Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman had a great column in the New York Times Monday, “Loading The Climate Dice.”

He discusses the forthcoming paper on “The New Climate Dice,” by NASA’s James Hansen along with Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy, in which they attribute some of the uber-extreme heat waves to global warming. I blogged on the first draft of that paper back in January (click here, excerpted below).

Krugman ends his discussion this way:

This drought has already sent corn prices to their highest level ever. If it continues, it could cause a global food crisis, because the U.S. heartland is still the world’s breadbasket. And yes, the drought is linked to climate change: such events have happened before, but they’re much more likely now than they used to be.

Now, maybe this drought will break in time to avoid the worst. But there will be more events like this. Joseph Romm, the influential climate blogger, has coined the term “Dust-Bowlification” for the prospect of extended periods of extreme drought in formerly productive agricultural areas. He has been arguing for some time that this phenomenon, with its disastrous effects on food security, is likely to be the leading edge of damage from climate change, taking place over the next few decades; the drowning of Florida by rising sea levels and all that will come later.

And here it comes.

Will the current drought finally lead to serious climate action? History isn’t encouraging. The deniers will surely keep on denying, especially because conceding at this point that the science they’ve trashed was right all along would be to admit their own culpability for the looming disaster. And the public is all too likely to lose interest again the next time the die comes up white or blue.

But let’s hope that this time is different. For large-scale damage from climate change is no longer a disaster waiting to happen. It’s happening now.

For updates of my discussion of “Dust-Bowlification,” see “We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming.” For a discussion of the impacts of Dust-Bowlification on food, see “Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security.”

Here is some chart-filled analysis of Hansen’s paper from my January post:

“Climate dice,” describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons relative to climatology, have become progressively “loaded” in the past 30 years, coincident with rapid global warming.  The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased.  An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (σ) warmer than climatology.

This hot extreme, which covered much less than 1% of Earth’s surface in the period of climatology [1951-1980], now typically covers about 10% of the land area.  We conclude that extreme heat waves, such as that in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, were “caused” by global warming, because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming.  We discuss practical implications of this substantial, growing climate change.

Read more

To be a modern Republican in good standing, you have to believe — or pretend to believe — in two miracle cures for whatever ails the economy: more tax cuts for the rich and more drilling for oil. And with prices at the pump on the rise, so is the chant of “Drill, baby, drill.” More and more, Republicans are telling us that gasoline would be cheap and jobs plentiful if only we would stop protecting the environment and let energy companies do whatever they want.

In place of the news round up today, I’m excerpting Paul Krugman excellent op-ed, “Natural Born Drillers.” The Nobel-prize winning economist debunks popular but fact-free right-wing myths:

Thus Mitt Romney claims that gasoline prices are high not because of saber-rattling over Iran, but because President Obama won’t allow unrestricted drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile, Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal tells readers that America as a whole could have a jobs boom, just like North Dakota, if only the environmentalists would get out of the way.

The irony here is that these claims come just as events are confirming what everyone who did the math already knew, namely, that U.S. energy policy has very little effect either on oil prices or on overall U.S. employment. For the truth is that we’re already having a hydrocarbon boom, with U.S. oil and gas production rising and U.S. fuel imports dropping. If there were any truth to drill-here-drill-now, this boom should have yielded substantially lower gasoline prices and lots of new jobs. Predictably, however, it has done neither.

Outside of the WSJ editorial page, though, even the newspaper itself doesn’t buy this nonsense (see Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and Koch-Fueled Cato Agree: “It’s Not Obama’s Fault That Crude Oil Prices Have Increased”).  Nor does the public (see Poll: 66% Blame Big Oil and MidEast Countries For High Gas Prices, 23% Blame Obama).

Here’s more from Krugman:

Read more

Solar power is advancing at a remarkable rate. Major investments by the Obama administration and much greater investment by the Chinese government have accelerated competition, driving down prices for high-quality solar modules. Installation of solar projects in China has exploded. In China, 195 projects, with a total capacity of over 1.8 GW, will be installed within 2011, comparable to installations in the United States. In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman describes how the fossil fuel industry and its allies are attacking solar’s success:

We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power. If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives. [...]

Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.

Solar powered-electricity is getting close to the price of coal-fired electricity, Krugman notes. “And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.”

Krugman:  ”It would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand. Yes, it would have cost money — but that’s the point! And with corporations sitting on lots of idle cash, the money spent would not, to any significant extent, come at the expense of other investment.“

The Nobel prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, had a great piece on his blog Saturday, “Broken Windows, Ozone, and Jobs.”

This was the same point I was (briefly) making in my Friday post on Obama’s dreadful decision: “The standard would not have any noticeable negative impact on the economy and, if anything, would have driven investment and innovation even in the short term.”

Krugman explains why this is especially the case in the severe economic downturn we are now in:

Read more