On Monday, Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory measured CO2 levels in the air of 398.36 parts per million (ppm). And that means carbon dioxide, the main gas driving climate change, will soon hit 400 ppm for the first time in human existence

The world’s longest unbroken record of atmospheric CO2 levels is the “Keeling Curve” measured at Mauna Loa since 1958. The curve was initiated by Charles David Keeling and is maintained by his son, Ralph F. Keeling, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (where I did my Ph.D. research on the physical oceanography of the Greenland Sea).

The Scripps folks want you to know precisely when we hit 400 ppm so they have set up a website and even a twitter feed, @Keeling_curve, that will tweet out the CO2 level every day.

The 400 ppm level is another major milestone on humanity’s accelerating path to destroying a livable climate. As climatologist Chris Field told the AP, “It’s an important threshold. It is an indication that we’re in a different world.”

How different can be seen in this chart:

The 400 ppm level was passed in parts of the Arctic last May because, as E&E News (subs. req’d) notes, “It typically gets to a peak concentration above that of the rest of the world due to winds blowing CO2 up north in the spring.”

A 2009 article in Science reported that when CO2 concentrations were sustained at this level 15 million years ago, it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher.

Related Posts:

• Recent Warming Is ‘Amazing And Atypical’ And Poised To Destroy Stable Climate That Enabled Civilization

Last month, we reported on the umpteenth study that confirmed the Hockey Stick. It made clear the rate of global warming since 1900 is 50 times greater than the rate of cooling in the previous 5000 years.

That study, Marcott et al, is the most the most comprehensive “Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years” ever done. It’s the source of most of the data (in blue) in the jaw-dropping graph at the right (click to enlarge). Projected warming this century (in red) on humanity’s current emissions path comes from the recent literature.

Now a team of 78 researchers (from 60 institutions) in the international network PAGES (PAst Global Changes) has “published the most comprehensive reconstruction of past temperature changes at the continental scale” over the past 2000 years. Their Nature Geoscience article (subs. req’d) concludes:

The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between AD 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period AD 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

No “worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age.” Another denier myth bites the dust.

Here is a key figure from the new study:

Standardized 30-year-mean temperatures averaged across all seven continental-scale regions. Blue symbols are area-weighted averages, and bars show 25th and 75th unweighted percentiles to illustrate the variability among regions; open black boxes are medians. The red line is the 30-year-average annual global temperature from the HadCRUT4 instrumental time series relative to 1961–1990, and scaled visually to match the standardized values over the instrumental period.

As you can see, the 30-year mean temperature is already at the highest level in almost 1400 years, and this is just the 1971-2000 average. The 1982-2010 average is higher yet again on this scale.

And so we have the hockey stick, which countless studies have now vindicated — though as the top chart makes clear, within a few decades the hockey stick will soon look more (and feel more) like a brick wall.

You can find everything you could want to know about the new study, “Continental-scale temperature variability during the last two millennia,” at the PAGES website. Here are the “primary conclusions” from the FAQ:

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Some myths pushed by the anti-science crowd are so laughably backwards that repeating them should be grounds for expulsion from homo “sapiens.” And so it is with the doubly wrong claim that progressives are now using the term ‘climate change’ because the planet has supposedly stopped warming.

Of course, it hasn’t actually stopped warming (see “Global Warming Has Accelerated In Past 15 Years, New Study Of Oceans Confirms“).

But since the deniers make up stuff about the science, why shouldn’t they make up stuff about everything else?

Indeed, it is conservatives who typically change the names of things, as in refusing to say “Democratic” but only “Democrat” and insisting on “death tax” rather than “estate tax,” even though only big estates are taxed, not death.

That latter switch was championed by the GOP’s spinmaster, Frank Luntz, who, as it turns out, also championed switching from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’ in 2003. Scientists, environmentalists, progressives, and frankly the whole darn planet have always used both terms — hence the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established in 1988.

In a confidential 2003 memo, Luntz asserted that the Administration and conservatives should stop using the term “global warming” because it was too frightening:

It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming and “conservation” instead of preservation.  1) “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming”. As one focus group participant noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.

Media Matters has a new video out (by John Kerr) responding to the latest Faux News effort to push this phony conspiracy:

Media Matters further notes:

The term “climate change” was used long before Luntz’s memo, particularly in the scientific literature. For instance, a 1970 paper published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was titled “Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change” and discussed how emissions of carbon dioxide warm the atmosphere.

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Last week, David Roberts over at Grist flagged a report carried out by the environmental consultant group Trucost, at the behest of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity over at the United Nations.

The idea behind the report was simple. Tally up all the world’s natural capital — land, water, atmosphere, etc. — that doesn’t currently have a dollar value attached to it, and figure out the price. But the next step was where it got interesting. Figure how much of that natural capital is being consumed, depleted or degraded without the responsible party paying the cost for that use. The number the study hit on was a staggering $7.3 trillion in 2009 — about 13 percent of global economic output for that year.

This brings up what economists call “negative externalities.” That’s a technical term for what happens when one actor in the economy has to pay for another actor’s mess. In a theoretically perfect market, the price of consuming, degrading or depleting a resource would be paid by the party responsible.

But getting the theory of markets to map onto the real world is difficult. Dumping trash on a neighbor’s lawn is technically free, so a lot of us should be doing it more. But because we’ve built societies in which our neighbor can sue us, or the cops can fine us, we’re forced to internalize that cost. Lots of costs can only be internalized through smart institutional design and government policy, rather than by leaving the markets free to do their market thing.

What Trucost found is that when you scale this problem up globally — all the river, air, and land and air pollution that isn’t paid for, all the water and land use that isn’t paid for, and especially all the carbon emissions dumped into the atmosphere that aren’t paid for — the numbers get very big:

Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions: $2.7 trillion. This was by far the biggest single problem, and East Asia and North America were the two biggest culprits. That lines up with an International Monetary Fund study that determined the United States is the world’s biggest subsidizer of fossil fuels — with Asia the runner-up — because it’s failed to put a price on carbon emissions through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system. Trucost assumed a social cost to carbon emissions of $106 per metric ton. That’s higher than the IMF’s assumption of $25 per ton, but well within the overall range of costs studies have found.

Global Water Consumption: $1.9 trillion. Wheat farming was the biggest problem here, followed by rice farming and general water supply, mainly in Asia and North Africa. That’s probably largely because developing and poorer countries have fewer institutions or infrastructure for managing water use.

Global Land Use: $1.8 trillion. Cattle ranching in South America came in first here, followed by cattle ranching in South Asia. Besides the usual uses, the effects of logging and fishing were also included. Trucost estimated the value of unused land using metrics laid out in the United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

Global Waste And Land, Air, And Water Pollution: $850 billion. Sulfur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate emissions were the big culprits for air pollution ($500 billion total) mainly in North America, East Asia, and Western Europe. Land and water pollution ($300 billion total) was actually mostly fertilizers, from North America, Asia, and Europe again. Global waste was the remainder, mostly hazardous materials. Trucost figured out these prices mainly through the costs of clean-up and health effects.

On top of that, the study’s next conclusion was equally dramatic: whole sectors of power generation, materials production, farming and ranching across the globe would become entirely unprofitable if they had to pay the true cost of their natural capital use. The top five biggest regional industries the study looked at are in the chart below, and even in the best case their natural capital costs effectively wipe out their revenues:

In fact, of the twenty biggest regional industries the researchers examined around the globe, none of them would be profitable. Much of the global economy, in other words, is a giant Ponzi scheme that is (temporarily) viable only because markets fail to account for the value and use of the natural ecology — on which civilization depends for its crops, water, air, its very livelihood.

But that bill will ultimately be paid in full are — by our children and countless future generations.

The Consequences For The Economy

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75 years ago this month, a steam engineer in England named Guy Stewart Callendar used his avid interest in meteorology to publish a landmark study in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society linking fossil fuel burning to global warming. Two modern climatologists have published a paper in the same journal checking — with modern techniques and measurements — just how accurate Callendar was. [Guardian]

Dr. Ed Hawkins and Prof. Phil Jones write:

In hindsight, Callendar’s contribution was fundamental. He is still relatively unknown, but in terms of the history of climate science, his paper is a classic. He was the first scientist to discover that the planet had warmed by collating temperature measurements from around the globe, and suggested that this warming was partly related to man-made carbon dioxide emissions…

People were sceptical about some of Callendar’s results, partly because the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere was not very well known and because his estimates for the warming caused by CO2 were quite simplistic by modern standards. It was only in the 1950s, when improved instruments showed more precisely how water and CO2 absorbed radiation, that we reached a better understanding of its importance. Scientists at the time also couldn’t really believe that humans could impact such a large system as the climate – a problem that climate science still encounters from some people today, despite the compelling evidence to the contrary.

EPA rated the adequacy of the State Department’s draft environmental impact statement regarding the Keystone pipeline as having “insufficient information” for a host of reasons. [LA Times]

16 of 29 states are considering legislation that would repeal or curtail their renewable portfolio standards, at the behest of companies like ExxonMobil and Peabody coal. [Bloomberg]

A Senate committee will consider energy efficiency legislation proposed by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Rob Portman. [The Hill]

Louisiana faces greater risks from the impacts of global warming, which complicates its close relationship with oil and gas interests. [National Journal]

Juliet Eilperin summarizes what the Obama administration has done for the climate and environment so far, and what is left to do. [Washington Post]

Check out this interactive graphic that shows how much each state’s temperature has increased since the first Earth Day in 1970 (spoiler alert: they all increase). [Climate Central]

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill was even dirtier and more dangerous than most Americans thought. [Newsweek]

Another Indian state has more than 500 megawatts of solar energy capacity. [CleanTechnica]

A community wind farm in South Dakota won 600 local investors through some innovative financial techniques. [Renew Economy]

Many experts now say that if recent volume trends continue we will see a “near ice-free Arctic in summer” within a decade.

Creative tech guru Andy Lee Robinson shows why in a wondrous new video — set to music he wrote and played:

Let’s help this video go viral!

Related Posts:

• CryoSat-2 Confirms Arctic Sea Ice Volume Has Collapsed
• How Arctic Death Spiral Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events ‘Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves’
• NOAA:Warming-Driven Arctic Ice Loss Is Boosting Chance of Extreme U.S. Weather

For all the confused debate over the meaning of the climate bill’s failure, the most salient lesson for climate hawks is that Obama is not “the one.”

Obama isn’t the Winston Churchill that this nation — and indeed all of humanity — so desperately need if we are to avoid a catastrophic 7°F warming, let alone the unimaginable 11°F warming we are currently headed toward.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd makes that key point about the gun control failure in her tough Sunday piece, “No Bully in the Pulpit“:

President Obama has watched the blood-dimmed tide drowning the ceremony of innocence, as Yeats wrote, and he has learned how to emotionally connect with Americans in searing moments, as he did from the White House late Friday night after the second bombing suspect was apprehended in Boston.

Unfortunately, he still has not learned how to govern.

Obama talks the talk, but he doesn’t walk the walk, or, rather, he doesn’t twist the wrist, as Dowd details in her piece:

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A 2010 study found “global warming is the main cause of a significant intensification in the North Atlantic Subtropical High that in recent decades has more than doubled the frequency of abnormally wet or dry summer weather in the southeastern United States.” Below, meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters relates how wild climate swings are becoming the norm in the Midwest, too.–JR

Runoff from heavy rains flooded parts of a cemetery in St. Louis County on April 18, 2013. (Photo credit: Robert Cohen)

By Jeff Masters, via Weather Underground

It seems like just a few months ago barges were scraping bottom on the Mississippi River, and the Army Corps of Engineers was blowing up rocks on the bottom of the river to allow shipping to continue. Wait, it was just a few months ago–less than four months ago! Water levels on the Mississippi River at St. Louis bottomed out at -4.57′ on January 1 of 2013, the 9th lowest water level since record keeping began in 1861, and just 1.6′ above the all-time low-water record set in 1940 (after the great Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s.)

But according to National Weather Service, the exceptional April rains and snows over the Upper Mississippi River watershed will drive the river by Tuesday to a height 45 feet higher than on January 1. The latest forecast calls for the river to hit 39.4′ on Tuesday, which would be the 8th greatest flood in history at St. Louis, where flood records date back to 1861. Damaging major flooding is expected along a 250-mile stretch of the Mississippi from Quincy, Illinois to Thebes, Illinois next week.

At the Alton, Illinois gauge, upstream from St.Louis, a flood height of 34′ is expected on Tuesday. This would be the 6th highest flood in Alton since 1844, and damages to commercial property in the town of Alton occur at this water level. In addition, record flooding is expected on at least five rivers in Illinois and Michigan over the next few days. A crest 1.5′ above the all-time record has already occurred on the Des Plaines River in Chicago. This river has invasive Asian Carp that could make their way into Lake Michigan if a 13-mile barrier along the river fails during an extreme flood. Fortunately, NPR in Michigan is reporting today that U.S. Army Corps of Engineers crews stationed along the 13-mile Asian carp barrier have seen no evidence of the fish breaching the structure, and it would have taken a flood much larger than today’s record flood to breach the structure. A crest on the Grand River in Grand Rapids, Michigan nearly 4′ above the previous record (period of record: at least 113 years) is expected this weekend. At this flood level, major flooding of residential areas is expected, though the flood wall protecting downtown Grand Rapids will keep the commercial center of the city from flooding.

Figure 1. The rains that fell in a 24-hour period ending at 7 am EDT Thursday, April 18, 2013 over Northern Illinois were the type of rains one would expect see fall only once every 40 years (yellow colors), according to METSTAT, Inc. (http://www.metstat.com.) METSTAT computed the recurrence interval statistics based on gauge-adjusted radar precipitation and frequency estimates from NOAA Atlas 14 Volume 2, published in 2004 (http://dipper.nws.noaa.gov/hdsc/pfds/.) METSTAT does not supply their precipitation recurrence interval forecasts or premium analysis products for free, but anyone can monitor the real-time analysis (observed) at: http://metstat.com/solutions/extreme-precipitation-index-analysis/

Damages from the April 2013 Midwest U.S. flood in Illinois, Michigan, and Missouri are likely to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of the impacts at the flood levels predicted include:

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Yesterday the Senate shamefully failed to move forward on modest gun control — a bipartisan amendment on background checks. A small but highly dedicated single-issue group backed by large amounts of industry dollars blocked action that is not only highly popular with the American public, but which had been viewed just a couple months ago as the most minimal action conceivable in the face of tragedy.

This failure should underscore just what an opportunity we missed on climate in 2009-2010, which may well have been a once-in-a-generation chance or “One brief shining moment for clean energy,” as I called it four years ago. More specifically, the lesson is that we are unlikely to see serious federal action on climate until there is a highly dedicated group of single-issue voters (backed with serious money) who can make it politically and economically more painful for members of Congress to oppose action than to support it.

One reason for this post is that the National Journal has a remarkably ill-timed article out today, “5 Things Immigration, Gay Marriage, and Gun Control Have That Climate Change Doesn’t.” While NJ‘s reporting on climate is normally solid, this piece aims to show that climate change lacks the factors that led to a “sea change” for gun control legislation:

The amount of change happening in Washington right now is impressive. Congressional leaders are debating legislation on gun control and immigration, and lawmakers from both parties are coming out in support of gay marriage. This kind of sea change can’t happen right now with energy and climate policy. Here are five reasons why.

Oops. Guess the seas didn’t really change on guns.

Indeed, it’s worth noting we are a long way from actually having a successful immigration bill — what happened on gun control should make clear that Congress “debating legislation” doesn’t mean bloody much. Until a bill actually does pass both the Senate and House (and get Obama’s signature), any “lessons” to be learned from immigration should be viewed as wildly premature. And, of course, we don’t even have federal marriage equality legislation, we just have (some) lawmakers coming out in support of gay marriage.

Significantly, not too long ago, we had lots of lawmakers from both parties coming out in support of climate action — remember Newt Gingrich on the couch with Nancy Pelosi? But the moment wasn’t seized and it died (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2“).

Or perhaps the lesson is that a climate bill never had a chance — as long as 60 votes was the threshold in the Senate. The New York Times makes a similar argument about gun control in its front page analysis, with the online headline, “Gun Control Effort Had No Real Chance, Despite Pleas“:

At a moment when the national conversation about how best to stem the menace of guns in the wrong hands seemed to have shifted, it turned out that the political dynamic had not.

Republicans armed themselves with disputed talking points from the gun lobby about how a bill to expand background checks and outlaw a national gun registry was instead tantamount to a national gun registry.

A powerful industry creating a disinformation campaign that is then taken up by the GOP — who’d have guessed?

So the lessons, to the extent that there are any given how wildly different all of these issues are, don’t have to do with why climate change can’t achieve the kind of “sea change” that gun control supposedly has had. They have to do with why politically popular pieces of legislation — like background checks and climate action — die in the Senate.

Obviously the antidemocratic extra-constitutional super majority requirement is reason #1. The background check amendment offered by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) got “only” 54 votes. In his first term, Obama (against Congressional opposition) was able to have the health care bill require only a simple majority in the Senate, but he didn’t fight for outcome that with the climate bill.

Reason #2 is the existence of a powerful, well-funded, single-minded opposition that can create an effective disinformation campaign and, even more importantly, can exact a real political cost (in terms of campaign support and votes) if you cross them. In the gun debate, that is the NRA — which is really the gun manufacturers’ lobby masquerading as a grassroots organization. In climate, the fossil fuel companies and pollutocrats have even more money, so they can back multiple groups spreading disinformation and opposing action.

Reason #3 is the failure of the advocates for action to turn broad popular support into a potent political force combining a large number of single-issue voters with wealthy donors who are willing to withhold their support from those who don’t support their cause – even from political allies. That’s true for climate action, and, it appears, gun control. Interestingly, it’s not true for supporters of marriage equality, who have become far more organized — and the recent success they’ve achieved is certainly due at least in part to that fact.

Of course, Obama and the Senate Democratic leadership never pushed for a Senate vote on climate action in 2009 the way they have pushed for background checks this year, so we really don’t know whether that would have made a difference. But it did at least get gun control a vote in the Senate, something that never happened with the climate bill. So it would seem that presidential leadership  is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

A landfill in Kearny NJ that converts methane gas from decomposing trash into electricity. (AP Photo)

The United States currently generates 390 million tons of trash per year, or 7 pounds per person per day. Municipal solid waste, or MSW, commonly known as garbage, gets picked up from homes and businesses on a weekly basis and is usually sent straight to a landfill.

At the landfill, a hole is dug in the ground and then lined with a man-made liner. As trash begins to fill the hole, methane is emitted as a result of waste being broken down by anaerobic bacteria. Once the landfill is full, it is capped to limit water from seeping into it.

Although many states have the physical space for trash, it is environmentally unsustainable to take garbage and bury it in the ground at landfills, where it decomposes and releases potent greenhouse-gas pollution. What’s more, some trash has to be transported by diesel trucks or trains to landfills several hundred miles away, further exacerbating its pollution footprint. Though garbage is not something we tend to actively think about on a daily basis, specifically as it relates to climate change, the United States must begin developing policies to limit the environmental consequences that result from our generation of garbage.

There are already some efforts in place to help manage trash creation. Though America’s MSW generation has significantly increased over the past decades as a result of population growth, the country has also seen tremendous improvements in recycling and composting efforts, for example. In 1960 the United States recycled only 5 million tons of garbage, but today America is recycling and composting more than 90 million tons. This increase is largely a result of many state and local governments introducing recycling requirements as well as recycling incentives.

But there is another alternative waste management option that America has not significantly utilized but that could help stem the flow of waste, and thus pollution emissions, in our country: energy-from-waste, or EfW, facilities. These facilities provide a means for waste disposal while also generating clean electricity. EfW plants burn garbage in a controlled environment that generates electricity, which in turn is sold to utilities and then distributed to residential, commercial, and industrial consumers.

As America’s population continues to increase, greenhouse-gas emissions, specifically methane from landfills, will also rise as more garbage is generated. Scientists in Hawaii found just last month that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere jumped dramatically to a new record high in 2013. America’s business-as-usual plan has the nation on the wrong path. Federal legislators need to begin to find more ways to decrease the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and a plan that combines increases in EfW usage and recycling and composting would be a good start. This issue brief addresses the need for the United States to increase rates of recycling, composting, and EfW to combat climate change, explains the technology at work in an EfW facility, and makes policy recommendations that will drive down the emissions released by landfills.

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