cavuto.

“A very very shaky science is being used to formulate public policy.” concluded Asnan. “Thank you, David ‘Brainiac’ Asman,” replied Cavuto, before turning to a “Fox Body Alert” on swimsuit model Kate Upton.

by Steven Perlberg

Western wildfires, record-setting temperatures, devastating floods, and other extreme weather made more extreme by global warming have welcomed us to summer 2012. Yesterday’s solstice — marked by 66 high scorching records across the Eastern Seaboard — should serve as yet another reminder that it’s time to seriously address the carbon pollution.

Here are the top five extreme weather disasters in the U.S. for June:

1. Colorado Wildfire Blazes: This month, wildfires in northern Colorado forced thousands of families to evacuate their homes. Fueled by 40-to-50-mph winds and dry brush left after a particularly hot spring, the flames have destroyed at least 181 homes with 2000 firefighters deployed.

2. Zoo Animals Drowned in Minnesota Floods: Heavy rain in Duluth, Minnesota flooded two-thirds of the Lake Superior Zoo, drowning at least 11 animals in the process. Sinkholes and mudslides ravaged the rest of Duluth, flooding homes and shutting down roads. The flood also swept up an 8-year-old boy who luckily survived with just a few cuts.

3. Flooding in the Florida Panhandle: Earlier this month, torrential rains damaged homes and forced evacuations in the Florida Panhandle. The downpour cut power in the Escambia County jail and sent more than 100 residents to spend the night in Red Cross shelters, with 40 homes flooded in the city of Gulf Breeze.

4. Summer 2012 Poised for Record Low Sea Ice: Satellite observations analyzed by the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center show that this summer looks likely to bring unusually ice-free Arctic waters. The NSIDC predicts a low-ice year, the lack of white ice allowing more heat to be absorbed into the Arctic, an amplifying feedback that further accelerates warming and ice melt.

5. California Wildfire Prompts Evacuation: A San Diego County wildfire necessitated the evacuation of 150 homes. Over 500 firefighters were dispatched to attack the 907-acre blaze, which was fanned by strong gusts of wind and sent flames burning along the highway.

According to an NOAA analysis, the Northern Hemisphere land and ocean average surface temperature for last month was the all-time warmest May on record, at 0.85°C (1.53°F) above average. And as Amanda Staudt notes, it’s time for policymakers to start connecting the dots on carbon pollution. The recent influx of western wildfires — not to mention flooding, record heat, and the like — is extremely unlikely to occur under otherwise natural conditions.

Some states and insurance companies are beginning to recognize this, and regulators in California, Washington, and New York recently announced that insurance companies will be required to assess and disclose climate-related risks they face.

Colorado is facing drought not seen since 2002, following the fourth-warmest and third-least-snowy winter in US history. Colorado State University scientists report that 98 percent of the state is facing these drought conditions.

The drought comes after a record-breaking warm winter that left very low “snowpack levels” in water basins. “Even though the reservoir levels are still strong and northeast Colorado soil moisture is still pretty good, we just don’t usually start out quite this warm and dry at this time — so this is very concerning,” CSU climatologist Nolan Doesken said. “In 2002, things didn’t seem that bad at the end of March, as March had been quite cool, with some snow.”

Colorado’s hydrofracking boom — a technology that heavily relies on water — only adds additional strain as farmers and drillers bid for a scarce resource:

At Colorado’s premier auction for unallocated water this spring, companies that provide water for hydraulic fracturing at well sites were top bidders on supplies once claimed exclusively by farmers. [...]

State officials charged with promoting and regulating the energy industry estimated that fracking required about 13,900 acre-feet in 2010. That’s a small share of the total water consumed in Colorado, about 0.08 percent. However, this fast-growing share already exceeds the amount that the ski industry draws from mountain rivers for making artificial snow. Each oil or gas well drilled requires 500,000 to 5 million gallons of water.

A Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission report projected water needs for fracking will increase to 18,700 acre-feet a year by 2015.

Farmers who go to the auctions seeking to produce food — or maybe plant more acres — are on equal footing with companies seeking water for fracking, Northern Water spokesman Brian Werner said.

“If you have a beneficial use for the water, then you can bid for that water,” Werner said. “We see the beneficial use of the water as a positive for the economy of the whole region. Fracking is one of those uses. Our uses of water have evolved over 150 years.”

States including Colorado, Alabama, Florida, and Virginia have all faced raging wildfires before wildfire season even officially sets off, fueled by the winter that wasn’t and the March madness powered by global warming pollution from fossil-fuel polluters like Colorado’s frackers.

Martin Hoerling, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist, argues that the freak March heat wave which most climate scientists are attributing to global warming is something to be celebrated. In an interview with the Associated Press, Hoerling said that the record-shattering warmth was a “darn good outcome“:

Why wouldn’t we embrace it as a darn good outcome? This was not the wicked wind of the east. This was the good wind of the south.

The record warmth has already led to pervasive drought in Colorado, an early wildfire season across much of the country, a record-breaking onslaught of pollen. The heat has fueled an early and destructive tornado season and crippled ski areas and maple-syrup producers.

Hoerling’s sentiment was shared by President Barack Obama, who said “we really have enjoyed the nice weather” even though it makes him “a little nervous.”

Hoerling says that global warming was “certainly a minor factor” in causing the March madness.

Hoerling — who clearly accepts that man-made global warming is making weather hotter and more extreme — has published several non-peer-reviewed reports as the lead of NOAA’s Climate Scene Investigators that claim global warming did not influence recent catastrophic extremes, such as the 2009-2010 Snowmageddon, the 2010 Russian heat wave, and the 2011 tornado outbreak. Hoerling’s team did conclude, however, that “human-caused global warming was a factor in the Midwest flooding disaster” of 2008. Hoerling’s method of ascribing attribution to global warming relies primarily on statistical analysis of weather records. His method can miss phenomena that occur because of non-linear changes in the climate system, such as how the decline in Arctic sea ice caused by global warming is influencing large-scale circulation patterns.

Peer-reviewed studies that don’t rely on a single test for attribution have found a clear link between global warming and the 2009-2010 Snowmageddon and the 2010 Russia heat wave.

In a peer-reviewed work, Hoerling did find that the increasing frequency of Mediterranean droughts is caused by global warming.

In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times reporter Justin Gillis criticizes the media, including his own paper, for failing to connect the dots on how the hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution humanity has spewed into the atmosphere is making weather more extreme and “crazy”:

One thing I’m seeing—and I see it in our own paper as well as many other news outlets—is that people are covering the crazy weather we’re having and, more often than not, dodging the subject of whether there’s any relationship to climate change. TV weathermen are dodging that subject. Print reporters are dodging the subject. And it’s not so easy to cover because science does not have particularly good answers for us. The concept that I wrote about last week—that we’re in the middle of a sort of weather “weirding”—isn’t really a scientific concept for which you can build a weird index and figure out where we are on that index, but there are some things that scientists can say about weather extremes. Some of the extremes are very consistent with what is expected and what has long been predicted, and we’re seeing very clear trends in certain extremes like heat waves and heavy precipitation events. Reporters are not going to be able to be definitive, in real time, about whether this particular event was or wasn’t connected to climate change, but it’s a bit of a scandal that there’s not enough connecting the dots for people.

As climate scientist Kevin Trenberth said in 2011, “It is irresponsible not to mention climate change in stories that presume to say something about why all these storms and tornadoes are happening.”