On Friday, the City of New York allocated $294 million of Superstorm Sandy recovery funds for resiliency projects to respond to the threat of fossil-fueled climate change.

The announcement was part of the unveiling of NYC’s plan for $1.77 billion in Sandy recovery initiatives by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) at New York City Hall:

The City has set aside $294 million for resiliency investments to be detailed in a report issued by the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency later this month.

“HUD’s approval of our comprehensive Action Plan enables us to take the next critical step toward recovery – launching the programs for home rebuilding and business assistance that will rejuvenate the neighborhoods Sandy hit hardest,” said Deputy Mayor for Operations Cas Holloway. “We’ll also take the first steps toward making the City more resilient to the impacts that we know climate change will bring.”

The sequester cuts reduced the planned budget for resilience from an original $327 million.

The New York City Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency (SIRR) was established by Bloomberg in November, 2012, with an explicit mission to address global warming:

When it comes to climate change, New York City has long been considered a leader in long-term sustainable planning, but Hurricane Sandy was a wake-up call to all New Yorkers.

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The Arctic is the fastest changing place on earth. The most obvious and important change is the staggering loss of sea ice (see “CryoSat-2 Confirms Sea Ice Volume Has Collapsed“).

In addition, “the Arctic marine waters are experiencing widespread and rapid ocean acidification,” a new study finds. This first-ever Arctic Ocean Acidification Assessment, commissioned by the Arctic Council’s Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), explains that the “primary driver of ocean acidification is uptake of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere by human activities.”

We knew from a 2010 Nature Geoscience study that the oceans are now acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. We are risking a marine biological meltdown “by end of century” as a 2010 Geological Society study put it.

As the lead author of a 2012 study on acidification in Science explained, “if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about—coral reefs, oysters, salmon.”

Here is a video from AMAP on Arctic Ocean acidification:

The Key Findings of the AMAP study are here.

Related Posts:

• Bad Acid Trip: USGS Study Finds Humans Are Acidifying ‘The Air, Oceans, Freshwaters And Soils’
• The Great Oyster Crash and Why Ocean Acidification Is “A Ticking Time Bomb” for Both Marine Life and Humanity

Image by John Garrett

Part 1 took on a NY Times essay that pushed the myth “We already know it’s too late” to stop climate catastrophe. In fact, many recent studies have concluded that aggressive action now to curtail carbon pollution could keep us at the low end of warming, where impacts are far more manageable.

Here I’ll extend that discussion, while taking on a NYT Dot Earth post that pushes other dangerous myths, such as the notion climate change impacts are reversible on a timescale that matters to humans.

In his post, “An Earth Scientist Explores the Biggest Climate Threat: Fear,” NYT climate blogger Revkin introduces an extended comment from Peter Keleman this way:

Here’s a “Your Dot” contribution pushing back against apocalyptic depictions of the collision between humans and the climate system — written by Peter B. Kelemen, the Arthur D. Storke Professor and vice chair in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. Kelemen has done a lot of interesting work on possible ways to capture carbon dioxide from air (none being easy or cheap):

Not quite.

What Keleman wrote is a pushback against “apocalyptic depictions of the collision between humans and the climate system” that say it is too damn late to do anything (depictions which, as I’ve discussed, are relatively rare and generally debunked when they do appear).

Keleman begins:

Fear Itself

“We already know it is too late to reverse the planet’s transformation, and we know what is going to happen next – superstorms, super-droughts, super-pandemics, massive population displacement, water scarcity, desertification and all the rest. Massive destruction, displacement and despair. Our worst fears are already upon us. The reality is far worse than anyone has imagined.”

These phrases are distilled from “Writing [at] the End,” an essay by Nathaniel Rich in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. They capture its doomsday ethos, and its breathtaking certainty. Rich, a novelist, is sure he knows the causes of our present ills, and the nature of the near future. He probably feels that he learned this from the 98 percent of climate scientists who – famously – agree on some things. I am part of that community; we agree that human greenhouse gas emissions are having a huge, negative effect on global climate. But I don’t agree with Nathaniel Rich.

Well first off, as anyone can easily see by checking the original, these phrases “distilled” from the Rich essay are not in order, and the second and fourth sentences are completely out of context.

“Massive destruction, displacement and despair” doesn’t refer to “what is going to happen next” — it comes from the essay’s first paragraph and applies to the  aftermath of hurricane Sandy (and the aftermath of Rich’s fictional hurricane Tammy in his novel). The sentence “The reality is far worse than anyone has imagined” applies to Ian McEwan’s novel Solar, and what Rich apparently means is that our current reality is far worse than we imagined. That is hardly an unreasonable opinion to have given the bark beetle devastation, the loss of Arctic ice and apparent its impact on extreme weather, the accelerating disintegration of both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets — to name but a few realities far worse than were imagined even a decade ago.

Second, Rich is pretty clearly writing a literary, not scientific, essay. He is a novelist writing an essay about dystopian fiction and how it is having trouble keeping up with what’s actually happening in the real world. It is strange to say the least to treat this as if it were some sort of science treatise.

Third, we know where Rich “learned this from” because he tells us! It’s not “from the 98 percent of climate scientists” but rather from “nonfiction polemics” like Overheated” and “Hot” — neither of which, I might add, are written by climate scientists.

Fourth, not to nitpick or anything, but Keleman isn’t really a climate scientist, at least in the classic sense that his comments would imply — he is a (distinguished) geochemist who mostly works on geochemisty, rather than someone who has published peer-reviewed articles on, say, projected climate impacts.

I mention this only because Keleman’s next paragraph pushes the tired myth that some large number of climate scientists (and others) are exaggerating climate impacts to get grants and publicity:

Apocalyptic warnings sell newspapers, power Web sites, and are surprisingly good for marketing. Beyond the media, in the sciences and social sciences, if your research predicts a scary outcome, your name gets in the news, your grants get funded, and you feel like Paul Revere (though you might be Chicken Little). It’s a heady experience.

No, no, and no.

If the first sentence were actually true then you’d expect climate coverage would be soaring in a desperate effort by the newspaper business to stave off its ongoing collapse. Instead, of course, media coverage of climate change has itself collapsed in the past several years (see here and here) — and what little there is generally ain’t apocalyptic.

Yes, it’s true, Climate Progress is probably the most widely read climate blog, but then we do not do the kind of unjustified “it’s hopeless” messaging Keleman disdains. Indeed, we’ve criticized the very few who do — or, rather, who did, in the case of James Lovelock.

Moreover, while it is a common trope that scary research gets your name in the news, that is also rather demonstrably not the case. To the extent that the media is paying attention at all, it would much rather run a (misleading) story on the occasional contrarian finding of a somewhat low climate sensitivity than a piece on the 95% of scientific studies published since 2007 that suggest things will be worse than we thought.

Ironically, climate scientists are as likely to be attacked as exaggerators (or as “Chicken Little,” for that matter) for reporting the increasingly dire situation we face as they are to be celebrated. Go figure.

Given Keleman’s disdain for those who supposedly get grants funded for predicting a “scary outcome,” it seems odd that he would be working on “possible ways to capture carbon dioxide from air (none being easy or cheap).” Unless inaction on CO2 emissions were to lead to a ”scary outcome,” why would anyone bother with expensive, difficult measures to capture CO2???

It is, in fact, the grim reality of our predicament that justifies such work — and the recent scientific literature makes it painfully clear (see a review of over 50 recent studies here). That’s why the normally staid folks at the World Bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers and the International Energy Agency are in a panic.

Keleman continues:

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2012 was the ninth-warmest year since 1850, and 2001-2012 were all among the top 13 warmest years on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization. [Climate News Network]

Last year was among the ten warmest years since records began more than 160 years ago, the World Meteorological Organisation says.

The WMO says 2012 was the ninth warmest year recorded since 1850, and the 27th consecutive year in which the global land and ocean temperatures were above the 1961-1990 average.

The WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said the continuing warming was cause for worry, and that it was on track to continue.

The assessment comes in the WMO’s Statement on the status of the global climate in 2012, the latest in an annual series providing information about temperatures, precipitation, extreme events, tropical cyclones, and sea ice extent.

It estimates the 2012 global land and ocean surface temperature during January-December 2012 at 0.45°C (±0.11°C) above the 1961-1990 average of 14.0°C. The years 2001-2012 were all among the top 13 warmest years on record.

Fracking a natural gas well requires up to five million gallons of water at once, and with thousands of wells across the American West, the region’s water supply is threatened by expanded shale gas extraction. [New York Times]

A new Yale poll finds 58 percent of Americans link climate change to recent extreme weather. [NBC News]

Keystone pipeline fan Rep. Lee Terry applauded Mark Zuckerberg’s “immigration” group that has aired ads embracing increased fossil fuel use like approving the Keystone tar sands pipeline. [The Hill]

GM signed onto the joint “climate declaration” statement by which companies like Nike, Starbucks, Timberland, and L’Oreal call on Congress to pass comprehensive climate legislation. [The Hill]

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Every climate scientist I’ve ever spoken to thinks we can still avert the worst impacts of climate change. It is an absurd myth that either the media or scientists constantly repeat the “it’s too late” message — a myth debunked here and here.

And so we have the spectacle of the NY Times publishing an essay by a novelist (!) asserting “We already know it’s too late” to stop catastrophe — and then following that up with a piece by its climate blogger attacking this uncommon and incorrect view in order to make an erroneous (if not utterly counterproductive) larger point about how “the Biggest Climate Threat” is “Fear.”

You read that right. The headline of the second NYT piece is “An Earth Scientist Explores the Biggest Climate Threat: Fear.”

So the biggest climate threat isn’t 10°F warming, dust-Bowlification of a third of the planet’s arable land, sea level rise that doesn’t end until we have an ice free planet, ocean acidification, ever-worsening extreme weather — or all of those things happening at the same time making it all but impossible to feed 9 billion people post-2050.

No, we are to believe the biggest threat is fear. #FAIL.

Seriously, if we had too much “fear” about the very real, ever-worsening, compound threats posed by our current dawdling, well then we wouldn’t be dawdling, would we? If we were fear driven, we would be doing too much carbon pollution reduction rather than virtually none at all.

Heck, if we had even the right amount of worry — say, the amount of worry that most climate scientists have — we’d be like Lonnie Thompson, who explained in December 2010 why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.” But I digress.

Let’s begin with the first NY Times whopper, the Sunday Book Review article about dystopian fiction, “Writing the End,” by novelist Nathaniel Rich. It contains these dubious assertions:

Dystopian novels about environmental apocalypses tend to contain a warning: this is the hell we will inherit if we don’t change our behavior, quickly.

But that view is obsolete. We already know it’s too late to reverse the planet’s transformation, and we know what is going to happen next — namely more of the same, just worse: superstorms, super-droughts, super-pandemics, massive population displacement, water scarcity, desertification and all the rest. The grim details can be found in any of the hundreds of nonfiction polemics published on the subject every year, books with titles like “Overheated” and “Hot.”

Let’s be clear what the science says — or, more specifically, what those nonfiction polemics say. You can read online most of Overheated (here) and Hot (here) — Amazon has conveniently (?!) posted most of their pages online.

Rich does a sleight of hand here. Yes, both those books make quite clear that because we have dawdled for so long — and because the climate and energy system both have large, intrinsic delays — we are almost certainly stuck with considerably worse superstorms, super-droughts, massive population displacement, water scarcity, and desertification than we have already seen.

Whether the “transformation” we are stuck with is “hell” is a matter of semantics, I suppose, but if hell is a metaphor for the worst place imaginable, then, no, not even close. What we are stuck with is more like “planetary purgatory” — a desperate, all-consuming effort lasting decades to keep us out of hell (and high water).

Indeed, contrary to Rich’s implications, both books he cites have the rather clear message that things could get considerably worse “if we don’t change our behavior, quickly.” Yes, 3°F to 5°F warming is going to be brutal — but it beats the hell (figuratively and, perhaps, even literally) out of 7°F warming, let alone 9°F warming or, heaven forbid, 11+°F warming.

And that matches what the best science says, as in this MIT analysis:

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

Now some may say that, given our political system, we’re simply not going to act fast enough or effectively enough to stop at 3°F to 5°F. But that is a political judgment, not a scientific one.

If we were all as alarmed as the science warrants, then I believe we would make a WWII-scale effort and take the world to near zero net emissions in a couple of decades and then start sucking CO2 out of the air and go back to 350 ppm this century and perhaps even lower next century. No, that wouldn’t give us a 100% certainty of avoiding serious consequences, but it would give us a near-certainty of avoiding hell and high water.

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On the sixth-month anniversary of superstorm Sandy, NBC evening news looked at whether rising seas and ever-worsening storms could destroy beach living.

Of course the answer is that it could and probably will on our current emissions path:

NBC: “The three feet of sea level rise predicted by the end of the century could swamp the jersey shore and redraw the coastline of florida. more immediate is the one-two punch of rising seas and storm surge. Scientists estimate some $500 billion of residential real estate will be at risk for severe coastal flooding by 2030.”

Scientist: “We have always been able to depend upon a constant shoreline. It’s going to be a hard lesson to learn. This is a new planet we are living on.”

It would have been nice if once in the story, NBC could have brought themselves to utter the words “climate change” or “global warming” — let alone mention the carbon pollution that is causing this ever-worsening situation.

The bottom line is that unless we act ASAP there will hardly be any real beaches left in a few decades (see “Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050“). And post-2050, seas rising several inches a decade will make it impossible to sustain coastal properties, particularly in areas threatened by supercharged storms and the deadly storm surges they bring.

The video is here:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Climate hawk Bill McKibben wrote an important and influence Rolling Stone piece last July, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” He reduced the climate debate to “Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe — and that make clear who the real enemy is.”

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. We are headed toward 800 to 1,000+ ppm, which represents the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it – as the recent scientific literature makes chillingly clear.

The three key numbers are:

• The First Number: 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit): The temperature rise we need to work as hard as possible to limit total warming to if we want to have our best chance of averting multiple catastrophes and amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks. (Equates to roughly 450 ppm CO2)
• The Second Number: 565 Gigatons: “Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon … into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. (‘Reasonable,’ in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.)”
• The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons: “This number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma…. The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it’s the fossil fuel we’re currently planning to burn.

ABC’s Nightline has done a terrific segment on McKibben’s math. I’d almost call it perfect, but they can’t quite get his name right!

Watch it:

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More on how the bill to repeal North Carolina’s clean energy standard. Hint: it isn’t just the clean energy industry that likes clean energy. [Dallas Morning News]

When North Carolina Republicans brought forward a bill pushed by ALEC, the conservative lobbying group, to gut the state’s renewable energy standards this year, they figured they had a model piece of pro-business legislation that would sail through.

But, as North American Windpower gleefully reported, it died in committee.

Key to the story is the committee where it died, public utilities and energy. It died there because the state’s electrical utilities, mainly Duke Energy, which bought out rival Progress Energy last year, didn’t support it, despite the fact that the bill’s prime sponsor formerly worked there.

What happened?

Duke has found out how to make money with renewables. Its non-regulated Duke Energy Renewables unit plans to double production from wind, solar and biomass projects this decade. Big customers including Google and Apple, both of which have large data centers in the state, are supporting a new green energy rate, reports the Charlotte Business Journal.

It turns out solar and wind projects offer big advantages to electric utility companies. They can get a premium rate for solar power, whose supply peaks in the afternoon alongside the higher load of air conditioning.

Streetcar fan and Mayor of Charlotte Anthony Foxx will be President Obama’s nominee to be the next Secretary of Transportation. [Charlotte Observer]

Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) could chair the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee if she wins re-election next year. [National Journal]

EPA has revised downward its estimates of how much methane leaks from natural gas fracking practices. [AP]

New report: Australia’s coal reserves are a dangerous financial bubble, and its coal industry a dinosaur, if the world acts on cutting carbon pollution. [Guardian]

Even as China leads the world in total carbon emissions, it is also “accelerating action” on cutting electricity demand and adding renewable energy to its portfolio. [Phys.org]

Could Champagne be moving to England as temperatures rise? [Washington Post]

The Ohio EPA would like to know why natural gas pipelines are spilling slurry into their wetlands. [Columbus Dispatch]

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Northeast Shelf Regions: Mid-Atlantic Bight (MAB), Southern New England (SNE), Georges Bank (GB) and Gulf of Maine (GOM)

A new “Ecosystem Advisory” from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) reports, “Sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem during 2012 were the highest recorded in 150 years.”

The Ecosystem extends from Cape Hatteras, N.C. to the Gulf of Maine. The temperature record is “based on both contemporary satellite remote-sensing data and long-term ship-board measurements.” In 2012, sea surface temperature (SST) for the region was nearly  3°F above the average for the past three decades:

The advisory reports on conditions in the second half of 2012.

Sea surface temperature for the Northeast Shelf Ecosystem reached a record high of 14 degrees Celsius (57.2°F) in 2012, exceeding the previous record high in 1951. Average SST has typically been lower than 12.4 C (54.3 F) over the past three decades.

… The temperature increase in 2012 was the highest jump in temperature seen in the time series and one of only five times temperature has changed by more than 1 C (1.8 F).

No doubt it was purely coincidental that six months ago, in the fall of 2012, the Northeast was hit by the “largest hurricane in Atlantic history measured by diameter of gale force winds (1,040mi).” Or not.

The fact is climate scientists have long predicted that about 90% of total human-made global warming would go into heating the oceans — and that’s precisely what’s been happening (see “Global Warming Has Accelerated In Past 15 Years, New Study Of Oceans Confirms“):

Land, atmosphere, and ice heating (red), 0-700 meter OHC increase (light blue), 700-2,000 meter OHC increase (dark blue).  From Nuccitelli et al. (2012).

But I guess we’ll need some storms even more destructive than frankenstorm Sandy before the nation wakes up to the reality that climate change is unfolding much as scientists had warned — and that means all but certain ruin for modern civilization if we don’t slash carbon pollution rapidly.

Related Posts:

• How Does Climate Change Make Superstorms Like Sandy More Destructive?
• How Arctic Ice Loss Amplified Superstorm Sandy — Oceanography Journal

Climate change is certainly the story of the decade and the century. And if we don’t slash emissions soon, it will be the story of the millennium (see NOAA study concludes climate change is “largely irreversible for 1000 years” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and worldwide.)

But most of the mainstream media treat it as a second or third-tier story. Todd Gitlin — professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph. D. program in Communications at Columbia University –  has a long critique of the media at TomDispatch. Below is an excerpt of the part on climate — JR.

Is the Press Too Big to Fail?

It’s Dumb Journalism, Stupid

By Todd Gitlin

… The Desertification of the News

Oh, and in case you think that the coverage from hell of the events leading up to the financial meltdown was uniquely poor, think again.  On an even greater meltdown that lies ahead, the press is barely, finally, still haphazardly coming around to addressing convulsive climate change with the seriousness it deserves.  At least it is now an intermittent story, though rarely linked to endemic drought and starvation.  Still, as Wen Stephenson, formerly editor of the Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section and TheAtlantic.com and senior producer of National Public Radio’s “On Point,” summed up the situation in a striking online piece in the alternative Boston Phoenix: the subject is seldom treated as urgent and is frequently covered as a topic for special interests, a “problem,” not an “existential threat.”  (Another note on vanishing news:  Since publishing Stephenson’s article, the Phoenix has ceased to exist.)

Even now, when it comes to climate change, our gasping journalism does not “flood the zone.”  It also has a remarkable record of bending over backward to prove its “objectivity” by turning piece after piece into a debate between a vast majority of scientists knowledgeable on the subject and a fringe of climate-change deniers and doubters.

When it came to our financial titans, in all those years the press rarely felt the need for a dissenting voice.  Now, on the great subject of our moment, the press repeatedly clutches for the rituals of detachment.  Two British scholars studying climate coverage surveyed 636 articles from four top United States newspapers between 1988 and 2002 and found that most of them gave as much attention to the tiny group of climate-change doubters as to the consensus of scientists.

And if the press has, until very recently, largely failed us on the subject, the TV news is a disgrace.  Despite the record temperatures of 2012, the intensifying storms, droughts, wildfires and other wild weather events, the disappearing Arctic ice cap, and the greatest meltdown of the Greenland ice shield in recorded history, their news divisions went dumb and mute.  The Sunday talk shows, which supposedly offer long chews and not just sound bites — those high-minded talking-head episodes that set a lot of the agenda in Washington and for the attuned public — were otherwise occupied.

All last year, according to the liberal research group Media Matters:

“The Sunday shows spent less than 8 minutes on climate change… ABC’s This Week covered it the most, at just over 5 minutes… NBC’s Meet the Press covered it the least, in just one 6 second mention… Most of the politicians quoted were Republican presidential candidates, including Rick Santorum, who went unchallenged when he called global warming ‘junk science’ on ABC’s This Week. More than half of climate mentions on the Sunday shows were Republicans criticizing those who support efforts to address climate change… In four years, Sunday shows have not quoted a single scientist on climate change.”

The mounting financial troubles of journalism only tighten the muzzle on a somnolent watchdog.

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