Photo by Walter Disney

The International Energy Agency has a new report out, Golden Rules for a Golden Age of Gas. Unfortunately, the IEA buried the lede — the Golden Age of Gas scenario destroys a livable climate — so the coverage of the report was off target.

For instance, the New York Times opines, “Energy Agency Finds Safe Gas Drilling is Cheap.” And the Council on Foreign Relation headline is similar, “Safe Fracking Looks Cheap.”

That’s true only if a ruined climate, widespread Dust-Bowlification, an acidified ocean, and rapidly rising sea levels is your idea of “safe.”

Still, the IEA deserves much of the blame for this miscoverage. It’s not until page 91 (!) of the full report that the agency explains that adopting its “Golden Rules” for developing shale gas doesn’t stop catastrophe:

The Golden Rules Case puts CO2 emissions on a long-term trajectory consistent with stabilising the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse-gas emissions at around 650 parts per million, a trajectory consistent with a probable temperature rise of more than 3.5 degrees Celsius (°C) in the long term, well above the widely accepted 2°C target. This finding reinforces a central conclusion from the WEO special report on a Golden Age of Gas (IEA, 2011b), that, while a greater role for natural gas in the global energy mix does bring environmental benefits where it substitutes for other fossil fuels, natural gas cannot on its own provide the answer to the challenge of climate change.

D’oh! Or is that Duh?

The IEA was far clearer and blunter when it released its original report, as I wrote last year: IEA’s “Golden Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change. At the time, the UK Guardian‘s story put it well:

At such a level, global warming could run out of control, deserts would take over in southern Africa, Australia and the western US, and sea level rises could engulf small island states.

Not exactly a champagne moment.

Also, it’s far from clear that 650 ppm is even stable, in the sense of not triggering carbon cycle feedbacks that cause further warming — or not crossing dangerous tipping points (see “New study of Greenland under ‘more realistic forcings’ concludes ‘collapse of the ice-sheet was found to occur between 400 and 560 ppm’ of CO2” and “Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now“).

If we risk warming beyond 3.5C, we are courting multiple, simultaneous disasters. Such warming is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level),” according to Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain (see here).

Also, the IEA scenario assumes coal use is basically flat from from 2020 to 2035, which the report makes pretty clear would require a price on carbon. Without a carbon price, natural gas is a brige to nowhere and can actually crowd out carbon-free sources of power. That was precisely the point made by Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the IEA, at a London press conference for the 2011 report:

“While natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel, it is still a fossil fuel. Its increased use could muscle out low-carbon fuels such as renewables and nuclear, particularly in the wake of Fukushima. An expansion of gas use alone is no panacea for climate change.”

The UK Guardian focused on the crowding effect for its piece Tuesday on the new report, “ ‘Golden age of gas’ threatens renewable energy, IEA warns.”

To be clear, the “Golden Rules” proposed by the IEA still lead to a 20% rise in energy-related CO2 emissions from 2010 to 2035, a time we need to be slashing global CO2 levels. As climatologist Ken Caldeira told me in March, natural gas is “A Bridge To A World With High CO2 Levels.

Oh, and there’s a mini-bombshell that the IEA sticks in a footnote when discussing options for avoiding the 3.5+ C warming:

This conclusion could be changed by widespread application of technologies such as carbon capture and storage, which could reduce considerably the emissions from the consumption of gas (and other fossil fuels); but this is not assumed in the period to 2035.[15]

It’s wise not to assume much CCS by 2035 given the unresolved feasibility, permanence and safety issues surrounding CCS as well as the fact that CCS efforts around the world are being scaled back or terminated.

But here’s the IEA’s footnote 15:

15.  There is the possibility that the capacities for CO2 storage might be affected by hydraulic fracturing. A recent study (Elliot and Celia, 2012) estimated that 80% of the potential area to store CO2 underground in the United States could be prejudiced by shale and tight gas development, although others have argued that, even if the rock seal in one place were to be broken by hydraulic fracturing, other layers of impermeable rock underneath the fractured area would block migration of the CO2.

Yeow!

I’d been meaning to blog on that study, “Potential Restrictions for CO2 Sequestration Sites Due to Shale and Tight Gas Production” (abstract here). No, this study doesn’t mean fracking will wipe out all potential CCS storage areas. But it does suggest that an all-out fracking spree — aka the Golden Age of Gas Scenario aka GAGS — will constrict our storage options in the future.

Finally, on my 2011 post on GAGS, Tyler Hamilton, Business Columnist at The Toronto Star, commented:

Not only is gas threatening to crowd out renewables, cheap natural gas — viewed as an input fuel — is dramatically improving the economics for unconventional oil. More cheap gas means more dirty oil. Not a good combination. http://www.cleanbreak.ca/2011/05/26/higher-oil-prices-arent-leading-to-higher-clean-energy-investments-sadly-its-quite-the-opposite/

The bottom line is that if your goal is to stay under or as close to 4°F warming as possible, then we can’t be investing significant resources in new fossil fuel infrastructure — especially without a high and rising CO2 price.

Related Posts:

• Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere Absent A Carbon Price AND Strong Standards To Reduce Methane Leakage
• New Study: You Can’t Slow Projected Warming With Gas, You Need ‘Rapid and Massive Deployment’ of Zero-Carbon Power.
• Must-Read Caldeira: ‘The Only Ethical Path Is To Stop Using The Atmosphere As A Waste Dump For Greenhouse Gas Pollution’

A crowded encampment on Everest.

Mount Everest has become a microcosm for the rest of the planet. Once an isolated place for adventurers, the mountain is now extremely crowded, polluted, and facing dramatic changes as global temperatures rise.

As commercial climbing outfits have blossomed over the last two decades, more and more climbers are flocking to Everest. The overcrowding problem became clear earlier this month when the mountain was clogged by a traffic jam of roughly 150 people trying to reach the summit — contributing to the death of four climbers.

The traffic jam made big news. But a couple weeks before the incident, another major event took place on the mountain that only got attention from within the climbing community.

Russell Brice, head of the leading Everest climbing operation Himalayan Experience, announced that he would pull his team off Everest, citing unprecedented temperatures that made climbing too dangerous. Heeding advice from experienced Sherpas worried about the warmth, Brice decided to cancel his 2012 expedition because of unstable ice.

In a blog post, Brice’s crew explained the decision:

• Already at the beginning of the season, the Sherpas were saying that it was too warm when they were setting up base camp. They were working in T-shirts.
• Our Sherpas continuously reported that the icefall is more dangerous and the ‘popcorn area’ is more active this year. They were not worried about taking the risk but they were very aware of the increased hazards.
• In 2011, this risk of the looming seracs on the West Ridge was more acceptable as the debris fell into the Bergschrund, a deep crevasse between the glacier and the mountain. Then we were about 100m away from where debris was falling, however, this year the Bergschrund is filled and there is no protection at all. The route has dropped off and now we are only 25m to 30m away from debris, which is constantly covering the route.
• When we first arrived at base camp at the beginning of April, the crack in the ice block on the West Ridge was pretty small – now it is probably between 5 and 7 metres wide. This means that the pressure within the ice blocks is huge. So far, we only had small pieces come down, however, there is certainly the potential for a huge collapse, which could kill and injure a large number of people.
• We have been recording the temperature at 2am when the Sherpas are usually leaving to go through the icefall. There have only been a few days when it was colder than -10 C, which is unusual and not really cold enough to be moving through the icefall
• Now, it is only the beginning of May and lakes are forming at base camp. Today, on 8^th May, it is as warm as it is normally at the end of the season and it will only get warmer, which means the danger in the icefall will increase.

This is not the first warning sign for climbers on Everest. Apa Sherpa, a Nepali “super sherpa” who has been up Everest more than 20 times, has expressed deep concern for the changes he’s seen on Everest over the last two decades.

“In 1989 when I first climbed Everest there was a lot of snow and ice but now most of it has just become bare rock. That, as a result, is causing more rockfalls which is a danger to the climbers,” he recently told AFP News in an interview.

In 2011, the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development issued an assessment of glaciers in the Himalayas, finding that glaciers in the region have declined by 21 percent over the last 30 years.

Increasingly unstable ice and rock are making Everest ascents more dangerous. Greg Paul, a climber with Himalayan Experience, explained the decision to abandon the mountain this year: “Russell [Brice] expects an accident of catastrophic proportions to possibly [sic] hit the icefall.”

But all of the impacts occurring simultaneously will have an even more devastating synergy (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“).  It means the rich countries will be far less likely to be offering much assistance to the poorer ones, since there will be ever worsening catastrophes everywhere simultaneously so we’ll be suffering at the same time.  Heck, this deep economic downturn and the record-smashing disasters of the past two years has already exacerbated media myopia and compassion fatigue to help those around the world staggered by floods and droughts.

And that suggests another deadly climate impact — far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog — may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly: war, conflict, competition for arable and/or habitable land.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two of our biggest recent wars.

Last November, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan “said rising temperatures and rainwater shortages are having a devastating effect on food production. Failing to address the problem will have repercussions on health, security and stability.”

The NYT reported in 2009:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

That’s a key reason 33 generals and admirals supported the comprehensive climate and clean energy jobs bill in 2010, asserting “Climate change is making the world a more dangerous place” and “threatening America’s security.”  The Pentagon itself has made the climate/security link explicit in its Quadrennial Defense Review.

Sadly, the chance that humanity will avert catastrophic climate impacts has dropped sharply in the past two years (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2“).  And that means it is increasingly likely we face a world beyond 450 ppm atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which in turn means we likely cross carbon cycle tipping points that threaten to quickly take us to 800 to 1000 ppm — a world of rapid warming and a ruined climate far outside the bounds of any human experience.

It is a world not merely of endless regional resource wars around the globe. It is a world with dozens of Darfurs and Pakistani mega-floods, of countless environmental refugees — hundreds of millions in the second half of this century — all clamoring to occupy the parts of the developed world that aren’t flooded or desertified.

In such a world, everyone will ultimately become a veteran, and Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day may fade into obscurity, as people forget about a time when wars were the exception, a time when soldiers were but a small minority of the population.  And if we don’t act swiftly and strongly to stop it, the worst impacts could last a long, long time (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe and Nature Geoscience: ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years”).

So when does this start to happen?

Thomas Fingar, “the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst,” sees it happening by the mid-2020s:

By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.

For poorer countries, climate change “could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Fingar said, while the United States will face “Dust Bowl” conditions in the parched Southwest“¦.

He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.

Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world.

For the latest literature review and projections, see my May 13 post “Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now” as well as the 2011 study, Michael Wehner et al., “Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico,” and the 2010 piece, “Must-read NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path.”

The 2010 NCAR is being revised, but the figure below (which had been his 2030s projection in his original version) is a rough representation of where his analysis projects things will be in mid-century — if we are so self-destructive as to let this happen:

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here).

And, of course, we’ve seen that even in areas expected to become wetter, can experience an extreme heat wave so unprecedented that it forces the entire country to suspend grain exports:

• Russian Meteorological Center: “There was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat.”
• Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” NYT: “Russia Bans Grain Exports After Drought Shrivels Crop”

See also Nature Publishes My Piece on Dust-Bowlification and the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security

Significantly, the UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, laid out a scenario similar to Fingar’s in a 2009 speech to the government’s Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster. He warned that by 2030, “A ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions,” as the UK’s Guardian put it.

You can see a five-minute BBC interview with Beddington here. The speech is online. Here are some excerpts:

We saw the food spike last year; prices going up by something in the order of 300%, rice went up by 400%, we saw food riots, we saw major issues for the poorest in the world, in the sense that the organisations like the World Food Programme did not have sufficient money to buy food on the open market and actually use it to feed the poorest of the poor.

So this is a major problem. You can see the catastrophic decline in those reserves, over the last five years or so, indicates that we actually have a problem; we’re not growing enough food, we’re not able to put stuff into the reserves”….

So, what are the drivers? I am going to go through them now very briefly.

First of all, population growth. World population grows by six million every month “” greater than the size of the UK population every year. Between now and”¦ I am going to focus on the year 2030 and the reason I am going to focus on 2030 is that I feel that some of the climate change discussions focusing on 2100 don’t actually grip”¦. I am going to look at 2030 because that’s when a whole series of events come together.

By 2030, looking at population terms, you are looking at the global population increasing from a little over six billion at the moment to about eight billion”…

… you are going to see major changes but particularly in the demand for livestock — meat and dairy….

… By 2030, the demand for food is going to be increased by about 50%. Can we do it? One of the questions. There is a major food security issue by 2030. We’ve got to somehow produce 50% more by that time.The second issue I want to focus on is the availability of fresh water”¦. The fresh water available per head of the world population is around 25% of what it was in 1960. To give you some idea of this; there are enormous potential shortages in certain parts of the world”¦ China has something like 23% of the world’s population and 11% of the world’s water.

… the massive use of water is in agriculture and particularly in developing world agriculture. Something of the order of 70% of that. One in three people are already facing water shortages and the total world demand for water is predicted to increase by 30% by 2030.

So, we’ve got food — expectation of demand increase of 50% by 2030, we’ve got water — expectation of demand increase of 30% by 2030. And in terms of what it looks like, we have real issues of global water security.

…. where there is genuine water stress [in 2025 is] China and also parts of India, but look at parts of southern Europe where by 2025 we are looking at serious issues of water stress”….

So, water is really enormously important. I am going to get onto the climate change interactions with it a little bit later but water is the one area that I feel is seriously threatening. It is so important because a shortage of water obviously interacts with a shortage of food, there are real potentials for driving significant international problems — what do you do if you have no water and you have no food? You migrate. So one can have a reasonable expectation that international migration will occur as these shortages come in.

Now, the third one I want to focus on is energy and, driven by the population increase that I talked about, the urbanisation I talked about and indeed the movement out of poverty”…. For the first time, the demand of the rest of the world exceeded the demand of energy of the OECD …. Energy demand is actually increasing and going to hit something of the order of a 50% increase, again by 2030.

Now, if that were not enough … those are three things that are coming together. What will the world be like when that happens? But we also have, of course, the issue of climate change. Now, this is a very familiar slide to you all but we are shooting for a target of two degrees centigrade, a perfectly sensible target. There is enormous uncertainty in the climate change models about that particular target. It is perfectly reasonable to say ‘shouldn’t we be shooting for one degrees centigrade or, oddly enough, it is perfectly reasonable to say ‘shouldn’t we be shooting for three degrees centigrade’, the only information we have is really enormously uncertain in terms of the climate change model.

Shooting for two seems a perfectly sensible and legitimate objective but there are enormous problems. You are talking about serious problems in tropical glaciers “” the Chinese government has recognised this and has actually announced about 10 days ago that it is going to build 59 new reservoirs to take the glacial melt in the Xinjiang province. 59 reservoirs. It is actually contemplating putting many of them underground. This is a recognition that water, which has hitherto been stored in glaciers, is going to be very scarce. We have to think about water in a major way….

The other area that really worries me in terms of climate change and the potential for positive feedbacks and also for interactions with food is ocean acidification….

As I say, it’s as acid today as it has been for 25 million years. When this occurred some 25 million years ago, this level of acidification in the ocean, you had major problems with it, problems of extinctions of large numbers of species in the ocean community. The areas which are going to be hit most severely by this are the coral reefs of the world and that is already starting to show. Coral reefs provide significant protein supplies to about a billion people. So it is not just that you can’t go snorkelling and see lots of pretty fish, it is that there are a billion people dependent on coral reefs for a very substantial portion of their high protein diet.

… we have got to deal with increased demand for energy, increased demand for food, increased demand for water, and we’ve got to do that while mitigating and adapting to climate change. And we have but 21 years to do it….

I will leave you with some key questions. Can nine billion people be fed? Can we cope with the demands in the future on water? Can we provide enough energy? Can we do it, all that, while mitigating and adapting to climate change? And can we do all that in 21 years time? That’s when these things are going to start hitting in a really big way. We need to act now. We need investment in science and technology, and all the other ways of treating very seriously these major problems. 2030 is not very far away.

Some of this can be avoid or minimized if we act now. Some of it can’t. But if we don’t act strongly now, then by Memorial Day 2030, many of the global conflicts will either be resource wars or wars driven by environmental degradation and dislocation (see “Warming Will Worsen Water Wars). Indeed that may already have started to happen (see “Report: Climate Change and Environmental Degradation Trigger Darfur Crisis).

For one discussion of the kind of wars we might be seeing, albeit for the year 2046, here is a three-part radio series on Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer, a Canadian journalist and historian of warfare.

For all of the above reasons, veterans and security experts and politicians of all parties have begun working together to avoid the worst.   A key leader on climate and energy security has been the conservative Virgina Republican, John Warner, who pushed hard to pass the clean energy bill — because he is a former Navy secretary and former Senate Armed Services Committee chair and because he is a former Forest Service firefighter now “just absolutely heartbroken” because “the old forest, the white pine forest in which I worked, was absolutely gone, devastated, standing there dead from the bark beetle” thanks in large part to global warming.

Warner has been “trying to build grass-roots support for congressional action to limit global warming,” as Politics Daily reported. “He is traveling the country to discuss military research that shows climate change is a threat to U.S. national security.” Here is part of PD‘s interview:

PD: Does the responsibility fall to us to respond to the consequences of climate change?

JW: Not exclusively, but we’re often in the forefront of response to these things. We’re the nation with the most sealift. The most airlift. We have more medical teams which are mobile, more storehouses of food and supplies to meet emergencies. And throughout our history, from the beginning of the republic, America’s always had to respond to certain humanitarian disasters.

PD: What are some examples of destabilization due to climate?

JW: One clear case of it is Somalia. [In the early 1990s] the prolonged drought began to tie up the economy, the food supplies. There was a certain amount of political and economic instability. Where you have fragile nations . . . a serious climactic problem will come along, with a shortage of food or water, and often those governments are toppled. And then they fall to the evils of . . . terrorism or others who try to exploit these fallen governments. You saw it in Darfur. You saw it in Somalia. This political instability and weakness is given the final tilt by a problem associated with climactic change.

Our choice today is clear. We can continue listening to the voices of denial and delay and disinformation, assuring that everyone ultimately becomes a veteran of the growing number of climate-related conflicts.

Or we can launch a WWII-scale effort and a WWII-style effort to address the problem as Hansen and I and many others have called for. That is our most necessary fight today.

This post is an update.

Related Posts:

• Nicholas Stern: Climate inaction risks a “global war”
• Scientific American asks “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”
• Must have PPT #1: The narrow temperature window that gave us modern human civilization
• Steven Chu on climate change: “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California”
• Sen. Barrasso (R-WY) seeks to block intelligence on the national security threat posed by climate change. He needs to see the Fingar.
• Juan Cole: The media’s failure to cover “the great Pakistani deluge” is “itself a security threat” to America

A protester outside Heartland's climate denier conference. Photo: Kelly Mitchell

“I don’t appreciate being called a terrorist,” the woman said firmly.

I was standing outside the Hilton Chicago hotel talking to Jim Lakely, the director of communications for the Heartland Institute, when an elderly woman approached us on the street. Dressed in a business suit, she was loading her luggage into a taxi when she noticed Lakely’s Heartland name badge and interrupted our conversation.

“We can have a civil discussion. But I really don’t like being labeled a terrorist,” she said, referencing a billboard posted by Heartland equating people who believe in global warming to the Unibomber. “That’s all I wanted to say.”

“Well, I appreciate you telling me that,” said Lakely, who was taking a break from managing Heartland’s conference to watch the 60 or so people protesting the event outside the hotel.

The woman, who was wearing a badge for a different conference, got into her taxi and drove away. There was a brief moment of awkward silence between me and Lakely.

The exchange perfectly encapsulated the public relations disaster the Heartland Institute has created for itself over the last few weeks. The downfall started with an offensive billboard campaign on May 3rd and ended with 11 companies pulling support for the organization — stripping 35% of corporate funds overnight and leaving its financial future uncertain.

The dramatic drop in support was facilitated by the advocacy organization Forecast the Facts, which collected more than 150,000 signatures from people calling on corporate donors to end their relationship with Heartland.

This series of events built on an earlier incident in which Peter Gleick, a scientist with the Pacific Institute, faked his identity to acquire internal documents from the Heartland Institute. Those documents showed that the organization planned to secretly develop school curriculum to spread doubt about the causes of climate change. It also opened up a window to the organization’s donors, which were forced to make a decision about whether or not they wanted to be associated with Heartland’s tactics.

And then yesterday, the other shoe dropped. In his closing speech, Heartland President Joseph Bast announced that the organization does not have the money to continue putting on its hallmark climate conference — an event that had become a rallying point for an insulated group of climate disinformers.

“I hope to see you at a future conference, but at this point we have no plans to do another ICCC,” said Bast, explaining that Heartland was struggling to meet expenses.

The cancellation marks the end of an era — albeit a short era — for the oddball world of organized climate change denial.

The event, called the International Conference on Climate Change, was started in 2008 as a way to organize libertarians  — many of whom believe that taking action on climate change would create a one-world government dominated by the United Nations.

Heartland tried hard to label the event a “science” conference. But the presentations were almost always political, peppered with anti-government rhetoric and conspiracy theories.

“We’re in a war. We’re in a war against our standard of living,” said Walt Cunningham, a former NASA astronaut, speaking in a morning session on Tuesday.

“There’s not a lot of science here,” said Scott Denning, an atmospheric scientist from Colorado State University who attended the event last year to present the so-called “warmist” case. Neither Denning nor any of the other 97% of climate scientists who say human activity is warming the planet presented at this year’s conference.

In fact, none of this year’s top speakers had any background in climate science. Instead, they spoke about the issues in highly conspiratorial terms.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a former economist who gave the keynote address on Monday, called environmentalism “identical to communism—identical, not similar.”

Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, the featured keynote speaker for Tuesday, asked if we “need to put catalytic converters on our noses” by addressing heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

And following Sensenbrenner’s nonsensical remarks, Heartland brought up “special mystery guest” Lord Christopher Monckton, who admitted at the beginning of his speech that he has “no scientific qualification” to challenge climate science. He then performed a comedy routine in which he questioned the legitimacy of President Obama’s citizenship — a joke that brought the room to full applause.

These fringe views made even Heartland senior staffers very nervous. After the billboard debacle, the leader of Heartland’s Washington office, Eli Lehrer, left the organization and brought six staff members with him, saying the campaign “didn’t reflect the seriousness which I want to bring to public policy.”

But Heartland’s leadership twisted the knife into their self-inflicted wound with a decision to keep repeating their extreme rhetoric in the lead-up to the conference — later calling Bill McKibben and Michael Mann “Madmen.”

The rapid unraveling of Heartland forced it to scale down the conference, and seemingly kept attendees away. This year, only around 300 people showed up — a decrease from the 500 people at its first conference in 2008.

Despite the subdued mood, Congressman Sensenbrenner tried to rally the remaining troops during his Tuesday speech.

“Things are a lot better now than they were three years ago,” he said, referencing the failure to pass a carbon cap and trade bill and potential expiration of the Kyoto Protocol.

Things certainly weren’t better for Heartland. The following afternoon, the organization announced its decision to abandon the entire conference due to lack of funds and a backlash from corporate donors.

But Sensenbrenner was right about one thing: The public dialogue has moved dramatically backward in the last three years, driven largely by the aggressive disinformation tactics of the climate denial community — and enabled by the Obama Administration’s decision to stop talking about the issue and the media’s decision to sharply curtail coverage.

While the dissolution of Heartland’s conference may be considered a “win” for those concerned about the spread of junk science and disinformation, there are still plenty of allies in industry and the halls of Congress willing to take up the denial cause.

“Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”

Last year, the journal Nature asked me to write a Comment piece after they read one of my posts on prolonged drought and “Dust-Bowlification.” The article was published October 27, 2011 (here, subs. req’d).

Since six months have passed, I can reprint the entire piece on ClimateProgress (see below).

This was my first piece ever in the journal itself.  I did have an online piece, “Nature publishes my climate analysis and solution.”  This is not a peer-reviewed article but rather a “Comment” piece.

I sent it to five of the world’s leading authorities on climate change and drought and the hydrological cycle:  Kevin Trenberth, Aiguo Dai, Michael Mann, Peter Gleick and Jonathan Overpeck.  I endeavored to incorporate their comments, but unfortunately Nature has a 10-reference limit for their Comment pieces so I wasn’t able to include as many references as they suggested or as I would have liked.  If you want links to most of the articles I refer to, go here.

I was particularly delighted that Overpeck liked the term “Dust-Bowlification.”  He really was an inspiration for me to begin studying this topic many years ago when I saw a 2005 presentation of his, “Warm climate abrupt change–paleo-perspectives,” that concluded “climate change seldom occurs gradually” (see The “global-change-type drought” and the future of extreme weather).

I was equally delighted Nature has basically endorsed this term through its multiple appearances in this article and felt that the overall issue warranted more attention.

I do not believe that most Americans — and that includes most policymakers and the media — understand the convergence of the recent scientific literature on the extreme threat posed directly to this country of Dust-Bowlification (see “Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security“).

I am glad that leading climatologists like James Hansen are starting to talk more about the threat posed by drought — since it is painfully clear that even some people considered climate experts are unaware of the literature (see “James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now“).

As I wrote in the article:

Human adaptation to prolonged, extreme drought is difficult or impossible. Historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment; the very word ‘desert’ comes from the Latin desertum for ‘an abandoned place’. During the relatively short-lived US Dust-Bowl era, hundreds of thousands of families fled the region. We need to plan how the world will deal with drought-spurred migrations and steadily growing areas of non-arable land in the heart of densely populated countries and global bread-baskets. Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.

Now, Dust-Bowl conditions could stretch all the way from Kansas to California by mid-century. America’s financial future and the health and safety of our people are at serious risk if greenhouse gas pollution is not brought under control quickly.  The food security of all of humanity is at risk. Denial is simply not an option, the time for action is now.

Here is the whole article:

Which impact of anthropogenic global warming will harm the most people in the coming decades? I believe that the answer is extended or permanent drought over large parts of currently habitable or arable land — a drastic change in climate that will threaten food security and may be irreversible over centuries.

A basic prediction of climate science is that many parts of the world will experience longer and deeper droughts, thanks to the synergistic effects of drying, warming and the melting of snow and ice.

Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temp- erature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl; and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season. Added to natural climatic variation, such as the El Niño–La Niña cycle, these factors will intensify seasonal or decade-long droughts. Although the models don’t all agree on the specifics, the overall drying trends are clear.

I used to call the confluence of these processes ‘desertification’ on my blog, ClimateProgress.org, until some readers pointed out that many deserts are high in biodiversity, which isn’t where we’re heading. ‘Dust-bowlification’ is perhaps a more accurate and vivid term, particularly for Americans — many of whom still believe that climate change will only affect far-away places in far-distant times.

Prolonged drought will strike around the globe, but it is surprising to many that it would hit the US heartland so strongly and so soon.

The coming droughts ought to be a major driver — if not the major driver — of climate policies. Yet few policy-makers and journalists seem to be aware of dust-bowlification and its potentially devastating impact on food security. That’s partly understandable, because much of the key research cited in this article post-dates the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Raising public awareness of, and scientific focus on, the likelihood of severe effects of drought is the first step in prompting action.

AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

I first heard of the risks in a 2005 talk by climatologist Jonathan Overpeck of the Uni- versity of Arizona in Tucson. He pointed to emerging evidence that temperature and annual precipitation were heading in oppo- site directions over many regions and raised the question of whether we are at the “dawn of the super-interglacial drought”.

The idea wasn’t new. As far back as 1990, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenom- enon by mid-century.

Events are starting to bear out these worrying predictions. Snowpack reduction, early snowmelt and a decrease in dry-season river flow in the American West, forecast more than two decades ago, have now been measured. In much of the northern Rockies, the peak of the annual stream runoff is up to three or four weeks earlier than it was half a century ago.  Heat and drought — coupled with the greater impact of destruc- tive species, such as bark beetles, aided by warming — have increased forest die-off and the risk of wildfire.

The palaeoclimate record dating back to the medieval period reveals droughts lasting many decades. But the extreme droughts that the United States faces this century will be far hotter than the worst of those: recent decades have been warmer than the driest decade of the worst drought in the past 1,200 years.

And much warmer conditions are projected. According to a 2009 report of the US Global Change Research Program, warming over mid-latitude land masses, such as the continental United States, is predicted to be higher than the forecast average global warming: much of the inland United States faces a rise of between 5 °C and 6 °C on the current emissions path (that is, ‘business as usual’) by the century’s end, with a substantial fraction of that warming occurring by mid-century.

A 2007 analysis of 19 climate projections estimated that levels of aridity comparable to those in the Dust Bowl could stretch from Kansas to California by mid-century. To make matters worse, the regions at risk of reduced water supply, such as Nevada, have seen a massive population boom in the past decade. Overuse of water in these areas has long been rife, depleting groundwater stores.

Of course, the United States is not alone in facing such problems. Since 1950, the global percentage of dry areas has increased by about 1.74% of global land area per decade. Recent studies have projected ‘extreme drought’ conditions by mid-century over some of the most populated areas on Earth—southern Europe, south-east Asia, Brazil, the US Southwest, and large parts of Australia and Africa. These dust-bowl conditions are projected to worsen for many decades and be “largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stopped.”

The concept of drought has not been ignored by the IPCC and other scientific groups; there is even a United Nations Con- vention to Combat Desertification. But the cumulative risks don’t seem to have been fully recognized by the public and by policy- makers. And key questions remain to be answered, ideally in a dedicated report by an organization such as the US National Academy of Sciences or the IPCC.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Most pressingly, what will happen to global food security if dust-bowl conditions become the norm for both food-importing and food-exporting countries? Extreme, widespread droughts will be happening at the same time as sea level rise and salt-water intrusion threaten some of the richest agricultural deltas in the world, such as those of the Nile and the Ganges. Meanwhile, ocean acidification, warming and overfishing may severely deplete the food available from the sea.

What are the implications of dust-bowlification for energy generation? After agriculture, energy generation is responsible for the majority of freshwater withdrawals, and two key strategies for generating additional potable water — wastewater purification and desalinization — are both energy intensive. Future energy systems will need to be low on greenhouse-gas emissions and on water use. In particular, thermal power plants — including nuclear — may need to switch from evaporative or ‘wet cooling’  systems to dry cooling techniques, which, unfortunately, tend to be less efficient.

From an ecological perspective, what will be the effects of dust- bowlification on the global carbon cycle? In the past six years, the Amazon has seen two droughts of the sort expected once in 100 years, each of which may have released as much carbon dioxide from vegetation die-off as the United States emits from fossil-fuel combustion in a year. More frequent wildfires also threaten to increase carbon emissions. And as habitats are made untenable, what will be the effect on biodiversity?

At the same time, drought models need to be improved. They successfully chart the hydrological changes seen in the US South- west and the drying seen at the global level7, but regional predictions can be disturbingly variable. Some models forecast an increase in precipitation for East Africa, whereas oth- ers correctly predicted in 2010 that warming of the Indian Ocean would lead to drought in the region, such as this year’s devastating drought in Somalia. The models need higher resolution and a better understanding of precipitation, sea surface temperature and the effects of vegetation.

Human adaptation to prolonged, extreme drought is difficult or impossible. Historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment; the very word ‘desert’ comes from the Latin desertum for ‘an abandoned place’. During the relatively short-lived US Dust-Bowl era, hundreds of thousands of families fled the region. We need to plan how the world will deal with drought-spurred migrations (see page 447) and steadily growing areas of non- arable land in the heart of densely populated countries and global bread-baskets. Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.

These predictions are not worst-case scenarios: they assume business-as-usual greenhouse-gas emissions. We can hope that the models are too pessimistic, but some changes, such as the expansion of the subtrop- ics, already seem to be occurring faster than models have projected10. We clearly need to pursue the most aggressive greenhouse-gas mitigation policies promptly, and put dust-bowlification atop the world agenda.

What does the future look like?  Dai laid it out in a 2010 study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “Drought under global warming: a review,” the best review and analysis on the subject I’ve seen.

He is in the process of revising his analysis, but the figure below (which had been his 2030s projection in his original version) is a rough representation of where his analysis projects things will be around mid-century for the U.S.

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here).

And this isn’t just Dai’s finding. Michael Wehner et al. find the drying has the same signature in “Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico” (2011).

Wehner and Dai are quoted in an excellent new IPS News piece by Stephen Leahy, “Action Needed Now to Prepare for Severe Drought.” That article notes future conditions “for almost all of Mexico, the midwestern United States and most of Central America … are projected to be worse than Mexico’s current drought or the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s that forced hundreds of thousands of people to migrate”:

“Drought conditions will prevail no matter what precipitation rates are in the future,” said co-author Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. government research centre in California.

“Even in regions where rainfall increases, the soils will get drier. This is a very robust finding,” Wehner told Tierramérica.

Wehner’s conclusions are based on findings from 19 different state-of-the-art climate models. His results match Dai’s. The story notes:

“If the projections in this study come even close to being realised, the consequences for society worldwide will be enormous,” Dai said in 2010.

According to Wehner, the very latest projections from the newest computer models that have not yet been published also show very similar results. “At the very least we are looking at severe drought conditions in future.”

Wehner said he was surprised the study received very little media attention, given the serious implications for the future.

What this means for future generations is “a very difficult issue for me to talk about” at a personal level, Wehner admitted.

Climate Progress readers aren’t surprised the media mostly ignores what is probably the most dangerous of all the climate impacts humans face in the coming decades (see “Network News Coverage of Climate Change Collapsed in 2011“).

The time to act is now.

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‘The Great Big Book of Horrible Things’: WWII and Climate Change

What our great failure in the 1930s may teach about facing the rapid assault of manmade global warming  (Or “Hell is the truth seen too late.”)

Dresden (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

It is the continuation of an essay he wrote about last week, which I blogged about here: “ ‘Hug The Monster’: Why So Many Climate Scientists Have Stopped Downplaying the Climate Threat.”

Blakemore cites the great quote from 18th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “Hell is truth seen too late.” Since I wrote a book on climate a few years back, Hell and High Water, that quote seems particularly apt to me for climate.

Blakemore’s piece starts by looking at The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities by Matthew White, noting:

The world’s climate scientists are in effect telling us that one part of the truth we must now try to see is humanity’s ability — or lack of it — for collective prevention of enormous manmade disaster, atrocity.

The record is worrisome.

He then examines humanity’s problematic track record of not preventing catastrophes even when many powerful people were aware of what was happening or about to happen, including the great atrocities of World War II. And no, there is no direct analogy being made (see “Climate Science Disinformers Are Nothing Like Holocaust Deniers“).

Blakemore cites a presentation by Harvard historian and social anthropologist Timothy Weiskel — a colleague of mine 20 years ago at the Rockefeller Foundation. Weiskel in turn cites John F. Kennedy’s 1940s book, Why England Slept (a title JFK ‘borrowed’ from Churchill’s 1938 book, though JFK’s book was originally his senior thesis at Harvard titled, Appeasement in Munich):

“To say that all the blame must rest on the shoulders of Neville Chamberlain or of Stanly Baldwin, is to overlook the obvious.  As the leaders, they are, of course, gravely and seriously responsible.  But, given the conditions of democratic government, a free press, public elections, and a cabinet responsible to Parliament and thus to the people, given rule by the majority, it is unreasonable to blame the entire situation on one man or group…”

Blakemore notes, “But this time, say today’s climate scientists, the rapidly approaching climate catastrophe threatens to kill far more people than all of White’s 100 Deadliest atrocities combined.”

There is little question that if we continue to listen to the disinformers and the do-little crowd, we are very likely headed toward global warming in excess of 10°F, as the International Energy Agency and many others have made clear. That will destroy a livable climate (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Indeed, that is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level),” according to Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain (see here).

Blakemore points out that a great many scientists are worried that this would lead to a staggering amount of misery and starvation:

The Rapidly Approaching Climate Catastrophe

… Estimates heard in private conversations with scientists and economists reach even into the billions of people who could perish well within this century if the warming is not somehow controlled.

This reporter has heard figures in measured conversation, for example, such as this: If humanity does not now manage somehow to drastically cut carbon emissions so that the global temperature levels off at around 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial times, but reaches instead 4 degrees centigrade, it could mean some 4 billion people dying within this century because the world couldn’t grow enough food in such heat and the drought it will bring — rice harvests, for one, would be decimated.

And remember, we’re on track to blow past 4C (7F), possibly even this century:

Humanity’s Choice (via M.I.T.):  Inaction (“No Policy”) eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether or not future warming will be catastrophic.  Aggressive emissions reductions dramatically improves humanity’s chances.

Steve Easterbrook’s post “A first glimpse at model results for the next IPCC assessment” shows that for the scenario where there is 9°F warming by 2100, you get another 7°F warming by 2300.  Of course, folks that aren’t motivated to avoid the civilization-destroying 9°F by 2100 won’t be moved by whatever happens after that.

I do know some experts who think that a great many people will die if we are so self-destructive as to keep near the worst-case emissions scenario — even if the carbon cycle feedbacks and soil moisture projections are merely in the middle of their projected range (see “James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now“).

But it’s not what I think is going to happen. I actually believe that even if we do let the disinformers sucker us into another decade of delay, we are still going to get WWII-scale serious about climate sometime in the 2020s and avert the worst-case scenarios — even if the feedbacks really start to kick in.

I also believe that if the bad-case scenarios kick in post-2040, the world is going to reorganize much of its activity to prevent billions of people from dying. Oh, yes, billions of people are going to needlessly suffer a great deal if the deniers triumph, but stopping billions from starving to death this century will be well within our capability even if we ruin a livable climate.

We waste over 1/3 of our food globally, and the U.S. burns 1/6 of the world’s corn crop in its vehicles. Oh, and then there is the use of staggering amounts of grain for meat. We could feed the world on under half the acreage we use today.

Now that doesn’t mean we will definitely do what is needed, of course, but I remain an optimist in this regard. Still, if we blow past 3C, and then 4C, then unimaginable catastrophe is unavoidable.

Blakemore ends:

What if we don’t try to report or explain the full scale and challenge of the climate problem?… just as a number of professionals in the 1930s apparently didn’t with the challenge they faced.

Knowing the general size of the problem, painful or frightening as it may be, would seem clearly necessary for any professional journalist or government leader trying to report on or assess the chances of any realistic hope we think we may glimpse amid all the bad news.

It would obviously help us get our minds around it, at least.

And that’s a beginning.

To be continued…

Hear! Hear!

It’s not too late for the truth, not too late to avoid Hell and High Water.

Related Posts:

• The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate
• A Critique Of The Broken-Record Counterfactual Message of The New York Times On Environmentalists and Scientists
• Network News Coverage of Climate Change Collapsed in 2011

by Nicole Lederer, via Clean Edge

They say nothing can get done in Washington, D.C. on the issue of clean energy, which has become a political lightening rod over the last year. With Congress at a high watermark of partisanship, accusations abound on Capitol Hill that American energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies and the policies that support them are job killers and a money-wasting hoax on taxpayers.

And yet, there’s reason for optimism about energy innovation in this country. Why? Because the most powerful force in the world, the U.S. military, is mobilizing on a clean-energy mission – and I believe they’re going to win this war.

While Congress fumbles, the Department of Defense (DoD) has identified our fossil-fuel dependence as a national security threat which exposes our country to increased vulnerability both at home and abroad. The Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines have all set aggressive goals – to lower their energy demand, utilize new renewable fuel sources, and develop energy generation, storage, and transmission technologies – that will allow military installations to function more reliably and expeditionary forces to perform more effectively.

Not only that, but the DoD has unequivocally determined that climate change is a “threat multiplier” that will heighten geopolitical instability, resource conflicts, and humanitarian disasters around the globe – stretching the capacity of our Armed Forces to respond.  Accordingly, not only is the military dedicated to improving energy performance and diversifying energy sources, it is specifically committed to developing low-carbon technologies.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta asserts that all of these initiatives are for one purpose only. “By changing the DoD energy posture, America will have a military that is better able to project and sustain forces around the world to meet any challenges to the nation’s security and interests of the American people.”

Through my work with Environmental Entrepreneurs, I’ve had the privilege to meet with many of the Pentagon’s energy leaders executing this clean-energy mandate, and also to work alongside a number of retired military officers to advance these initiatives. I can say without reservation that these are the best allies the clean-technology sector could have.

DoD brings formidable assets to this mission.

Armed services installations encompass more than 28 million acres of land. DoD plans to install at least 3 GW of renewable-power generation on these bases – the single largest commitment to clean energy in the U.S. It manages more than 2.2 billion square feet of building space for which it is seeking to greatly improve energy and resource efficiency performance. As a massive consumer of fuel (using nearly 2 percent of the nation’s total), and unwilling to sustain the enormous budgetary burden of volatile fuel prices, the military is seeking alternative transportation technologies for its vehicles on bases, as well as its aircraft, ships, and combat vehicles. It is evaluating every aspect of its operations, from energy demand in base housing to the batteries that soldiers carry to battle, and pinpointing where next-generation technologies can improve the nation’s security.

And the military is prepared to invest in these technologies. The Pentagon is requesting $2 billion in fiscal year 2013 for energy improvements to DoD installations and expeditionary operations, with a view to both short and long term results. In many cases these investments will produce huge savings on energy costs.

In the absence of a cogent national energy policy, the military’s actions add up to a national demand signal like no other in the United States today. Because the military is both a strategic (and relatively patient) investor and a huge customer for new energy technologies, DoD’s energy mandates are providing an innovation pull function that holds massive promise for economic growth and job generation in the private sector.

Perhaps most important of all, the military is creating a roadmap for American civilian society, as each vulnerability that the Pentagon has identified with regard to energy security applies at least as much to the general population. From undependable fuel supplies and prices to vulnerable power grids and inefficiencies in our homes and businesses, these liabilities pose an insidious threat to the resilience and strength of our economy and reduce our ability to compete in global markets.

And yet, some in Congress are prepared to sacrifice national and economic security for a partisan agenda. With a visceral disdain for clean energy, or perhaps with an overly robust relationship with the fossil-fuel industries, they are challenging the motives behind the Pentagon’s clean-energy initiatives and threatening to withhold funding to carry them out.

Now is the time to speak out in defense of DoD’s clean-energy initiatives. The annual National Defense Authorization Act is currently being hammered out in both houses of Congress. The House Armed Services Committee has already passed their version of the bill which includes provisions to prohibit the military from investing in and deploying low-carbon renewable fuels. The Senate Armed Services Committee will take up the bill on May 22nd. Whether you’re an employee, a business owner, or an investor in the clean-energy sector, call your representatives in Congress, especially those who sit on the Armed Services Committees, and tell them to support DoD’s clean energy initiatives. Tell them that those initiatives will help you grow your business and create jobs. They need to know you are watching what they do on this and will hold them accountable. Your voice will have more impact than you imagine.

Civilians from across the political spectrum should step up to defend the military’s clean-energy agenda. Uncle Sam really does need you.

Nicole Lederer is Co-Founder of Environmental Entrepreneurs, a national, nonpartisan organization of business leaders promoting strong environmental and economic policy. This piece was originally published at Clean Edge and was reprinted with permission.

Monckton watches the protesters outside Heartland's conference.

With the Heartland Institute suffering from a public relations disaster that caused 11 donors to abandon financial support, one might think the organization would attempt to moderate messaging tactics at its climate denial conference this week.

Or maybe even find an expert who doesn’t freely admit that he “has no scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change.

Not quite.

After comparing people who understand global warming with serial killers in a billboard campaign, the organization featured a presentation yesterday that called into question the legitimacy of President Obama’s citizenship.

Enter Lord Christopher Monckton, Heartland’s “mystery guest” who popped in to the conference Tuesday to perform a quirky stand-up comedy routine for a couple hundred eager attendees.

His presentation peeled back yet another layer on the conspiratorial beliefs of many within the climate disinformation community.

Monckton, a man frequently held up as an expert among deniers, started his speech off by boldly admitting his lack of scientific qualifications. He thanked the attendees for having the “courage” to challenge climate scientists, explaining: “It is particularly hard, if like me, you have no scientific qualification to do so.”

Monckton then joked about what he needed to do in order to build his credibility in America.

“I have concluded what one needs to have is a freshly minted Hawaiian birth certificate,” he said, referencing the belief among “birthers” that President Obama’s birth certificate is forged. He displayed a picture of a Hawaiian birth certificate with his personal information filled in. The crowded erupted in laughter.

“I was born at a military hospital. What is marvelous is that this [birth certificate] is just as genuine of that of the President of the United States,” said Monckton.

Even with the release of official documents and the repeated confirmation from Hawaiian officials, Monckton is an outspoken believer that President Obama’s birth certificate is forged. The conspiracy has gotten so ludicrous in the face of documentary evidence, the Washington Post labeled remaining birthers “crackpots” who “live for their pet conspiracy theory.”

Explaining that his forged birth certificate prepared him to run for President of the United States, Monckton presented Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast with a freshly minted campaign button. Bast shook Monckton’s hand, jokingly saying he would endorse the candidacy.

The opening skit raised resounding laughter and applause throughout the room.

Monckton, a former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher, has become a form of comic relief for the climate disinformation community. Australian satirists did a hilarious interview with him in which they “mistook” him for an act by Sacha Baron Cohen. But Monckton has also said those who embrace climate science are “Hitler youth” and fascists. He travels around the world making grossly inaccurate presentations filled with peculiar jokes poking fun at climate scientists, who he labels “bullies” and “liars.”

However, the scientists he attacks have done nothing more than factually debunk, point-by-point, every single argument that Monckton has laid out throughout his career as a climate disinformer. (In fact, Monckton is one of the most widely discredited figures among the community of widely-discredited deniers).

Then again, Monckton himself admitted up front in yesterday’s speech that he has no “scientific qualification.”

In the wake of Heartland’s unibomber billboard campaign, 11 donors representing roughly 35% of the organization’s funds for 2012 pulled support, according to the advocacy organization Forecast the Facts. The pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly said such tactics “were not consistent” with how the company “engages in public debate.”

Helping spread the fringe conspiracies of birthers probably isn’t the best messaging strategy for the Heartland Institute right now.

Ironically, Monckton’s birther routine came directly after a speech from Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who alluded to the billboard campaign by saying “we can continue to win these debates out of the strength of our arguments, without recourse to unsavory tactics that only serve to detract from our message.”

Sensenbrenner’s message at the conference: Carbon dioxide is a “natural gas” that couldn’t possibly harm the planet. “Does this mean that all of us need to put catalytic converters on all our noses?” he asked the crowd, which chuckled at his suggestion.

by Jake Schmidt, via NRDC’s Switchboard

With the haze of the Durban climate negotiations finally lifting, the climate negotiations in Germany at the midway point, and one month before Rio+20 it is time to reflect on the path that lies ahead for the rest of this year.  While global negotiations have slowed since the high-intensity period over the last three years (in Copenhagen, Cancun, and Durban), that doesn’t mean we can afford for action to slow down.  After all, as the International Energy Agency just pointed out the door for avoiding the greatest impacts is quickly closing.

Four key themes are critical to watch the remainder of this year that are essential ingredients for progress on international global warming action: (1) the actions countries take at home right now; (2) the actions countries commit to implement at Rio+20; (3) how much progress is made in closing the “mitigation gap”; and (4) what stage is set this year for the international legal agreement that is to be reached in 2015.

Acting at Home Right Now

No global political signal or agreement is sufficient if countries don’t act at home to pass laws, adopt regulations, or support incentives which spur the necessary actions.  As a result, what happens in key countries around the world is essential for putting the world on a safer path.  So here are some key actions to watch in some of the key countries the rest of this year.

Some important countries have taken additional action at home this year. Mexico has adopted a national law which establishes in domestic law the country’s target to reduce its emissions 30 percent below business-as-usual emissions by 2020 and 50 percent below 2000 levels by 2050.  The law sets in place the foundation for even greater action by Mexico under future Administrations.

The South Korean Government approved a mandatory carbon trading program for its biggest polluters. The legislation is set to go into effect in 2015 and would cap the carbon pollution from power plants, steel plants, ship makers, and large universities.  The final details are still to be worked out sometime this year so stay tuned.

South Africa announced that it will introduce a rising price on carbon pollution from major sources starting in 2013.  The proposal is to implement the carbon tax at a level of $16 per ton in 2013, with annual increases of 10 percent through 2019.  Final details could come later this year.

The European Union program to reduce the carbon pollution from aviation has gone into effect. Starting this January all aircraft that choose to use European airports have to reduce their carbon pollution that is causing global warming.  It is a common-sense approach which helps to slow the growth of pollution from aviation – which is set to almost double by 2025 if left uncontrolled.  Unfortunately this program is under constant attack by the “coalition of the inaction”, but to date the E.U. has shown no signs that it is willing to let these attacks undermine its law.

The U.S. has proposed some new rules for the carbon pollution from power plants and methane from natural gas.  More than one million citizens have submitted comments in support of the power plant rules—the most in the history of any environmental rule in the U.S. In addition, the U.S. government has finalized important standards for major appliances that will significantly reduce how much energy they use (e.g., clothes washing machines and microwaves).  Later this year we also expect that the final standards for the global warming pollution from new passenger vehicles will be extended through 2025.

Clean energy continues to soar. In 2011, new clean energy investments rose to a record $263 billion – a 6.5 percent increase from last year. So while many policymakers and commentators still perceive renewable energy as something that can be done only if you have lots of extra money for incentives, the reality is quite different.  For example, one new study from Bloomberg New Energy Finance concluded that: “power generated from solar photovoltaic (PV) panels is much closer to competitiveness with conventional electricity generation than many policy-makers and commentators have realized.”

The Brazilian decision on changes to the forest law – will reductions in deforestation slow? In recent years Brazil has shown remarkable progress in reducing the rate of deforestation and the associated global warming pollution thanks to some policies the government adopted.  But just as Brazil is about to host a critically important high-level Summit – Rio+20—President Dilma Rousseff is being confronted with a law that changes the Brazilian Forest Law in a way that would dramatically increase deforestation in the coming years. Will she veto this law as more than 1.8 million people have now demanded or will Rio+20 be chopped down by deforestation?

Acting Now: What Other Actions Will Come This Year?

Over the remainder of this year it will be critical that the countries that made commitments at Copenhagen, Cancun, and Durban follow through with even more action as their existing action isn’t sufficient to meet their commitments or fully address global warming.  In addition, it will be critical that the remaining big polluters step up to the plate and make commitments as there is a “missing 20%” of the world’s global warming pollution that have yet to outline their commitments.

Will further steps be taken this year by the key countries and will new countries come forward with commitments?

Jake Schmidt is the International Climate Policy Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard and was reprinted with permission.

by Jeffrey Cavanagh

During this weekend’s G-8 summit hosted by President Obama at Camp David, leaders from the Group of Eight nations endorsed a new plan to combat “short-lived climate polluters,” with a focus on methane, black carbon, and hydroflurocarbons (HFCs).

According to the Camp David Declaration — the official communiqué endorsed by all G-8 leaders at the end of the summit — short-lived pollutants significantly contribute to global warming, and limiting their release will help prevent a substantial number of premature deaths around the world:

Recognizing the impact of short-lived climate pollutants on near-term climate change, agricultural productivity, and human health, we support, as a means of promoting increased ambition and complementary to other CO2 and GHG emission reduction efforts, comprehensive actions to reduce these pollutants, which, according to UNEP and others, account for over thirty percent of near-term global warming as well as 2 million premature deaths a year.

The Group of Eight nations will now join the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-lived Climate Pollutants, a partnership originally launched by the United States, with Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico and Sweden, in February of this year. Additional G-8 members to the Coalition will include France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan, and Russia.

Unlike carbon dioxide, which can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, climate pollutants such as methane, black carbon, and HFCs are generally much shorter lived; however they are much more effective at raising global temperatures.

Methane, a shorter-living gas, is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period, and has contributed to roughly 50 percent of tropospheric ozone helping warm the planet. HFCs, a common refrigerant, are thousands of times more potent. Black carbon — or soot — lands on ice caps and glaciers, increasing melting and preventing the reflection of sunlight. Reducing these short-lived pollutants will help countries meet near-term international climate change goals.

The G-8 operates with an “imperative” to promote economic growth and create jobs, and the group’s willingness to address climate change and short-lived pollutants rightly suggests that fighting climate change by curbing greenhouse gasses can also facilitate economic growth.

According to a White House fact sheet released during the summit, fostering sustainable economic development is “essential” for addressing both the challenges of climate change as well as international economic insecurity:

The development of and universal access to environmentally safe, sustainable, secure, and affordable sources of energy is essential to global economic growth and to their overall efforts to address climate change.

G-8 leaders also agreed to support initiatives of the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), a collaborative effort of 23 countries that brings together the world’s major carbon emitters in a smaller forum than the UNFCCC. G-8 countries agreed to build on current initiatives in the CEM, which already cover 90 percent of clean energy investment and 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, including the Super-efficient Equipment and Appliances Deployment (SEAD) initiative and working through the CEM to share best practices for efficient energy management in industry and government. Additional G-8 support for the CEM’s 21^st Century Power Partnership will enhance high-volume renewable energy and smart-grid technology development, as part of the 20-country International Smart Grid Action Network.

The G-8’s decision to reduce short-lived pollutants represents another, effective approach in combination with broader efforts to address carbon dioxide. Reducing these pollutants will save lives and help curb near-term global warming. That’s a win-win for everyone.

Jeffrey Cavanagh is an intern with the international climate team at the Center for American Progress.

Photo: Jefferson Beck/NASA

by Michael D. Lemonick, via Climate Central

The sea ice that blankets the Arctic Ocean each winter peaked in early March this year, as usual, and is now in retreat, en route to its annual minimum extent in September. How low it will go is something scientists worry: Ice reflects lots of sunlight back into space, and when the darker ocean underneath is exposed, more sunlight is absorbed to add to global warming.

That’s the simple version of the story, but things look even worse when you dig into the details. For one thing, all that open water does re-freeze each winter, but it freezes into a relatively thin layer known as seasonal, or first-year ice. Because it’s so thin, first-year ice tends to melt back quickly the following season, giving the ocean a chance to warm things up even more in what National Snow and Ice Data Center director Mark Serreze has called a “death spiral” that could lead to ice-free Arctic summers by 2030.

But it’s worse than that, says a new analysis by scientists at the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research Laboratory in Hanover, N.H. “First-year ice is not just thinner, “ said Donald Perovich, lead author of a report in Geophysical Research Letters, in an interview. “We’re also beginning to realize it has other properties.” The most important: New ice is less reflective than old ice, for most of the year, anyway. It absorbs more heat from the Sun, which means it doesn’t just melt faster: It actually speeds up its own melting.

Here’s how it happens, according to Perovich. “Most of the precipitation in the Arctic,” he said, “happens at the end of summer and in the early fall.” When the snow first begins to fall, it builds on the multi-year ice, but disappears onto the patches of open ocean. Those patches eventually freeze, and the snow sticks there as well; it just forms a thinner layer. So for most of the winter, all of the ice, thick and thin, is covered with a brightly reflective blanket. That would be good as far as warming is concerned, except that for most of the winter, the Sun doesn’t rise.

When the Sun finally does rise in spring, it melts the thinner snow first, forming heat-absorbing pools on the surface of the first-year ice. The older ice eventually catches up, forming pools of its own, but since the surface is crumpled, the ponds don’t spread as widely, and they absorb less heat.

In short, the death spiral — where more melting leads to more melting — appears to be even steeper than anyone thought.

That doesn’t mean that there’s less ice literally every year. The lowest levels ever recorded happened in September of 2007; since then, coverage has been bouncing around near, but not quite at, those historic lows, and first-year ice in the winter has been near its historic highs.

“What it means,” Perovich said, “is that with more seasonal ice, the Arctic is more susceptible to an outlier kind of year.” If there’s significantly more heat in a particular year due to natural variations, in other words, there could be a huge loss of ice. It’s kind of like a staircase, Petrovic said. “It bounces around for a while, then there’s a drop to a new normal, then it bounces around.” The point, he said, is that “we now have a type of ice cover that’s even easier to knock over than it was before.”

What that means is that at some point in the not too distant future, an unusually warm summer (even for a globally warming world) could knock the ice in the Arctic ocean down another major step, and take the world closer to the time when all of it vanishes — creating a new heat-trapping region where none existed before, and pushing climate change into an even higher gear.

– Michael Lemonick covered science and the environment for TIME magazine for nearly 21 years, where he wrote more than 50 cover stories. This piece was originally published at Climate Central and was reprinted with permission.

Related Posts:

• Arctic Death Spiral Continues (9/11): Sea Ice Volume Hits Record Low for Second Straight Year
• The Arctic Death Spiral Continues (3/12): Thick, Multi-Year Sea Ice Melting Faster, NASA Study Finds

“The average thickness of the Arctic sea ice cover is declining because it is rapidly losing its thick component, the multi-year ice. At the same time, the surface temperature in the Arctic is going up, which results in a shorter ice-forming season,” explains NASA senior scientist

The situation in the country illustrates the cruel reality of “rollercoaster” extreme weather — a problem that will only be exacerbated by accumulating heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. Recent research also finds that the loss of Arctic ice favors extreme, prolonged weather events “such as drought, flooding, cold spells and heat waves.”

The rain has certainly helped some regions. But other parts of England were so dry, it could take months of record rainfall to bring groundwater levels back to normal. One aquifer close to London is 90 percent below normal levels for this time of year.

Experts in the country are explaining why the combination of extremely dry and extremely wet conditions make it harder to recover from drought. Climatewire reported on the problem:

“Heavy rain on parched ground is like pouring water on an old, dry sponge. Much of it will bounce off. The sponge needs to be wet in order to hold the water. Farmers are in a much better position than they were thanks to the rains. River levels have risen, soil moisture has increased and their water reserves have been replenished. But aquifers take much longer to fill,” said a spokeswoman for England’s Environment Agency.

According to figures from the Environment Agency, 42 percent of groundwater “indicator sites” are “exceptionally low.”

“Over the last two winters, the amount of rainfall we have had has been down 20 to 30 percent on what we would normally have. Most of the recharge of groundwater happens over the winter. We lost three to four months of groundwater recharge in total over that two-year period,” [explained Andrew McKenzie of the British Geological Survey McKenzie to Climatewire.]

“We have now had the wettest April ever, and you might think that would go halfway to recharging the groundwater. But we also had a very dry March, and the soils had already switched to summer, dry mode and had to switch back,” he added.

Ironically, when the rains hit in April after a dry March, the Environment Agency issued 13 severe flood warnings and 42 flood alerts for areas around the country — all while homeowners were banned from watering their gardens.

This will eventually be normal weather under a business as usual emissions scenario.

According to a study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, our current rate of emissions puts us on a path to dust bowl conditions in many areas of the world, while “precipitation may become more intense but less frequent (i.e., longer dry spells) under GHG-induced global warming. This may increase flash floods and runoff, but diminish soil moisture and increase the risk of agricultural drought.”

Related Posts:

• Must-See Video: Has Global Warming Caused A Quantum Jump In Extreme Weather?
• NOAA: Human-Caused Climate Change Already a Major Factor in More Frequent Mediterranean Droughts
• Study: Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse

by Jorge Madrid

The fossil fuel industry is aggressively pushing its drill-everywhere-drill-anything agenda, which would open up every square inch of America to extraction. So what would happen if we gave the industry what it wants?

Today, the Center for American Progress released “America’s Future Under ‘Drill, Baby, Drill,’” describing where we may be in the year 2030 if we continue down the path of fossil fuel dependency that the American Petroleum Institute (API) advocates a report on the organization’s “vision,” also released today.

If you ask API, that vision means opening up significant portions of our oceans that are currently off-limits to drilling; turning large swaths of our pristine public lands into areas for extraction; and pushing shortcuts in the environmental and public health review process to speed up permits.

In short, Big Oil wants a free ride to “Drill Baby Drill” straight into our children’s future.

But at what cost?

CAP’s report illustrates some of the costs we may incur if Big Oil gets its way: Intensifying heat waves, drought, and accelerated sea-level rise become a normal part of our warming, unchecked, carbon-spewing world. Public health impacts in the U.S. from smog and ozone quadruple, global food prices rise, and water scarcity exacerbates already-worsening conditions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

What will our economy look like under the “Drill Baby Drill” scenario? Consumers will be more vulnerable to spikes in the global oil market as clean energy and efficiency become an afterthought; public health costs add up as lawmakers strip needed regulations; and America misses an opportunity to invest in a globally-competitive clean energy sector, thus ceding leadership to China, India and Europe.

Of course, we can’t predict what 2030 will exactly look like. But we do have a massive body of scientific evidence showing us we must reduce emissions quickly today — otherwise, it will be too late.

Big Oil can no longer pretend that its vision is consistent with a prosperous, healthy future. Making our country more reliant on fossil fuels is good for the largest, most profitable companies in the world — but it’s terrible for society.

And now, come with us into the dystopian future, to the year 2030…

Jorge Madrid is a Research Associate for Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress.

by Peter Lehner, via NRDC’s Switchboard

In a recent PBS documentary, the mayor of Norfolk, Virginia, Paul Fraim, talks about how flooding has become a monthly occurrence in his town, and how global warming and sea level rise are as much a daily issue for him as education and fighting crime. In some parts of Norfolk, streets turn into rivers at high tide. Homes are flooded five out of six years. People lose their carpets, their appliances, their savings. And they can’t afford to move elsewhere.

Sea levels have risen 14 inches in Norfolk since 1930–almost double the global rate. Part of this alarming change is due to the natural sinking of the area’s soggy tidal lands, but part of it is due to the rising sea levels brought about by global warming. Like stranded polar bears in the North Pole, like disappearing island nations in the Pacific, waterlogged Norfolk is yet another symbol of global warming at work. And even though Norfolk is within spitting distance of our nation’s capital, Congress still hasn’t seemed to grasp the seriousness of the situation.

Turning a blind eye to the realities of global warming is a dangerous game. Scientists predict that sea levels will rise anywhere from 7 inches to 78 inches in the next 100 years (depending, in part, on how much we do to curb global warming pollution), which means that in a few generations, nearly five million people who currently live within 4 feet of high tide could be in the same boat as the residents of Norfolk.

New research shows that global warming will double the chance of a hundred-year flood occurring in many locations within the next 18 years. In some areas, the chance is tripled.

Nearly half the states in the nation will be affected by rising sea levels. Despite these odds, for the most part, we are financially, structurally, and administratively unprepared to deal with the most immediate consequences of global warming.

Bailing out after a flood is a major expense not only for swamped cities, but for taxpayers all over the country. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, spent more than $100,000 per home in Norfolk to raise residences above expected water levels. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), run by FEMA, is nearly $18 billion in debt, and has had to borrow money from the Treasury to stay afloat.

Part of the problem is that federal insurance coverage is based on maps which only take historical data into account, and make no predictions about future flooding. This is senseless: we know perfectly well we’re looking at a future unlike anything we’ve seen in the past. So-called “century” floods are practically a yearly occurrence in some areas. Frequent, furious storms and higher seas are the new normal. The Norfolk-Virginia Beach area ranks 10th in the world for assets most at risk due to rising sea levels. Miami ranks first.

Private insurers have a pretty good idea of what the future will hold–they’ve basically gotten out of the market for disaster coverage in high-risk flood areas, making federal insurance the only option. The U.S. Navy knows the score, too: they’ve commissioned a study to find out how global warming will affect their activities in Norfolk, where it runs the largest naval base in the world, home to the U.S. Atlantic fleet and 54,000 active duty personnel. Researchers are modeling how rising sea levels and more frequent, intense storms might affect naval operations and facilities, possibly delaying performance for hours or resulting in, as the military says, “mission impairment.”

Some states are doing their part to prepare for the reality of sea level rise. California has a comprehensive climate adaptation plan, which includes directives for state agencies to assess and reduce the risks of sea level rise to construction projects in flood-risk areas. Massachusetts is working to conserve and restore critical wetlands and buffer zones to enhance natural flood protection. Pennsylvania, even though it’s not on the coast, faces threats to its water supply from saltwater intrusion into the Delaware River. The state is turning to green infrastructure to improve water quality, using features like green roofs and rain gardens to absorb excess stormwater and reduce the flow of sediment and pollution into waterways.

It’s Congress that seems unable to confront the reality of global warming, a head-in-the-sand approach that puts our property, our health, and our money at risk. The NFIP, by providing insurance coverage for buildings in flood-prone areas, is actually encouraging development where, practically speaking, there should be none. The program should focus on incentives that will help homeowners prepare their homes to better withstand flooding, saving lives and lowering the cost of rebuilding. Studies estimate that prevention and mitigation strategies save $4 dollars for every dollar spent. The intention of the program was to help people in need, and it should continue to do so. But basing coverage on inaccurate, unscientific maps doesn’t do anyone any favors. It’s misleading to homeowners and all taxpayers who share the burden of the costs of flooding.

Ignoring the threat of rising seas leaves too many people in harms’ way. We need to step up efforts to reduce global warming pollution, and make plans to ensure that our homes, our businesses, and our health are protected. This is where the government needs to play its role as defender of the public interest, and start seriously examining the consequences of global warming.

Peter Lehner is the Executive Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard and was re-posted with permission.

Seriously, this is a show that says things like “We used electricity for everything. Even to grown food and pump water. But after the blackout, nothing worked. Not even car engines or jet turbines. Hell, even batteries. All of it. Gone forever.” Except that absent some mysterious magical thing or scientific nonsense Abrams and Eric Kripke, his co-creator dream up for introduction at some point, electricity doesn’t have an on-off switch: it’s generated by many different methods. Messing with the grid that distributes electricity is not the same thing as removing our capacity to ever generate and distribute more of is. We don’t use electricity to make airplanes stay up, we use jet fuel—20.2 billion gallons of it annually as of 2009. And while hybrid electric cars are on the market, those too rely on internal combustion engines, which in turn are powered by fossil fuels.

I’m fully aware, of course, that most television is based on junk science. But the reason this is particularly disappointing is that Kripke and Abrams are setting up a scenario here that undermines precisely what science fiction has the potential to do: reckon with what we’ve done to ourselves and posit solutions, be they scientific or societal. A magic shutdown scenario, rather than a situation where we’ve run out of fossil fuels, doesn’t require us to grapple with what we’ve done to ourselves—there are no contractions of services, no resource hoarding, no slow adaptation and competition between classes or nations. The blame can and probably will be placed on some sort of mysterious cabal rather than our collective inability to radically change our energy use. And the solution will be in the form of hidden knowledge possessed by an equally small and brilliant cabal, rather than major, painful, realignments in the way we live our lives and innovation that changes it. Setting up its central conceit this way, Revolution is a fantasy of an energy crisis where no one is to blame, in the same way that Tony Stark’s building-powering arc reactor (a great discussion of the relevant zoning issues is available here) is a fantasy that an alternative to fossil fuels is just around the corner.

But at least The Avengers argues that green energy innovation is sexy (as will, apparently, Marion Cotillard in The Dark Knight). That’s much more attractive than a fantasy in which an energy crisis happens to us as innocent victims, rather than an acknowledgement that we happened to the world’s energy reserves.

I’m traveling, so let me focus first on Hoerling’s incorrect statements — posted on this blog and DotEarth — about drought. As readers know, the journal Nature asked me to write a Comment piece on the threat posed by drought after they read one of my posts examining the latest science on prolonged drought and “Dust-Bowlification.”

The Nature article, which is basically a review of recent drought literature, is here (subs. req’d). Most of the text is here.

The research I did for that article — along with the comments of the expert reviewers I sent it to — is why I know Hoerling is quite wrong. Hoerling begins by quoting Hansen’s recent New York Times Op-Ed piece:

“Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.”

Hoerling then asserts:

He doesn’t define “several decades,” but a reasonable assumption is that he refers to a period from today through mid-century. I am unaware of any projection for “semi-permanent” drought in this time frame over the expansive region of the Central Great Plains. He implies the drought will be due to a lack of rain (except for the brief, and ineffective downpours)….

But facts should, and do, matter to some. The vision of a Midwest Dustbowl is a scary one, and the author appears intent to instill fear rather than reason.

That’s a very serious attack on Hansen — if it were true. But it isn’t, and it should be retracted.

The fact is that the recent literature examining warming-driven drought in America could not be clearer in warning about a “semi-permanent” (or worse) drought in both the South West and the Central Great Plains and “More and more of the Midwest.” Here are two studies that lay things out starkly:

• Aiguo Dai of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “Drought under global warming: a review” (2010)
• Michael Wehner et al., “Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico” (2011)

I would also add the 2010, Environmental Research Letters article “Characterizing changes in drought risk for the United States from climate change.”

And that’s not even counting the Journal of Geophysical Research study that Hansen himself co-authored in 1990, “Potential evapotranspiration and the likelihood of future drought,” which projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenomenon by mid-century.

As an important aside, contrary to what Hoerling states, Hansen was not implying the drought will be due to lack of rain (by itself). Everyone seriously writing about warming-driven drought knows we are talking about a combination of factors, ones that I laid out in my Nature article:

Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temperature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl; and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season.

Obviously, since Hansen coauthored an article titled, “Potential evapotranspiration and the likelihood of future drought,” we know he understands the drought conditions are driven by more than precipitation changes. The whole point of that 1990 paper was to examine the impact of warming-driven evaporation on soil moisture and drought.

It is quite surprising that Hoerling doesn’t appear to know the drought literature given that, as Revkin notes, he “runs an effort by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to assess the forces contributing to extreme weather events!”

Hoerling says it is reasonable to assume Hansen means “a period from today through mid-century.” Hansen says the “semi-permanent drought” will develop “over the next several decades.” That would clearly seem to mean that these conditions will evolve by just after mid-century, the 2050s and 2060s. This is also the first period of time where aggressive action to reduce emissions today could substantially change the projected climate.

Dai’s analysis does indeed project drought conditions over the Great Plains and Midwest. He is in the process of revising his analysis, but the figure below (which had been his 2030s projection in his original version) is a rough representation of where his analysis projects things will be in Hansen’s time frame for the U.S.

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here).

And this isn’t just Dai’s finding. Michael Wehner et al. find the drying has the same signature. The study is behind a firewall, but you can see a PDF of a  PowerPoint presentation here.

Of course, just because several models project this future doesn’t make it a certainty.  As I note in the article, “drought models need to be improved. They successfully chart the hydrological changes seen in the US Southwest and the drying seen at the global level⁷, but regional predictions can be disturbingly variable.”

On the other hand, these models most certainly are not the worst-case scenario. Dai is modeling A1B (720 ppm), whereas we are on track for worse than that. A  plausible worst-case scenario is here (and below):  Royal Society Special Issue on Global Warming Details ‘Hellish Vision’ of 7°F (4°C) World — Which We May Face in the 2060s!

Hansen’s use of the term “Dust Bowl” is justified since that is the term widely used in the drought literature (see below). We are talking conditions that become as bad as the original Dust Bowl by mid-century and then get much, much worse for a long, long time. The Nature editors made repeated use of the term “Dust-Bowlification,” and I was particularly delighted that one of the leading experts in the field that I sent the piece to, Jonathan Overpeck, also liked the term.

Indeed, Hoerling’s critique is really only about whether the semi-permanent drought conditions will extend outside the U.S. SW to include most of Northern U.S. Great Plains. The literature is very clear that the Southwest is very likely headed for Dust Bowl conditions:

• In 2007, Science (subs. req’d) published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California. And they were also only looking at a 720 ppm case.
• In December 2008, the Bush Administration quietly released a US Geological Survey stunner: SW faces “permanent drying” by 2050, which found:

The serious hydrological changes and impacts known to have occurred in both historic and prehistoric times over North America reflect large-scale changes in the climate system that can develop in a matter of years and, in the case of the more severe past megadroughts, persist for decades. Such hydrological changes fit the definition of abrupt change because they occur faster than the time scales needed for human and natural systems to adapt, leading to substantial disruptions in those systems. In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier.

• NOAA: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe.  This January 2009 PNAS paper finds

… the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop….   Among illustrative irreversible impacts that should be expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450-600 ppmv over the coming century are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the “dust bowl” era

So again, the ‘debate’ such as it is, is how far into the northern US Great Plains and Midwest these Dust Bowl conditions will extend — and that’s without even considering the impact of the increasingly early loss of the winter snowpack, which most of these studies don’t even model. Since the recent literature suggests the droughts will extend that far, Hansen’s warning is justified by the literature.

And Hansen’s use of the phrase “semi-permanent” is fully warranted.  Given that the drought conditions just keep getting worse and worse as long as we keep warming –  and are “largely irreversible for 1000 years” (according to a NOAA-led paper), “semi-permanent” seems like a rather mild word.

Bottom Line: Given how catastrophic it would be to the nation and the world if our breadbasket were indeed hit by these conditions, Hansen’s warning seems fully justified and Hoerling’s response does not.

Finally, it’s always worth repeating that much of  human behavior and government policy is driven by the desire to avoid it worst-case scenarios, which is why we have fire insurance and catastrophic health insurance — and a military budget equal to that of the next 16 countries combined.

If we look at the plausible worst case for climate, we get both continuing high levels of emissions and high carbon-cycle feedbacks.  That possibility was discussed in a Royal Society Special Issue on a 7°F (4°C) World, which notes “In such a 4°C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world.”

This would be the worst-case for the 2060s, but is in any case, close to business as usual for 2090s:

This is 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic. The drought conditions that would be created by such warming over most of the central and western U.S. are beyond imagining.

And there is every reason to believe that the earth would just keep getting hotter and hotter:

• Science stunner — On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter:  Paleoclimate data suggests CO2 “may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models”

Indeed, Steve Easterbrook’s post “A first glimpse at model results for the next IPCC assessment” shows that for the scenario where there is 9°F warming by 2100, you get another 7°F warming by 2300.  Of course, folks that aren’t motivated to avoid the civilization-destroying 9°F by 2100 won’t be moved by whatever happens after that.

So if folks want to quibble about whether the semi-permanent Dust Bowl that the U.S. Southwest is headed to by mid-century might not spread to the northern U.S. Great Plains for, say, another few decades after that, well, I must say they are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

How many major scientific articles have to be published before people realized that on our current emissions path we are simply headed towards self-destruction of modern civilization, where feeding 9 billion people will be exceedingly problematic to say the least?

Related Post:

• Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security

A new report card issued by European marine researchers details the ecological and economic impact that climate change is having on fisheries in the UK and Scotland — concluding that there are “clear indications that climate change is affecting fish stocks” in the region.

The report card features a map of changes currently underway. In southwest England, there are increases in blue fin tuna, triggerfish, thresher sharks, stingrays, and ocean sunfish; In the North Sea, fisherman are catching far more squid, shifting from a traditional focus on haddock and cod; and on the coast of eastern England, fisherman are seeing major declines in cod due to overfishing and changing temperatures.

A rise in ocean temperatures could have mixed results in Europe, wiping out some fish stocks and making others more abundant. But the net impact would be unquestionably bad, warn the researchers:

Projected global redistributions of fish will affect different parts of the world unequally. By 2050, tropical regions could experience significant declines in landings with gains in some high latitudes. The overall cost of adaptation of the fisheries sector worldwide in response to climate change is predicted to be large and could lead to losses in gross fisheries revenues of $10–31 billion by 2050.

If ocean temperatures rise by 1 degree Celsius, the report predicts that mussel harvests could fall by half, while increasing storms could damage salmon farms — potentially introducing new predators or causing farmed salmon to escape in the wild and hybridize wild stocks.

The report card was put together by Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership, a group of scientists from government agencies and NGOs. While some of the long-term predictions for fisheries are sketchy, the impacts today are already being seen: “There are clear changes in the depth, distribution, migration and spawning behaviours of fish – many of which can be related to warming sea temperatures.”

NASA scientist: “It’s possible that as large areas of sea ice melt and expose more ocean water, methane production may increase, leading to larger methane emissions…. So our finding could represent a noticeable new global source of methane.”

A new airborne study measured surprising levels of the potent greenhouse gas methane coming from cracks in Arctic sea ice and areas of partial sea ice cover. Photo: JPL.

NASA news release

Study Finds Surprising Arctic Methane Emission Source

The fragile and rapidly changing Arctic is home to large reservoirs of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. As Earth’s climate warms, that methane is vulnerable to possible release into the atmosphere, where it can add to global warming.

Researchers have known for years that large amounts of methane are frozen in Arctic tundra soils and in marine sediments (including gas hydrates). But now a multi-institutional study led by Eric Kort of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has uncovered a surprising and potentially important new source of methane: the Arctic Ocean itself.

The photograph above was taken by Kort, and it shows leads and cracks in the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska. During five research flights in 2009–10, Kort and colleagues measured increased methane levels while flying at low altitudes north of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in a National Science Foundation/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Gulfstream V aircraft as part of the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) airborne campaign.

The methane level detected during the flights was about one-half percent higher than normal background levels.
 But where was the methane coming from? The team detected no carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, which would have been a signature of methane coming from the human combustion of fuels. And based on the time of year, the location, and the nature of the emissions, it was unlikely that the methane was coming from high-latitude wetlands or geologic reservoirs.

By comparing the locations of the enhanced methane levels with airborne measurements of carbon monoxide, water vapor, and ozone, the researchers from six institutions pinpointed a source: the ocean surface, in places where there were cracks and openings in the sea ice cover. The cracks were allowing methane in the top layers of the sea to escape into the atmosphere. The team did not detect enhanced methane levels over areas of solid ice.

Kort noted that previous studies had detected high concentrations of methane in Arctic surface waters, but no one had predicted that this dissolved methane would find its way into the overlying atmosphere. Scientists are not yet sure how the methane is produced, but Kort suspects biological productivity in Arctic surface waters may be the culprit.

“It’s possible that as large areas of sea ice melt and expose more ocean water, methane production may increase, leading to larger methane emissions,” he said. “While the methane levels we detected weren’t particularly large, the potential source region, the Arctic Ocean, is vast. So our finding could represent a noticeable new global source of methane.”

Kort, E.A., et al (2012) Atmospheric observations of Arctic Ocean methane emissions up to 82° north.Nature Geoscience 5, 318–321.

– Alan Buis, NASA JPL

Related Climate Progress Posts:

• The Arctic Death Spiral Continues: Thick, Multi-Year Sea Ice Melting Faster, NASA Study Finds
• NSIDC/NOAA: Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100
• Nature:  Climate Experts Warn Thawing Permafrost Could Cause 2.5 Times the Warming of Deforestation!
• Arctic Methane Outgassing On The East Siberian Shelf: A Primer Plus an Interview with Dr. Natalia Shakhova
• RealClimate Is Alarmed by Arctic Methane, Should You Be?
• Carbon Time Bomb in the Arctic: New York Times Gets the Story Right

The effects of global warming are making it more difficult for reservoir managers to control floods and manage flows for irrigation, recreation and fisheries.

Two days of record high temperatures and two days of record rainfall the same week in late April sent 26,000 cubic feet per second surging into the Boise River dam system, forcing federal river managers to increase flows to more than 8,100 cfs — the highest flow out of Lucky Peak Dam since 1998 and just the second time it has hit 8,100 in 30 years.

The water station at Twin Springs on the Middle Fork of the Boise River has been recording flow data for 100 years. Such long-term monitoring is increasingly important — and rare — as scientists try to understand long-range effects of climate change. PROVIDED BY USGS

We reported last year on a US Geological Survey study that found “Global Warming Drives Rockies Snowpack Loss Unrivaled in 800 Years, Threatens Western Water Supply.”

As many recent studies find, it is increasingly going to be feast or famine, flood or drought, because of manmade climate change (see “Study: Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse“).

As the Idaho Statesman piece explains:

The more variability in the climate, the harder it is for the two federal dam-managing agencies to balance their competing tasks of preventing floods while filling the reservoirs to provide water for various uses.

The evidence that the runoff timing has changed is based on streamflow gauges maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey. One of the oldest is the gauge on the Middle Fork of the Boise River, installed near Twin Springs above Arrowrock Dam in 1912.

It shows that runoff that used to begin in early April now starts in late March. That flow used to peak in late May or June, but now peaks in early May.

Droughts and wet years have come and gone over the past century on the Boise River, said USGS hydrologist Greg Clark. But the past 30 years have generally been drier. With the snowpack melting earlier, that leaves flows even lower in the late summer and fall in the tributaries above reservoirs and in rivers without dams.

And this increase in extremes has real impact for real communities:

That affects things besides farmers’ irrigation water. It affects fish, for instance, especially since the water is getting warmer, said Clark, associate director for the Idaho Water Science Center in Boise.

It also affects recreation. On the Boise River, the longer period of high flows through town through the spring to prevent flooding delays floating season. On rivers such as the Middle Fork of the Salmon, low flows late in the season limit the number of days for whitewater rafting.

Yet, just as we need to be spending more money on measurement and planning, money for the key federal agencies is being cut and “money for the 100-year-old Boise Middle Fork streamflow gauge is in doubt.”

The story ends with a warning from Ron Abramovich, “a water-supply specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Boise”:

“A lot of people think global warming is going to be a gradual increase in temperatures,” said Abramovich. “It may be a roller coaster … kind of like the stock market.”

It is noteworthy that a local paper did such a good job of reporting on a subject that has proved challenging to say the least for many in the national media (see “Silence of the Lambs 2: Media Herd’s Coverage of Climate Change Drops Sharply — Again“). Special kudos to The Idaho Statesman for not undermining the science with any false balance.

by Dana Nuccitelli, via Skeptical Science

In previous Lessons from Past Predictions entries we examined Hansen et al.’s 1988 global warming projections (here and here).  However, James Hansen was also the lead author on a previous study from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) projecting global warming in 1981, which readers may have surmised from my SkS ID, is as old as I am.  This ancient projection was made back when climate science and global climate models were still in their relative infancy, and before global warming had really begun to kick in (Figure 1).

As Hansen et al. described it,

“The global temperature rose by 0.2°C between the middle 1960′s and 1980, yielding a warming of 0.4°C in the past century.  This temperature increase is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect due to measured increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Variations of volcanic aerosols and possibly solar luminosity appear to be primary causes of observed fluctuations about the mean trend of increasing temperature. It is shown that the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the century, and there is a high probability of warming in the 1980′s.”

This analysis from Hansen et al. (1981) shows a good understanding of the major climate drivers, even 31 years ago.  The study was also correct in predicting warming during the remainder of the 1980s.  The Skeptical Science Temperature Trend Calculator reveals that the trend from 1981 to 1990 was 0.09 +/- 0.35°C per decade – not statistically significant because this is such a short timeframe, but most likely a global warming trend nonetheless.

Global Warming Skeptics Stuck in 1981?

Hansen et al. noted that the human-caused global warming theory had difficulty gaining traction because of the mid-century cooling, which ironically is an argument still used three decades later to dispute the theory:

“The major difficulty in accepting this theory has been the absence of observed warming coincident with the historic CO2 increase. In fact, the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere decreased by about 0.5°C between 1940 and 1970, a time of rapid CO2 buildup.”

However, as we will see in this post, despite these doubts, the global warming projections in Hansen et al. (1981), based on the human-caused global warming theory, were uncannily accurate.

Climate Sensitivity

Hansen et al. discussed the range of climate sensitivity (the amount of global surface warming that will result in response to doubled atmospheric CO2 concentrations, including feedbacks):

“The most sophisticated models suggest a mean warming of 2° to 3.5°C for doubling of the CO2 concentration from 300 to 600 ppm”

This is quite similar to the likely range of climate sensitivity based on current research, of 2 to 4.5°C for doubled CO2.  Hansen et al. took the most basic aspects of the climate model and found that a doubling of CO2 alone would lead to 1.2°C global surface warming (a result which still holds true today).

“Model 1 has fixed absolute humidity, a fixed lapse rate of 6.5°C km-1 in the convective region, fixed cloud altitude, and no snow/ice albedo feedback or vegetation albedo feedback. The increase of equilibrium surface temperature for doubled atmospheric CO2 is ∆Ts ~1.2°C. This case is of special interest because it is the purely radiative-convective result, with no feedback effects.”

They then added more complexity to the model to determine the feedbacks of various effects in response to that CO2-caused warming.

“Model 2 has fixed relative humidity, but is otherwise the same as model 1.  The resulting ∆T, for doubled CO2 is ~1.9°C. Thus the increasing water vapor with higher temperature provides a feedback factor of ~1.6.”

“Model 3 has a moist adiabatic lapse rate in the convective region rather than a fixed lapse rate. This causes the equilibrium surface temperature to be less sensitive to radiative perturbations, and ∆T ~1.4°C for doubled CO2.”

“Model 4 has the clouds at fixed temperature levels, and thus they move to a higher altitude as the temperature increases. This yields ∆T ~2.8°C for doubled CO2, compared to 1.9°C for fixed cloud altitude. The sensitivity increases because the outgoing thermal radiation from cloudy regions is defined by the fixed cloud temperature, requiring greater adjustment by the ground and lower atmosphere for outgoing radiation to balance absorbed solar radiation.”

“Models 5 and 6 illustrate snow/ice and vegetation albedo feedbacks.  Both feedbacks increase model sensitivity, since increased temperature decreases ground albedo and increases absorption of solar radiation.”

Overall Hansen et al. used a one-dimensional model with a 2.8°C climate sensitivity in this study.  In today’s climate models, water vapor is generally a stronger feedback than modeled by Hansen et al. (i.e. see Dessler et al. 2008) and clouds generally weaker (i.e. see Dessler 2010), but their overall model sensitivity was very close to today’s best estimate of 3°C for doubled CO2.

Natural Temperature Influences

Hansen et al. discussed the effects of solar and volcanic activity on temperatures, which are the two main natural influences on global surface temperature changes.  Solar activity in particular posed a difficult challenge for climate modelers three decades ago, because it had not been precisely measured.

“for small changes of solar luminosity, a change of 0.3 percent would modify the equilibrium global mean temperature by 0.5°C, which is as large as the equilibrium warming for the cumulative increase of atmospheric CO2 from 1880 to 1980. Solar luminosity variations of a few tenths of 1 percent could not be reliably measured with the techniques available during the past century, and thus are a possible cause of part of the climate variability in that period.”

“Based on model calculations, stratospheric aerosols that persist for 1 to 3 years after large volcanic eruptions can cause substantial cooling of surface air…Temporal variability of stratospheric aerosols due to volcanic eruptions appears to have been responsible for a large part of the observed climate change during the past century”

The study compared the various potential global temperature influences of both natural and human effects in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Surface temperature effect of various global radiative perturbations, based on the one-dimensional model used in Hansen et al. Aerosols have the The ∆T for stratospheric aerosols is representative of a very large volcanic eruption.  From Hansen et al. (1981)

Hansen et al. ran their model using combinations of the three main effects on global temperatures (CO2, solar, and volcanic), and concluded:

“The general agreement between modeled and observed temperature trends strongly suggests that CO2 and volcanic aerosols are responsible for much of the global temperature variation in the past century.”

Due to the uncertainty regarding solar activity changes, they may have somewhat underestimated the solar contribution (Figure 3), but nevertheless achieved a good model fit to the observed temperature changes over the previous century.

Figure 3: Percent contributions of various effects to the observed global surface warming over the past 100-150 years according to Tett et al. 2000 (T00, dark blue), Meehl et al. 2004 (M04, red), Stone et al. 2007 (S07, green), Lean and Rind 2008 (LR08, purple), Stott et al. 2010 (S10, gray), Huber and Knutti 2011 (HR11, light blue), and Gillett et al. 2012 (G12, orange).

Projected Global Warming

Now we arrive at the big question – how well did Hansen et al. project the ensuing global warming?  Evaluating the accuracy of the projections is something of a challenge, because Hansen et al. used scenarios based on energy growth, but did not provide the associated atmospheric CO2 concentrations resulting as a consequence of that energy growth.  Nevertheless, we can compare their modeled energy growth scenarios to actual energy growth figures.

Figure 4 shows the projected warming based on various energy growth scenarios.  The fast scenario assumes 4% annual growth in global energy consumption from 1980 to 2020, and 3% per year overall from 1980 through 2100.  The slow scenario assumed a growth of annual global energy rates half as rapid as in the fast growth scenario (2% annual growth from 1980 to 2020).  Hansen et al. also modeled various scenarios involving fossil fuel replacement starting in 2000 and in 2020.

Figure 4:  Hansen et al. (1981) projections of global temperature.  The diffusion coefficient beneath the ocean mixed layer is 1.2 cm² per second, as required for best fit of the model and observations for the period 1880 to 1978. Estimated global mean warming in earlier warm periods is indicated on the right.

Since 1981, global fossil fuel energy consumption has increased at a rate of approximately 3% per year, falling between the Hansen et al. fast and slow growth scenarios.  Thus we have plotted both and compared them to the observed global surface temperatures from GISTEMP (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Hansen et al. (1981) global warming projections under a scenario of high energy growth (4% per year from 1980 to 2020) (red) and slow energy growth (2% per year from 1980 to 2020) (blue) vs. observations from GISTEMP with a 2nd-order polynomial fit (black).  Actual energy growth has been between the two Hansen scenarios at approximately 3% per year.  Baseline is 1971-1991.

The global surface temperature record has improved since 1981, at which time the warming from 1950 to 1981 had been underestimated.  Thus Figure 5 uses a baseline of 1971 to 1991 (sets the average temperature anomaly between 1971 and 1991 at zero), because we are most interested in how well the model projected the warming since 1981.  As the figure shows, the model accuracy has been very impressive.

The linear warming trends from 1981 through 2011 are approximtely 0.17°C per decade for Hansen’s Fast Growth scenario, 0.13°C per decade for the Slow Growth scenario, vs. 0.17°C per decade for the observed global surface temperature from GISTEMP.  Estimating that the actual energy growth and greenhouse gas emissions have fallen between the Fast and Slow Growth scenarios, the observed temperature change has been approximately 15% faster than the projections of the Hansen et al. model.

If the model-data discrepancy were due solely to the model climate sensitivity being too low, it would suggest a real-world climate sensitivity of approximately 3.2°C for doubled CO2, although there are other factors to consider, such as human aerosol emissions, which are not accounted for in the Hansen et al. model, and the fact that we don’t know the exact atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations associated with their energy growth scenarios.

Predicted Climate Impacts

Hansen et al. also discussed several climate impacts which would result as consequences of their projected global warming:

“Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climatic zones, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.”

We can check off all of these predictions.

• The southwestern United States and Central Asia have experienced frequent droughts in recent years;

• The West Antarctic ice sheet has eroded;

• Global sea level has risen; and

• The Northwest Passage opened in 2007

Christy’s Poor Critique

Climate “skeptic” John Christy, whose poor analysis of Hansen et al. (1988) we previously discussed, has also recently conducted a poor analysis of Hansen et al. (1981), posted on Pielke Sr.’s blog.  Christy attempts to compare the warming projections of Hansen et al. with his lower atmosphere temperature record from the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH).  However, Christy is comparing modeled surface temperatures to lower atmosphere temperature measurements; this is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Christy’s justification for this comparison is that surface temperature records and UAH show a similar rate of warming over the past several decades, but according to climate models, the lower atmosphere should warm approximately 20% faster than the surface.  Christy believes the discrepancy is due to a bias in the surface temperature record, but on the contrary, the surface temperature record’s accuracy has been confirmed time and time again (i.e. Peterson et al. 2003, Menne et al. 2010, Fall et al. 2011 [which includes Anthony Watts as a co-author!], Muller et al. 2011 [the BEST project], etc.).  There are good reasons to believe the discrepancy is primarily due to problems in the atmospheric temperature record, but regardless, a surface temperature projection should be compared to surface temperature data.

In addition, Christy removes the influence of volcanic eruptions (which have had a modest net warming effect over the past 30 years due to a couple of volcanic eruptions causing cooling during the early part of that timeframe) before comparing UAH record to the Hansen model projections, but he fails to remove other short-term effects like the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and solar activity (as was done by Foster & Rahmstorf [2011]), which have had cooling effects over that period.  As a result, Christy’s analysis actually biases the data in the cool direction prior to comparing it to the model, and as a result he arrives at the incorrect conclusion, wrongly claiming that Hansen et al. had over-predicted the ensuing global warming.

From Intrigue to Concern

The concluding paragraph of Hansen et al. expresses fascination at the global experiment we are conducting with the climate:

“The climate change induced by anthropogenic release of CO2 is likely to be the most fascinating global geophysical experiment that man will ever conduct.  The scientific task is to help determine the nature of future climatic effects as early as possible.”

While the grand global experiment humans are running with the climate remains a fascinating one, climate scientists have concluded that the nature of future climatic effects will be predominantly bad if we continue on our current greenhouse gas emissions path, and potentially catastrophic.  Over the decades James Hansen’s tone has grown increasingly alarmed, as he and most of his fellow climate scientists worry about the consequences of human-caused climate change.

Hansen et al. (1981) demonstrates that we have every reason to be concerned, as three decades ago these climate scientists understood the workings of the global climate well enough to predict the ensuing global warming within approximately 15%, and accurately predict a number of important consequences.  It’s high time that we start listening to these climate experts and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

This piece was originally published at Skeptical Science and was re-printed with permission.

Related Post:

• Right for 27 years: 1981 Hansen study finds warming trend that could raise sea levels