Some brutal droughts are raging around the world.  The one in Texas has, naturally, been receiving most of the attention in this country (see Warming-Enhanced Texas Drought Is Once in “500 or 1,000 Years … Basically Off the Charts,” Says State Climatologist).  Later in the week I’ll blog about the ones hitting Mexico and South America.

But Britain is clearly also being hit by one for the record books, as the UK Guardian reports:

Underground water supplies are being used to keep rivers flowing in the seasons when they are supposed to be replenished

… The impending crisis – which could have widespread consequences for farmers, food production, tourism, industry and domestic life – has been building for the past 18 months. Reservoirs were already low this time last year. Then came 2011, the driest year in England and Wales for 90 years.

In addition, we are now experiencing the driest winter on record, though this could change over the next few weeks, meteorologists have said. The crucial point is that boreholes and reservoirs are now at “notably low” or “exceptionally low” levels. At the RSPB reserve at Titchwell Marsh in Norfolk, springs have dried up and many of the birds, including populations of bearded tits, marsh harriers and reed warblers, are now struggling to find food. Fresh water plants and animals such as water voles are also suffering. “This is a very worrying situation to have at this time of year,” said Grahame Madge, an RSPB official. “This is an incredibly important wildlife site that we cannot afford to have damaged. We are going to have to look very carefully at how we manage water supplies there in coming years.”

A second article warns, “Half of UK households ‘could face water restrictions by April’.”

A key point is that warm weather droughts are much worse than cold weather droughts. Thanks to manmade global warming, future droughts will be fundamentally different from all previous droughts humanity has experienced because they will be very hot weather droughts, as I have written (see Must-have PPT: The “global-change-type drought” and the future of extreme weather).

The Guardian piece makes a similar point:

Whether these problems trigger a full drought in England this summer depends not just on rainfall but summer temperatures. Britain’s worst years for rainfall included 1921, 1933, and 1964, but these were not the worst years for drought. Summers then were relatively cool, and that made up for the lack of water in boreholes and reservoirs.

It was only when heatwaves began to take place, in years when water levels were only fairly low, that there were significant shortages. This occurred in 1911, 1955, and 1976.

In the case of 1976, the effects were devastating. The temperature reached 27C (80F) every day between 22 June and 16 July, and often climbed well above 32C (90F). Crucially, the previous summer and autumn had been very dry, while the winter of 1975-76 was also exceptionally dry, along with the spring of 1976.

Heath and forest fires broke out across southern England at the peak of the drought in August; 50,000 trees were destroyed at Hurn Forest in Dorset; and an estimated £500m of crops were lost across the country. Food prices rose by 12%. Many rivers ran dry.

There have been numerous studies that make clear warm weather droughts are worse.  I discuss one from the University of Arizona here:  “U.S. southwest could see a 60-year drought like that of 12th century — only hotter — this century.”  The study’s news release explains:

Droughts that are accompanied by warm temperatures have more severe impacts on ecosystems, said Meko, an associate research professor in the UA’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

That should be obvious, though as I will point out in a forthcoming piece on the Texas drought, if you are in denial about global warming, it will be very hard to plan for what is to come.

CO2 emissions by fossil fuels [1 ppm CO2 ~ 2.12 GtC, where ppm is parts per million of CO2 in air and GtC is gigatons of carbon] via Hansen. Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks several severe and irreversible warming impacts.  Hitting 800 to 1,000+ ppm — which is our current emissions path and the inevitable outcome of aggressively exploiting unconventional fuels like the tar sands as Nocera advocates — represents the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it as the recent scientific literature makes chillingly clear. [Estimated reserves and potentially recoverable resources are from EIA (2011) and GAC (2011).]

NY Times business columnist Joe Nocera responded to my post “Joe Nocera Joins the Climate Ignorati.”  He also interviewed Bill McKibben for his new column, “The Politics of Keystone, Take 2.”

But he is still very wrong, and he didn’t represent McKibben’s position well at all.  Nocera’s new arguments are more elaborate. Since you see them a lot from centrist economist types, I will respond  in some detail –  with the help of McKibben, who explains here what he was trying to explain to Nocera and why Nocera’s final paragraph is “very unfair.”

I’ll also show that Nocera holds the environmental costs of the pipeline up to a considerably different standard of analysis than he does his hand-waving assertions of the supposedly vastly larger non-environmental benefits of Keystone.  A leading expert on life-cycle greenhouse gas analyses of the tar sands responds to Nocera’s lowball estimate.

Nocera goes astray almost immediately:

Here’s the question on the table today: Can a person support the Keystone XL oil pipeline and still believe that global warming poses a serious threat?

To my mind, the answer is yes.

I know what you’re thinking.  Since when does Nocera “believe that global warming poses a serious threat”?

If Nocera really believes global warming poses a serious threat, you’d think he’d write about it regularly.  But his first Keystone article never mentioned warming and dismissed all environmental concerns.  Nocera wrote a long piece on the Chevy Volt last year and never mentioned warming or CO2 at all.

If you google his name and “global warming,” you’ll find 2008′s “At Exxon’s Can’t-Miss Meeting,” in which he touts the widely debunked nonsense peddled by physicist Freeman Dyson and dismisses knowledgeable people who express science-based views as trying to “push Exxon Mobil toward their belief system — their global warming religion.”

Needless to say, folks who “believe that global warming poses a serious threat” do not generally use the phrase “global warming religion.”  That was a key reason I called him a member of the climate ignorati.  The science says that global warming is an existential threat (see Lonnie Thompson on why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization” and literature review here).

Heck, the International Energy Agency, a staid and conservative group of economists and the like where Nocera should feel at home, says the world is on pace for 11°F warming and “Even School Children Know This Will Have Catastrophic Implications for All of Us”

So Nocera lacks any “street cred” to either pose or answer the “question on the table today,” as he has never shown any indication that he believes global warming poses a serious threat — and indeed he has written in the past as if he does not.  In his first Keystone piece last week he wrote:

Along with the natural gas that can now be extracted thanks to hydraulic fracturing — which, of course, all right-thinking environmentalists also oppose — the oil from the Canadian tar sands ought to be viewed as a great gift that has been handed to North America.  These two relatively new sources of fossil fuels offer America its first real chance in decades to become, if not energy self-sufficient, at least energy secure, no longer beholden to OPEC.

Now that doesn’t sound much like a climate realist.  Apparently Nocera wants us to think he is concerned about the global warming threat while simultaneously embracing full exploitation of unconventional oil and gas.  The analysis by James Hansen (and others) — previewed here and summarized in the chart at the top — makes clear that those two views are in fact incompatible.  [See also Bombshell Study: High Methane Emissions Measured Over Gas Field “May Offset Climate Benefits of Natural Gas.]

That’s a key reason why all the folks best known for worrying about the threat posed by global warming oppose the pipeline.

Let’s dive into the piece itself.

Nocera’s piece continues:

The crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, which the pipeline would transport to American refineries on the Gulf Coast, simply will not bring about global warming apocalypse. The seemingly inexorable rise in greenhouse gas emissions is the result of deeply ingrained human habits, which will not change if the pipeline is ultimately blocked. The benefits of the oil we stand to get from Canada, via Keystone, far outweigh the environmental risks.

Talk about moving the goal posts and misstating the problem and handwaving.  First off, no individual pool of carbon can “bring about global warming apocalypse” by itself.  But in combination with  the conventional coal, oil, and gas we are burning unconstrained — a policy Nocera appears to endorse wholeheartedly — then, yes, the tar sands will be a clear contributor to impacts that deserve the label apocalyptic.  Nocera would know that if he bothered to talk to real climate scientists like Hansen.

Blocking the tar sands isn’t about changing “human habits” — it’s about blocking access to a vast pool of carbon that needs to be left in the ground.  Obviously if  you frame all efforts to  stop catastrophic climate change as attempting to change “deeply ingrained human habits” then you can  hand wave all action away.

And speaking of  handwaving, Nocera  never actually quantifies the supposed “benefits of the oil we stand to get from Canada.”  That’s probably because such quantification is difficult if not impossible, since those benefits are minimal.

In fact, Nocera simply asserts that tar sands oil and shale gas gives us a chance to become “no longer beholden to OPEC.” But that may be the sloppiest statement Nocera has written on this subject.  He knows  that the price of oil is set on an international market.  The Keystone XL pipeline would carry up to 900,000 barrels of oil a day.  That’s a little over 1% of global supply (and 4% of U.S. supply, assuming we got it all, which we won’t) –  it will have no significant impact on the price of oil or OPEC’s ability to control price (neither will shale gas).  Now, if Nocera is really proposing a vast expansion of tar sands oil significant enough to be even, say, 10% of global oil supply, well, then  that would be precisely what opponents of the pipeline have been arguing — that it opens the door to levels of tar sands  exploitation that would in fact  make a major contributor to climate catastrophe.

Nocera continues:

When I tried to make that case on Tuesday, however, I was cast as a global warming “denier.” Joe Romm, who edits the Climate Progress blog, said that I had joined “the climate ignorati.” Robert Redford — yes, that Robert Redford — denounced my column in The Huffington Post. “Let’s put the rhetoric aside, and simply focus on the facts,” he wrote.

NOTE TO NOCERA: Calling you part of the climate ignorati does not mean I am casting you as a “global warming ‘denier’.” I reserve that term for people who spread long-debunked disinformation knowingly and/or as part of the broader anti-science disinformation campaign.  The ignorati are, as Google quickly reveals, “Elites who, despite their power, wealth, or influence, are prone to making serious errors when discussing science and other technical matters.”

Actually, Nocera didn’t try to make that case.  He never detailed the supposed benefits of the pipeline, and he called concerns about environmental risks posed by expansion of the tar sands “ludicrous.”

Nocera continues:

Yes, let’s. In particular, let’s focus on two issues that have become the cornerstone of the opposition to Keystone. The first is that the crude from the tar sands is, in Redford’s words, “the dirtiest oil on the planet” — so dirty, in fact, that it will dramatically increase greenhouse gas emissions and greatly exacerbate the growing threat of global warming.

There is no question that oil from the tar sands will increase greenhouse gases. But by how much? According to a study by IHS Cera, a leading energy research firm, the oil from the tar sands emits only 6 percent more greenhouse gases than other, lighter forms of oil. (Environmental groups have tried to poke holes in the study, but even they don’t come up with the kind of increase that would doom the planet.)

No and no.

First, the IHS Cera analysis isn’t transparent, and therefore it isn’t very useful.  It isn’t just enviros who have issues with it.   I interviewed one of the country’s foremost authorities on comparative lifecycle GHG analyses of the tar sands, Adam Brandt.  He is in Stanford’s Department of Energy Resources Engineering, and author of the December 2011 study, “Variability and Uncertainty in Life Cycle Assessment Models for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Canadian Oil Sands Production.”

I asked him why IHS Cera was on the low side of most other analyses and what he thought was the best range to use.  He said, “I am not sure of exactly what CERA did in their study” and “I have a hard time commenting on numbers that CERA derives, because I can’t see what they did.”  He says:

There is a lot of variability depending on the oil sands project in question.  I think a reasonable range for the existing oil sands projects is a 5%-30% increase over the California baseline value.  When speaking to reporters, I cite a baseline industry-average increase of 10-15% compared to the California baseline.

Second, again, to avoid catastrophic global warming we need to leave the majority of hydrocarbons in the ground — and the overwhelming majority of unconventional fossil fuels in the ground.  The tar sands is at the top of the list of unconventional fossil fuels that need to be left in the ground, particularly if you’re talking the kind of exploitation needed to actually have any impact whatsoever on U.S. energy security — see Hansen slams Keystone XL Pipeline: “Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.”

X-axis is the range of potential resource in billions of barrels. Y-axis is grams of Carbon per MegaJoule of final fuel.  [Graph source: Farrell and Brandt, "Risks of the oil transition," 2006.]

Nocera continues:

What’s more, there is plenty of oil being produced today with the same greenhouse gas consequences as the oil from the tar sands. As Michael Levi, an energy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, says, “The argument you hear is that because it increases greenhouse gas emissions, we shouldn’t tolerate it.  Well, so do the lights in my house.  You have to be discriminating.”

Seriously.

That may be the lamest analogy in the history of energy and climate.  Nocera is actually analogizing the GHG emissions increase from 900,000 barrels a day of dirty tar sands oil with flicking on the lights in your house!  And remember, Nocera wants a lot more oil than that.

How bad is this analogy?  Many people choose to get their  electricity from renewable sources — so for them turning on the lights don’t even increase GHGs.  The point is people don’t have any choice about  the dirty tar sands oil — but Obama does.

Nocera continues:

The second argument is that the tar sands oil won’t help the United States because it is all headed for export. This is perhaps the silliest argument of all. Right now, most of the big refineries on the Gulf Coast export around 20 percent of their refined product. Why? Because every barrel of crude oil is converted partly to diesel and partly to gasoline — and the rest of the world is far more reliant on diesel fuel than we are. The gasoline remains in the United States. Keystone wouldn’t change that equation one bit. Normally, one wouldn’t have to point out that exporting high-value products is good for the country. But, of course, improving our trade balance is irrelevant when you’re facing the apocalypse.

Actually, it isn’t a silly argument because Nocera titled his piece “The Politics of Keystone.” Exporting this oil is a political killer.  But in any case, Nocera is willing to hand wave away all the environmental arguments because Keystone would enrich U.S. refiners?

He continues:

You want to know another little secret about the tar sands? It’s already coming here, thanks to existing pipelines — and it is already doing us a great deal of good. The influx of Canadian oil is partly why our imports from OPEC are at their lowest level in nearly a decade. And because the crude from Canada is selling at a steep discount to Saudi Arabian crude, it is stabilizing the price at the pump.

Another handwaving argument.  Let’s see if Nocera can find a study that says 900,000 barrels of tar sand oil will lower US oil prices over the long term.  Good luck.

Consider an analogous case, the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2009 report, “Impact of Limitations on Access to Oil and Natural Gas Resources in the Federal Outer Continental Shelf.” The EIA  analyzed the difference between restrictions to offshore drilling and full offshore drilling, which means about half a million barrels of oil a day more in U.S. oil production in the 2020s and beyond.  In 2030, US gasoline prices would be three cents a gallon lower.  Woohoo!

Somewhat to my surprise, the most reasoned Keystone opponent I spoke to this week was Bill McKibben, who led the protests against it. Although the tar sands ranks as “the second biggest pool of carbon in the world,” he told me, “Keystone, by itself, won’t make or break the environment.”

Rather, he said, he and other environmentalists had decided to draw this particular line in the sand because stopping Keystone would help accelerate what he described as the difficult transition from a fossil fuel economy to a new, brighter world based on renewable sources of energy. “The most sensible way to go about dealing with global warming is one pipeline at a time,” he said. “These kinds of fights are extremely important because they are the way the message gets out that we need to change.”

You won’t be surprised to learn this isn’t what McKibben was saying.  McKibben writes me:

What I said, in fact, was ‘the most sensible way to about dealing with global warming is not one pipeline at a time.’ And of course that’s true–it would make the most sense to have a real policy that put a stiff price on carbon. But since that’s not happening at the moment, despite our best efforts, we’re in a constant fight to try and keep carbon in the ground wherever we can.  The tar sands are key for the reason we’ve said from the start: there’s so much carbon in there that if you tap it heavily it’s ‘game over for the climate’ no matter what else you do.

The other thing that i talked with him about but failed to get across was that the biggest danger was not the extra carbon in tar sands oil but the sheer scale of the new deposit they’re now opening up. He seems to have dropped his earlier insistence that they’d get it to Asia somehow anyway: I think he heard from people about the opposition to the Gateway pipeline.   He’s taking what I think he conceives of as a ‘realist’ stance, from someone immersed in the world of business and diplomacy. What i tried and failed to explain to him is that there’s a deeper kind of realism that comes from physics and chemistry, a kind of realphysics that will trump realpolitik.

Nocera ends his piece.

Maybe — just maybe — stopping the Keystone pipeline would be worth it if it really was going to change our behavior and help usher in the age of renewable energy. It would, indeed, be worth turning our backs on oil that we badly need and that is already making our country more secure and prosperous.

But let’s be honest. It’s not going to change anyone’s behavior. If Keystone is ultimately blocked, the far more likely result is that everyone who opposed it will get to feel good about themselves while still commuting to work, alone, in their S.U.V.’s.

Again, it’s clever but specious to turn this into an issue about changing our behavior.  We need to leave most of the fossil fuels in the ground and that should start with the tar sands.

McKibben writes:

The last paragraph is very unfair. ‘Everyone’ opposed to keystone is not commuting to work alone in their SUV; the people I’ve met in the course of this fight are the most spirited, engaged, sincere and lovely bunch of people I can imagine.

But you know, you could add one more thing from me please:  “Nocera at least heard the criticism of his column and circled back for another look. He didn’t reverse what he said, but he did soften his tone. And that’s good. This is complicated stuff if you’re new to it, the power of the status quo is strong, and over time our leading journalists are starting to figure it out. It wouldn’t surprise me if eventually he ended up where the New York Times editorial page arrived many months ago: understanding that Keystone really was an important part of the fight for a working planet.”

Hear!  Hear!

We’re going to war at noon eastern today–non-violent war, but a powerful, unified fight against the heart of right-wing power, the fossil fuel industry. We’re out to collect half a million emails in 24 hours telling the Senate: back up the president and keep this pipeline dead. It’s going to be the most concentrated burst of environmental activism this millennium–and it needs you.

This effort includes a diverse coalition of the national environmental movement — including the Environmental Defense Fund, Rainforest Action Network, the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Wildlife Federation and Green For All. As McKibben said, it’s “everyone else who’s ever tried to save a whale, clean a lake, build a park, find a solar job.”

The 24-hour push isn’t just a “green” cause, but one of the American progressive movement. Other organizations participating in the petition drive include MoveOn, Credo, Democracy for America, Public Citizen, Change.org, the Labor Network for Sustainability, and businesses like Patagonia.

Bill McKibben will be on the Colbert Report tonight to discuss the effort to prevent the destruction of our climate for the profit of foreign oil companies.

In addressing climate resilience, Robinson stressed the importance of focusing on health and burden impacts of climate change. One of the keys is access to reproductive health for women.

”The sexual and reproductive health and rights community should challenge the global architecture of climate change, and its technology focus, and shift the discussion to a more human-based, rights-based adaptation approach,” said a Lancet editorial in 2009. ”Such a strategy would better serve the range of issues pivotal to improving the health of women worldwide.”

“Increasing women’s reproductive rights should be at the heart of the climate discussion, in the same basket as strategies like increasing energy efficiency and researching new technologies,” Robert Engelman of Worldwatch said in 2010.

As Nick Kristoff said in 2011, family planning is a solution to “climate change to poverty to civil wars,” but it has become a “victim of America’s religious wars.”

The more world leaders focus on giving women and girls the tools of empowerment — access to family planning, education, and the political and economic system — the better future all of us will have.

A world where women and girls have more power is a healthier world.

Natural-gas operations could release far more methane into the atmosphere than previously thought. [Source: Nature]

How much methane leaks during the entire lifecycle of unconventional gas has emerged as a key question in the fracking debate.  Natural gas is mostly methane (CH4).  And methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned.

Even without a high-leakage rate for shale gas, we know that “Absent a Serious Price for Global Warming Pollution, Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere.”

But the leakage rate does matter.  A major 2011 study by Tom Wigley of the Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) concluded:

The most important result, however, in accord with the above authors, is that, unless leakage rates for new methane can be kept below 2%, substituting gas for coal is not an effective means for reducing the magnitude of future climate change.

The industry has tended kept most of the data secret while downplaying the leakage issue.  Yet I know of no independent analysis that finds a rate below 2%, including one by the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the DOE’s premier fossil fuel lab.

Now, as the journal Nature reports, we finally have some actual air sampling measurements, and they appear to confirm the higher estimates put forward by Cornell professor Robert Howarth:

When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog — but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. They eventually linked the mysterious pollution to a nearby natural-gas field, and their investigation has now produced the first hard evidence that the cleanest-burning fossil fuel might not be much better than coal when it comes to climate change.

Led by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado, Boulder, the study estimates that natural-gas producers in an area known as the Denver-Julesburg Basin are losing about 4% of their gas to the atmosphere — not including additional losses in the pipeline and distribution system. This is more than double the official inventory, but roughly in line with estimates made in 2011 that have been challenged by industry. And because methane is some 25 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, releases of that magnitude could effectively offset the environmental edge that natural gas is said to enjoy over other fossil fuels.

Methane is 25 times  more efficient than CO2 trapping heat over 100 year — but it is 100 times more efficient than CO2 trapping heat over two decades.

“If we want natural gas to be the cleanest fossil fuel source, methane emissions have to be reduced,” says Gabrielle Pétron, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA and at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and first author on the study, currently in press at the Journal of Geophysical Research. Emissions will vary depending on the site, but Pétron sees no reason to think that this particular basin is unique. “I think we seriously need to look at natural-gas operations on the national scale.”

UPDATE:  The 30-author study, led by NOAA researchers, “Hydrocarbon emissions characterization in the Colorado Front Range – A pilot study” is online here (subs. req’d).

Natural gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal per unit of energy when burned, but separate teams at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded last year that methane emissions from shale gas are much larger than previously thought. The industry and some academics branded those findings as exaggerated, but the debate has been marked by a scarcity of hard data.

“It’s great to get some actual numbers from the field,” says Robert Howarth, a Cornell researcher whose team raised concerns about methane emissions from shale-gas drilling in a pair of papers, one published in April last year and another last month (R. W. Howarth et al. Clim. Change Lett. 106, 679–690; 2011; R. W. Howarth et al. Clim. Change in the press). “I’m not looking for vindication here, but [the NOAA] numbers are coming in very close to ours, maybe a little higher,” he says.

Natural gas might still have an advantage over coal when burned to create electricity, because gas-fired power plants tend to be newer and far more efficient than older facilities that provide the bulk of the country’s coal-fired generation. But only 30% of US gas is used to produce electricity, Howarth says, with much of the rest being used for heating, for which there is no such advantage.

Late last year, some of the leading (center-right) economists in the country — Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus — concluded in a top economic journal that the total damages from natural gas generation exceed its value-added at a low-ball carbon price of $27 per ton! At a price of $65 a ton of carbon, the total damages from natural gas are more than double its value-added!

For the record, stabilizing at 550 ppm atmospheric concentrations of CO2, which would likely still be catastrophic for humanity, would require a price of $330 a metric ton of carbon in 2030, the International Energy Agency (IEA) noted back in 2008. So even leak-free, new gas generation isn’t a good investment if avoiding catastrophic warming is your goal.

Back in April, I wrote about Howarth’s controversial paper, “New study questions shale gas as a bridge fuel,” arguing:

This is a potentially game-unchanging conclusion for one of the seminal energy policy choices of this decade — how hard to push shale gas here and around the world.  And yet, as the lead author Cornell Prof. Robert Howarth explained to me in an interview, it is based upon very limited data.  And that’s in part because the industry has fought efforts to get more data.  Prof. Howarth agreed with my suggestion that this would be a very ripe topic for the National Academy of Sciences to review.

Howarth’s analysis does in fact appear to be vindicated by these real-world observations.  I asked him for comment.  He writes of the Nature piece:

As they point out, our estimates seem to be a little on the low side.  That’s not surprising, as we were pretty conservative in our published analysis.  This new paper has the first actual measurements at the landscape scale, which is exactly what has been needed (as we concluded in our first and second papers).

In truth, it would not have surprised me if their numbers had come out either considerably higher than or considerably lower than ours, but it is quite gratifying to see that they basically confirm our estimates, and suggest in fact that the greenhouse gas emissions are even somewhat worse than we had concluded.  This is bad news for the planet, but good news for our credibility.

He directed me to an online version of his new 2012 paper, which concludes:

We reiterate our conclusion from our April 2011 paper that shale gas is not a suitable bridge fuel for the 21st Century.

The fact that natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere was also demonstrated by the International Energy Agency in its big June 2011 report on gas — see IEA’s “Golden Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change.  That study — which had both coal and oil consumption peaking in 2020 — made abundantly clear that if we want to avoid catastrophic warming, we need to start getting off of all fossil fuels ASAP.

I’ll end with some more background detail on the study from Nature:

The first clues appeared in 2007, when NOAA researchers noticed occasional plumes of pollutants including methane, butane and propane in air samples taken from a 300-metre-high atmospheric monitoring tower north of Denver. The NOAA researchers worked out the general direction that the pollution was coming from by monitoring winds, and in 2008, the team took advantage of new equipment and drove around the region, sampling the air in real time. Their readings led them to the Denver-Julesburg Basin, where more than 20,000 oil and gas wells have been drilled during the past four decades.

Most of the wells in the basin are drilled into ‘tight sand’ formations that require the same fracking technology being used in shale formations. This process involves injecting a slurry of water, chemicals and sand into wells at high pressure to fracture the rock and create veins that can carry trapped gas to the well. Afterwards, companies need to pump out the fracking fluids, releasing bubbles of dissolved gas as well as burps of early gas production. Companies typically vent these early gases into the atmosphere for up to a month or more until the well hits its full stride, at which point it is hooked up to a pipeline.

The team analysed the ratios of various pollutants in the air samples and then tied that chemical fingerprint back to emissions from gas-storage tanks built to hold liquid petroleum gases before shipment. In doing so, they were able to work out the local emissions that would be necessary to explain the concentrations that they were seeing in the atmosphere. Some of the emissions come from the storage tanks, says Pétron, “but a big part of it is just raw gas that is leaking from the infrastructure”. Their range of 2.3–7.7% loss, with a best guess of 4%, is slightly higher than Corn­ell’s estimate of 2.2–3.8% for shale-gas drilling and production. It is also higher than calculations by the EPA, which revised its methodology last year and roughly doubled the official US inventory of emissions from the natural-gas industry over the past decade. Howarth says the EPA methodology translates to a 2.8% loss.

The Cornell group had estimated that 1.9% of the gas produced over the lifetime of a typical shale-gas well escapes through fracking and well completion alone. NOAA’s study doesn’t differentiate between gas from fracking and leaks from any other point in the production process, but Pétron says that fracking clearly contributes to some of the gas her team measured.

Capturing and storing gases that are being vented during the fracking process is feasible, but industry says that these measures are too costly to adopt. An EPA rule that is due out as early as April would promote such changes by regulating emissions from the gas fields.

Officials with America’s Natural Gas Alliance, based in Washington DC, say that the study is difficult to evaluate based on a preliminary review, but in a statement to Nature they add that “the findings raise questions and warrant a closer examination by the scientific community”.

I think a NAS study is warranted, but these actual measurements, coupled with the myriad other analyses raising questions about the “dash to gas,” are more than reason enough to slow down any major investment in natural gas infrastructure that we will be stuck with for decades.

Filling up existing underutilized natural gas power plants to generate electricity that displaces coal remains a reasonable near-term idea.  But building a significant number of new natural gas fired power plants — or  building a major infrastructure for natural gas vehicles, which don’t even have the efficiency benefits of gas power plants — remains a counterproductive lock-in of scarce resources needed elsewhere to avert catastrophic global warming.

Scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, say the frigid, snowy European winter has its origins in a warm Arctic summer. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that July 2011 was the fourth-warmest July on record. A warm summer in the Arctic cuts the amount of sea ice. NOAA reports that sea-ice levels last July were the lowest in three decades.

The effect is twofold, the Wegener scientists report. First, less ice means less solar heat is reflected back into the atmosphere. Rather, it is absorbed into the darker ocean waters. Second, once that heat is in the ocean, the reduced ice cap allows the heat to more easily escape into the air just above the ocean’s surface. Because warmer air tends to rise, the moisture-laden air near the ocean’s surface rises, creating instability in the atmosphere and changing air-pressure patterns, the scientists say.

In an interview with Conducive Chronicle, Dr. Jeff Masters explained why greenhouse pollution should be considered the most likely suspect for unprecedented behavior in the climate system:

The laws of physics demand that the huge amount of heat-trapping gases humans are pumping into the atmosphere must be significantly altering the fundamental large-scale circulation pattern of the atmosphere. Unprecedented behavior like we’ve witnessed in the configuration of the winter jet stream over North America — with the four most extreme years since 1865 occurring since 2006 — could very well be due to human-caused climate change. Something is definitely up with the weather, and it is clear to me that over the past two years, the climate has shifted to a new state capable of delivering rare and unprecedented weather events. Human emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide are the most likely cause of such a shift in the climate.

It’s critical to note that the southern hemisphere is also experiencing utterly extreme weather during its summer: Australia is deluged by flood, and heat waves and drought are crippling South America and Africa.

AtmosNews takes a lighthearted look at an unexpected analogy, explaining why some people call carbon dioxide (and the other greenhouse gases) the steroids of the climate system. Statistics and extreme behavior are involved, whether we’re talking about baseball or Earth’s atmosphere. NCAR scientist Gerald “Jerry” Meehl explains why.

NCAR has puts it together an very informative website on global warming and extreme weather, which I highly recommend.

Related Post:

• PBS Covers Link Between 2011′s “Mind-Boggling” Extreme Weather and Global Warming: It’s Like “Being on Steroids”

I’m not going to go out and say the sky is falling and that climate change is happening, but I’m very concerned about the risk of climate change. That many smart people are that worried, that I’d be a fool not to be concerned.”

A former geologist, Hickenlooper had expressed skepticism of the overwhelming scientific consensus about global warming at a speech before mining executives during the 2010 campaign. “I don’t think that the scientific community has decided with certainty that climate change is as catastrophic as so many people think,” he said.

That year, approximately 100,000 spruce trees a day were killed by a spruce beetle infestation spurred by warming temperatures in Colorado.

Also in 2010, ThinkProgress Green interviewed some of Colorado’s many climate scientists to respond to global warming conspiracy theorist Ken Buck, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. “There is no controversy about the role human actions have made to alter the climate system through the emissions of greenhouse gases over the past 150 years,” Dennis Ojima, chair of Colorado State’s Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory and a senior scholar with the Heinz Center said.

“It’s very likely it’s disruptive to anything we’re doing and take for granted at the moment,” Caspar M. Ammann, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research cautioned.

In 2009, Hickenlooper wasn’t as scornful of the scientific threat of carbon pollution from fossil fuels, instead calling it “one of the greatest challenges of our time.” Writing in the forward for “How the West Was Warmed,” Hickenlooper said that “the Rocky Mountain region is a showcase for both the most immediate and most dramatic impacts of global warming, from the mountain pine beetle epidemic to shrinking glaciers.”

(HT Colorado Independent)

In a reflection of the Jewish community’s ongoing commitment to caring for the planet, 50 Jewish leaders from across denominations signed the Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign to protect the environment in a ceremony in Manhattan on February 6, on the eve of Tu Bishvat, the Jewish festival of trees. The campaign’s declaration, titled the “Jewish Environment and Energy Imperative,” reads:

Out of concern for the wellbeing of all nations, and with a particular concern for the poorest among them as well as for future generations, our support for more sources of clean, renewable energy and for energy efficiency is a matter of justice. Enlightened stewardship is not only a religious and moral imperative; it is a strategy for security and survival.

The Covenant Campaign sets a bold vision for the Jewish environmental community. To support their commitment to cutting greenhouse-gas pollution by 14 percent in 2014, signatories pledge to support clean-technology innovation, encourage investment in Jewish environmental organizations, conduct energy audits, promote sustainability in their own communities, and advocate for the reduction by 83 percent of 2005 emission levels by 2050.

Led by the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, or COEJL, a network of nearly 30 national organizations and over 100 community groups, the campaign has brought together leaders from the Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist movements in a unified effort to protect the environment.

“There’s a growing ecological consciousness in the Jewish community—a lot of concern about global warming, our energy policy, and energy security,” says Sybil Sanchez, COEJL’s director.

The declaration came on the eve of Tu Bishvat (or Tu B’Shevat), the Jewish festival of trees. The holiday, this year falling on February 7 and 8, traditionally involves a celebration of fruit trees and the coming of spring. Many communities observe the day by planting trees.

Over the years, environmental groups have elevated Tu Bishvat to something of a Jewish Earth Day, moving beyond planting trees to actions and advocacy that support the environment as a whole.

“Recently people are talking more and more not only about trees but about nature and the environment in connection with Tu Bishvat,” says Evonne Marzouk, founder of Canfei Nesharim, an Orthodox environmental-education organization. “‘What does it mean to appreciate trees today?’ The Jewish environmental community has both caused and responded to that.”

Though Tu Bishvat is the most overtly “green” festival, most Jewish holy days have an ecological undercurrent. “Each holiday is tied to the seasons; but [with Tu Bishvat] you can’t get more environmentally connected than trees and the land,” says Sanchez.

Tu Bishvat seders, or feasts, use symbols, through various fruits and wines, to represent the planet’s complex system that requires careful stewardship to maintain ecological balance and support life. A verse spoken at seders reads:

Look at My works! See how beautiful they are, how excellent! See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world, for if you do, there will be no one after you to repair it. (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:13)

Jewish environmental groups are redoubling efforts to put this charge into action as addressing climate change and carbon emissions becomes more urgent. Tu Bishvat, the springtime holiday, is seen as a symbolic season of renewal. This week Jewish leaders in New York and around the country called for renewal of the planet as well as the soul.

[T]he probability of cold winters with much snow in Central Europe rises when the Arctic is covered by less sea ice in summer. Scientists of the Research Unit Potsdam of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association have decrypted a mechanism in which a shrinking summertime sea ice cover changes the air pressure zones in the Arctic atmosphere and impacts our European winter weather. These results of a global climate analysis were recently published in a study in the scientific journal Tellus A.

That’s the news release for yet another new study examining what will inevitably be the huge implications for extreme weather from the massive amount of heat released by the declining Arctic sea ice cover.

Arctic sea ice in September 2007 reached its lowest extent on record, approximately 40% lower than when satellite records began in 1979. Sea ice loss in 2011 was virtually tied with the ice loss in 2007, despite weather conditions that were not as unusual in the Arctic. ”Such a large area of open water is bound to cause significant impacts on weather patterns, due to the huge amount of heat and moisture that escapes from the exposed ocean into the atmosphere over a multi-month period following the summer melt.”  Image: Cryosphere Today.

You may recall the recent repost of the discussion by meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters (see “Our Extreme Weather: Is Arctic Sea Ice Loss Partly to Blame?” the source of the figure above):

“The question is not whether sea ice loss is affecting the large-scale atmospheric circulation…. It’s how can it not?” That was the take-home message from Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, in her talk “Does Arctic Amplification Fuel Extreme Weather in Mid-Latitudes?”, presented at last week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Dr. Francis presented new research in review for publication, which shows that Arctic sea ice loss may significantly affect the upper-level atmospheric circulation, slowing its winds and increasing its tendency to make contorted high-amplitude loops. High-amplitude loops in the upper level wind pattern (and associated jet stream) increases the probability of persistent weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, potentially leading to extreme weather due to longer-duration cold spells, snow events, heat waves, flooding events, and drought conditions.

The new German study looks at the specific case of winters in central Europe.  The UK Independent story explains, “A growing number of experts believe complex wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere above.”

As cold weather hit much of Europe, the story describes the findings this way:

In particular, the loss of Arctic sea ice could be influencing the development of high-pressure weather systems over northern Russia, which bring very cold winds from the Arctic and Siberia to Western Europe and the British Isles, the scientists believe. An intense anticyclone over north-west Russia is behind the bitterly cold easterly winds that have swept across Europe and some climate scientists say the lack of Arctic sea ice brought about by global warming is responsible.

“The current weather pattern fits earlier predictions of computer models for how the atmosphere responds to the loss of sea ice due to global warming,” said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “The ice-free areas of the ocean act like a heater as the water is warmer than the Arctic air above it. This favours the formation of a high-pressure system near the Barents Sea, which steers cold air into Europe.”

Sea ice covering the Barents and Kara Seas has been exceptionally low this winter, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado. But air temperatures above the Barents and Kara Seas have been higher than average. The relatively mild westerly winds that have kept Britain from freezing much of this winter have been blocked by fierce high pressure over north-west Russia, centred on an area just south of the Barents Sea.

Indeed, as the story makes clear, although the impacts are complicated, more and more climate experts have been making the connection:

Professor Rahmstorf said the Alfred Wegener study confirms earlier predictions from computer models by Vladimir Petoukhov of the Potsdam Institute, who forecast colder winters in western Europe as a result of melting sea ice.

Dr Petoukhov and his colleague Vladimir Semenov were among the first scientists to suggest a link between the loss of sea ice and colder winters in Europe. Their 2009 study simulated the effects of disappearing sea ice and found that for some years to come the loss will increase the chances of colder winters.

“Whoever thinks that the shrinking of some far-away sea ice won’t bother him could be wrong. There are complex interconnections in the climate system, and in the Barents-Kara Sea we might have discovered a powerful feedback mechanism,” Dr Petoukhov said.

You can read the original study online: “Impact of sea ice cover changes on the Northern Hemisphere atmospheric winter circulation.”  Here’s more detail for non-scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research news release:

If there is a particularly large-scale melt of Arctic sea ice in summer, as observed in recent years, two important effects are intensified. Firstly, the retreat of the light ice surface reveals the darker ocean, causing it to warm up more in summer from the solar radiation (ice-albedo feedback mechanism). Secondly, the diminished ice cover can no longer prevent the heat stored in the ocean being released into the atmosphere (lid effect). As a result of the decreased sea ice cover the air is warmed more greatly than it used to be particularly in autumn and winter because during this period the ocean is warmer than the atmosphere. “These higher temperatures can be proven by current measurements from the Arctic regions,” reports Ralf Jaiser, lead author of the publication from the Research Unit Potsdam of the Alfred Wegener Institute.

The warming of the air near to the ground leads to rising movements and the atmosphere becomes less stable. “We have analysed the complex non-linear processes behind this destabilisation and have shown how these altered conditions in the Arctic influence the typical circulation and air pressure patterns,” explains Jaiser. One of these patterns is the air pressure difference between the Arctic and mid-latitudes: the so-called Arctic oscillation with the Azores highs and Iceland lows known from the weather reports. If this difference is high, a strong westerly wind will result which in winter carries warm and humid Atlantic air masses right down to Europe. If the wind does not come, cold Arctic air can penetrate down through to Europe, as was the case in the last two winters. Model calculations show that the air pressure difference with decreased sea ice cover in the Arctic summer is weakened in the following winter, enabling Arctic cold to push down to mid-latitudes.

Despite the low sea ice cover in summer 2011, a cold winter with much snow has so far not occurred here in Germany. Jaiser explains this as follows: “Many other factors naturally play a role in the complex climate system of our Earth which overlap in part. Our results explain the mechanisms of how regional changes in the Arctic sea ice cover have a global impact and their effects over a period from late summer to winter. Other mechanisms are linked, for example, with the snow cover in Siberia or tropical influences. The interactions between these influential factors will be the subject matter of future research work and therefore represent a factor of uncertainty in forecasts.”

I added “for now” to the subhed “Less Summer Arctic Sea Ice Cover Means Colder, Snowier Winters in Central Europe” because if we stay on our current emissions path, then the warming is going to be so great in the second half of the century it will generally overcome even these cold blasts.

In the worst case, we get both continuing high levels of emissions and high carbon-cycle feedbacks.  That possibility was discussed here:

• Royal Society Special Issue on Global Warming Details ‘Hellish Vision’ of 7°F (4°C) World — Which We May Face in the 2060s! “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 indeed 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic.  Central Europe sees 11-14°F. So, yes, there will no doubt still be relatively cool winters — but relatively to a vastly warmer average.

Moreover, 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”

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.

Related Post:

• Arctic Death Spiral Continues: Sea Ice Volume Hits Record Low for Second Straight Year

Chris Evans, John Hurt and Tilda Swinton already are on board, as is Korean actor Kang Ho Song, who starred in Joon-Ho’s international breakthrough, the Korean monster movie The Host. Snow Piercer, which Joon-Ho co-scripted, is set in a future where, after a failed experiment to stop global warming, an Ice Age kills off all life on the planet except for the inhabitants of the Snow Piercer, a train that travels around the globe and is powered by a sacred perpetual-motion engine. A class system evolves on the train but a revolution brews. [Octavia] Spencer plays a passenger on the train who joins the revolt in order to save her son.

I’ve said this repeatedly, but I’m much more interested in culture that explores either the leadup to an apocalypse or what comes after than television or movies where people spend a lot of time running around avoiding terrible things that are going down and ultimately avert disaster. It’s much more important—and I think much more interesting—to think about the choices we can make that will let us avert catastrophic change, or to really reckon with what life would be like after, say, the world warms enough to melt away the polar ice caps. The ultimate worst-case scenario in global warming or a fuel shortage may not actually come to pass, but playing with what the consequences of those developments would be like in a genuinely frightening, compelling way is an important spur to serious thinking about the consequences of our actions.

Similarly, I’m glad to see a sci-fi action movie that’s going to star at least some people of color. The Hollywood default to a world full of white people* is particularly weird given our demographic trends. And if we’re going to play around with the idea that large swaths of habitable land would be devastated (or at least, that we’d lose a lot of major costal cities), it makes sense to set a big post-disaster movie some place other than Los Angeles or New York. Diversity means diversity of location, too, with all the benefits, constraints, and visual freshness that come with it.

*I grant a blanket Tilda Swinton past because I’m pretty sure she’s here from the future anyway.

AMS-approved TV meteorologist André Bernier is a climate denier.

Linking to a mendacious Daily Mail article on his website, Bernier deliberately misrepresents the findings of the UK Meteorological Office that show the 2000s are the hottest decade on record:

Could it be that the very same climatic research group that gave us “Climategate” and researchers that appeared to be “cooking the books” when it came to global temperature records are now admitting that an even BIGGER issue is the global COOLING which is inevidible in the decades ahead? Could we start seeing a shorter growing season and frequent bitter cold in the winter? Could we even start seeing the River Thames freezing over like during the “Little Ice Age” of the Charles Dickens’ Scrooge era?

Bernier tweeted in January: “The day that @ametsoc (AMS) strong arms anyone to tow [sic] the AGW is the day I disown them.”

The American Meteorological Society has emailed its membership with a debunking of the Daily Mail article.

Bernier’s scientific training is a bachelor’s degree in meteorology from Lyndon State College. An evangelical Christian, he states that he presents “the wonderful world of weather from a God-honoring perspective.”

Fellow Cleveland television weatherman Mark Johnson — an AMS Certified Broadcast Meteorologist — is also an anti-science climate denier. The two million people in the Cleveland metropolitan area who watch these stations are being deceived about the civilizational threat of manmade climate change by ideologues, with the approval of the American Meteorological Society.

The Forecast the Facts campaign by the Citizen Engagement Lab, League of Conservation Voters, and 350.org is mobilizing citizens who believe that television meteorologists — the primary science communicators for most Americans — should promote scientific integrity, not fossil-fueled ideology.