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West Antarctica Glaciers: Past the Point of No Return

Published on May 12, 2014 by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCryGec9PdUCLjpJW2mgCuLw ]

A rapidly disappearing section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be on an unstoppable path to complete meltdown. The glaciers contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmjNqsnH6WQ [with comments]


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NASA Antarctic Ice News

Streamed live on May 12, 2014 by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

NASA will host a media teleconference to discuss new research results on the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its potential contribution to future sea level rise.

The briefing participants are:
-- Eric Rignot, professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, and glaciologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California;
-- Sridhar Anandakrishnan, professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, University Park; and,
-- Tom Wagner, cryosphere program scientist with the Earth Science Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory invites you to watch live and chat about everything from Mars rovers to monitoring asteroids to cool cosmic discoveries. From the lab to the lecture hall, get information directly from scientists and engineers working on NASA's latest missions.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM7YOmyo2wg [with comments]


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Videofile: West Antarctic Glacier Loss Appears Unstoppable

Published on May 12, 2014 by JPLraw [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYt2JN2z3ZXQpgPHt_eKcTw ]

A new study by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine, finds that a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the entire glacial basin from melting into the sea. Three major lines of evidence point to the glaciers' eventual demise: their flow speeds and how they change with time, how much each glacier is floating on seawater rather than lying on land, and the slope of the terrain they are flowing over and its depth below sea level. These glaciers already contribute significantly to sea level rise, releasing as much ice into the ocean each year as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCPN7apYxh8 [with comments]


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Germany Sets New Record, Generating 74 Percent Of Power Needs From Renewable Energy


Wind turbines and transmission lines in Nauen near Berlin, Germany.
CREDIT: AP Photo/Ferdinand Ostrop

By Kiley Kroh
May 13, 2014 at 11:16 am Updated: May 14, 2014 at 8:35 pm

On Sunday, Germany’s impressive streak of renewable energy milestones continued, with renewable energy generation surging to a record portion — nearly 75 percent — of the country’s overall electricity demand by midday. With wind and solar in particular filling such a huge portion of the country’s power demand, electricity prices actually dipped into the negative for much of the afternoon, according to Renewables International [ http://www.renewablesinternational.net/germanys-record-renewable-performance/150/537/78770/ ].

In the first quarter of 2014, renewable energy sources met a record 27 percent of the country’s electricity demand, thanks to additional installations and favorable weather. “Renewable generators produced 40.2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, up from 35.7 billion kilowatt-hours in the same period last year,” Bloomberg reported [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-09/renewables-meet-record-27-percent-of-german-electricity-demand.html ]. Much of the country’s renewable energy growth has occurred in the past decade and, as a point of comparison, Germany’s 27 percent is double the approximately 13 percent [ http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_01 ] of U.S. electricity supply powered by renewables as of November 2013.

Observers say the records will keep coming as Germany continues its Energiewende, or energy transformation, which aims to power the country almost entirely on renewable sources by 2050.

“Once again, it was demonstrated that a modern electricity system such as the German one can already accept large penetration rates of variable but predictable renewable energy sources such as wind and solar PV power,” said Bernard Chabot, a renewable energy consultant based in France, via email. “In fact there are no technical and economic obstacles to go first to 20 percent of annual electricity demand penetration rate from a combination of those two technologies, then 50 percent and beyond by combining them with other renewables and energy efficiency measures and some progressive storage solutions at a modest level.”


CREDIT: Bernard Chabot

To reach the lofty goal of 80 percent renewables by 2050, Germany had to move quickly. Despite being known for gray skies, the country has installed an astonishing amount of solar photovoltaic (PV) power — setting multiple solar power generation records [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/22/2508191/germany-solar-generation-record/ ] along the way. At the end of 2012, Germany had installed considerably more solar power capacity per capita than any other country. The rapid growth has slowed, however, with 3.3 GW [ http://www.renewablesinternational.net/33-gw-of-pv-in-2013-in-germany/150/452/76613/ ] of PV installed in 2013, compared to 7.6 in 2012. And as countries like the U.S., Japan and China catch up, installations have continued to drop [ http://www.platts.com/latest-news/electric-power/london/germany-adds-459-mw-of-solar-pv-in-q1-lowest-26780016 ] in 2014.

Regardless, a recent analysis [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/24/3418145/solar-grid-parity-italy-germany/ ] by the consulting firm Eclareon found that solar power has reached grid parity in Germany, meaning once all of the costs are accounted for, the price of commercial solar power is now equal to retail electricity rates.

And wind power reached record output levels [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-05/near-record-wind-helps-renewables-supply-a-third-of-german-power.html ] last year — producing a massive 25.2 GW and accounting for 39 percent of the electricity supply on a single day in December.

The unprecedented growth of solar PV in particular has been fueled in large part by policies that incentivize clean energy. Germany’s simple feed-in tariff (FIT) policy, which pays renewable energy producers a set amount for the electricity they produce under long-term contracts, has driven the solar power boom. But as installations continued to outpace government targets, Germany announced last year that it would begin scaling back its feed-in tariff.

The FIT is financed by a surcharge paid by utility customers, but a major part of the problem stems from the fact that industry is largely exempt from the renewables surcharge — meaning the burden falls on households. Rather than adjust the industry exemption, the government instead proposed a “PV self-consumption charge” on new photovoltaic systems, something Germany’s Solar Industry Association recently announced [ http://www.solarserver.com/solar-magazine/solar-news/current/2014/kw15/bsw-solar-to-challenge-solar-pv-self-consumption-charge-in-court.html ] it plans to challenge in court.

The equity of the renewables surcharge isn’t the only criticism of Germany’s power transformation. Along with cutting out fossil fuel-generated energy to a large extent, the transition to renewables includes completely phasing out nuclear power. These goals are only achievable in combination with greatly reduced energy demand. Instead, coal imports are increasing [ http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303417104579543814192542586 ] in order to meet the country’s baseload power demands. And retail electricity rates are high and rising [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/world/europe/germanys-effort-at-clean-energy-proves-complex.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0 ], putting pressure on lower income individuals in particular.

But many of the criticisms are largely overblown, according to Amory Lovins [ http://blog.rmi.org/separating_fact_from_fiction_in_accounts_of_germanys_renewables_revolution ] of the Rocky Mountain Institute. The modest uptick in coal-fired generation was substituting for pricier natural gas, not representative of a return to coal as it’s often mischaracterized. In fact, last December, as renewable energy production continued to grow and energy demand shrank, Germany’s largest utility chose not to renew [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/23/3101911/german-utility-coal-power/ ] two long-term contracts for coal-fired power.

And while much is made of rising industrial electricity prices, Lovins points out that in fact, “giant German firms enjoy Germany’s low and falling wholesale electricity prices, getting the benefit of renewables’ near-zero operating cost but exempted from paying for them.”

And as for the impact on the consumer, “the FIT surcharge raised households’ retail price of electricity seven percent but renewables lowered big industries’ wholesale price 18 percent. As long-term contracts expire, the past few years’ sharply lower wholesale prices could finally reach retail customers and start sending households’ total electricity prices back down.”

What’s more, “in Germany you have the option of earning back your payments, and far more, by investing as little as $600 in renewable energy yourself,” Lovins writes. “Citizens, cooperatives, and communities own more than half of German renewable capacity, vs. two percent in the U.S.”

Challenges aside, Energiewende — rooted in the acknowledgement that a fossil fuel-based energy system is not sustainable — is remarkable for its scope and its widespread support, particularly in a heavily industrialized country like Germany. “Don’t forget what Germany is doing right now. It’s changing its power supply,” Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based energy expert and journalist, told Voice of America [ http://www.voanews.com/content/green-energy-expansion-in-germany-comes-at-a-hefty-price/1858699.html ] earlier this year. “The last time when an energy supply was changed was the industrial revolution; this is something that has never been done before.”

© 2014 Center for American Progress Action Fund

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/13/3436923/germany-energy-records/ [with comments]


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The $4 Trillion Mistake: Climate Action Delayed Is Climate Action Denied


CREDIT: IEA

By Joe Romm
May 14, 2014 at 2:19 pm Updated: May 14, 2014 at 3:09 pm

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has issued another major report warning that we are headed for a beyond-catastrophic 11°F warming (6°C). The IEA report, “Energy Technology Perspectives” (ETP 2014 [ http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2014/may/name,51005,en.html ]), explains that delaying climate action has cost the world trillions of dollars in just the past two years

The good news is that the new report “confirms that global population and economic growth can be decoupled from energy demand.”

The IEA says that an aggressive effort to deploy renewable energy and energy efficiency (and energy storage) to keep global warming below the dangerous threshold of 2°C — their 2DS scenario — would require investment in clean energy of only about 1% of global GDP per year. But it would still be astoundingly cost-effective:

The $44 trillion additional investment needed to decarbonise the energy system in line with the 2DS by 2050 is more than offset by over $115 trillion in fuel savings – resulting in net savings of $71 trillion.

This is in line with the latest finding [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/13/3426117/climate-panel-avoiding-catastrophe-cheap/ ] by the world’s scientists and governments that stabilizing at 2°C would have a net effect on growth of 0.06% per year — essentially no effect at all compared to the staggering amount of climate damages [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/10/1696521/flashback-scientists-find-1240-trillion-in-climate-impacts-on-current-co2-path-so-we-must-mitigate-to-under-450-ppm/ ] avoided.

While serious progress would be low-cost, the new report explains that “the overall picture of progress remains bleak.” That’s why the new $44 trillion estimate for stabilizing below 2°C replaces a $36 trillion estimate in ETP 2012:

Some of the increase is due to accounting changes, but the calculations show that the cost of decarbonising the energy system – in real terms – is about 10% higher than it was two years ago. In part, this illustrates something the IEA has been saying for some time: the longer we wait, the more expensive it becomes to transform our energy system.

So the most recent two-year delay has added nearly $4 trillion to the cost of averting climate catastrophe. And the report makes crystal clear that is where we are headed, by analyzing three possible energy futures to 2050:

• 6°C Scenario (6DS), where the world is now heading with potentially devastating results

• 4°C Scenario (4DS) reflects stated intentions by countries to cut emissions and boost energy efficiency

• 2°C Scenario (2DS) offers a vision of a sustainable energy system of reduced greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

In 2011, IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/01/04/379694/iea-world-11-degree-warming-school-children-catastrophic/ ] of 6°C warming — by 2100 [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/30/492114/yes-deniers-and-confusionists-the-iea-and-others-warn-of-some-11f-warming-by-2100-if-we-keep-listening-to-you/ ] — “even school children know this will have catastrophic implications for all of us.” Of course he meant school children in other countries where they are taught the basic science [ http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/28/330109/science-of-global-warming-impacts/ ].

It bears repeating that warming beyond 7°F (4°C) is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e. 4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level,” as climate expert Kevin Anderson explains here. The latest research makes clear that such warming would make it exceedingly difficult [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/11/3424247/climate-change-drying-out-southwest/ ] if not impossible to feed 9 billion people post-2050 [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/09/27/795811/oxfam-warns-climate-change-and-extreme-weather-will-cause-food-prices-to-soar/ ] — and would likely force us to ultimately abandon major coastal cities [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/13/3437033/coastal-cities-abandoned/ ] around the world.

If you want to know what bleak progress looks like, the IEA has the chart for you (where “carbon intensity” is a measure of carbon pollution produced per unit of energy supply delivered):



The IEA explains “emissions per unit of electricity must be drastically decreased to meet 2DS targets … a reduction of more than 90%” by 2050. What does this mean for that ever popular bridge fuel:

After 2025 in the 2DS, emissions from gas-fired plants are higher than the average carbon intensity of the global electricity mix; natural gas loses its status as a low-carbon fuel.

Again, what precisely is the value of spending tens of billions of dollars on new long-lived natural gas infrastructure and power plants if we need to start getting off of natural gas in about a decade? Worse, the IEA doesn’t even look at the climate impact from the high levels of methane emissions [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/19/3296831/natural-gas-climate-benefit/ ] we’re seeing in the natural gas production and distribution system, which renders gas-fired plants actually worse than coal-fired plants from a climate perspective over a multi-decade period.

The IEA was once a staid and conservative organization that the opinion-makers ignored because it was staid and conservative. Now opinion-makers ignore the IEA because it has become a blunt truth teller on climate.

That’s why the right-wing tactic [ http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/06/climate-policy-economic-impact-and-cost-of-obama-s-climate-action-plan ] of saying it’s too expensive to cut carbon pollution is so destructive. Every year that argument wins, the cost of action goes up.

Climate action delayed is climate action denied.

© 2014 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/14/3437715/climate-action-delayed-is-climate-action-denied/ [with comments]


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In Latest Step In Its ‘War On Smog’ Effort, China Says It Will Triple Solar Capacity By 2017


A view of a heavily polluted city center on December 5, 2013 in Shanghai, China.
CREDIT: Shutterstock

By Emily Atkin
May 16, 2014 at 3:34 pm Updated: May 16, 2014 at 3:34 pm

As part of its notorious “war on smog” and effort to cut its reliance on coal, the Chinese government on Friday announced that it would speed up solar power development in the country by tripling installed capacity to 70 gigawatts by 2017, a report in Bloomberg [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-16/china-targets-70-gigawatts-of-solar-power-to-cut-coal-reliance.html ] said.

If met, the goal would increase installed solar capacity in China by about 50 gigawatts, about the amount of energy it takes to power 12.8 million homes [ http://cleantechnica.com/2012/08/10/us-reaches-50-gw-of-wind-energy-capacity-in-q2-of-2012/ ]. At the end of last year, China had almost 20 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, according the Bloomberg report.

The Chinese government’s announcement also included plans to have 150 gigawatts of installed wind power capacity, 11 gigawatts of biomass power and 330 gigawatts of hydro power by 2017.

The announcement comes just two months after Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s officially “declared war [ ]” on the country’s horrific and tragic smog problem, which scientists in Beijing have compared to the effects of a nuclear winter. The pollution has made headlines around the world as it has worsened, causing myriad health problems [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/18/3083901/chinas-smog-clinic/ ], marring cityscapes [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/09/3030071/shanghai-photos-pollution/ ], and even giving an 8-year-old girl lung cancer [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/11/05/2890101/air-pollution-8-year-lung-cancer/ ]. What’s more, the pollution has recently been confirmed to be caused by fossil fuel production [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/01/01/3110131/fossil-fuels-linked-beijing-smog/ ], with coal at the forefront.

China’s announcement that it would increase solar capacity also comes just days after a report [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/12/3436673/coal-dependent-china/ ] found that China’s continued dependence on coal would thwart any effort to fight global warming by any other country. That report, led by the U.K.’s Center for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, recommended China swiftly reduce its dependency on the fossil fuel, otherwise it would be “almost impossible” for the world to avoid a situation where global warming stays below [sic - exceeds] 2°C.

“The actions China takes in the next decade will be critical for the future of China and the world,” the study said. “Whether China moves onto an innovative, sustainable and low-carbon growth path this decade will more or less determine both China’s longer-term economic prospects in a natural resource-constrained world, … and the world’s prospects of cutting greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to manage the grave risks of climate change.”

There is reason, however, to be skeptical of China’s efforts to fight its choking pollution. Despite experiencing the worst air pollution on record in 2013, the country last year approved the construction of more than 100 million tonnes of new coal production capacity at a cost of $9.8 billion, according to a report compiled in January [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/01/09/3141691/china-adds-coal/ ] by Reuters. The increase in coal production in 2013 was six times bigger than the increase in 2012, when the administration approved just four coal projects with 16.6 million tonnes of annual capacity and a total investment of $1.2 billion. In other words, in just one year, China added coal production capacity equal to 10 percent of total U.S. annual usage.

At least one Chinese energy analyst, however, was optimistic about Friday’s announcement, telling Bloomberg by phone that it was a sign of better things to come.

“The trend that China will develop alternative energy is stable,” Wang Xiaoting, a Hong Kong-based analyst from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-16/china-targets-70-gigawatts-of-solar-power-to-cut-coal-reliance.html ]. “The new solar target set for 2017 will be easily attained if China keeps the current development pace.”

© 2014 Center for American Progress Action Fund

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/16/3438810/china-solar-goals/ [with comments]


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China and Russia Reach 30-Year Gas Deal

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, right, and President Xi Jinping of China on Wednesday in Shanghai, where they signed a deal to send gas through a pipeline from Siberia to China.
A Deal of Much Consequence
The agreement signed by the presidents of China and Russia on Wednesday, which will provide Russian natural gas to China for the first time, also carries major economic and geopolitical implications:
The pact will bolster President Vladimir V. Putin’s “Eurasian Economic Union” by helping to draw Russia and China closer, forming a more powerful economic counterweight to the United States and Europe. This comes at a time when the Obama administration is trying to isolate Russia economically over the crisis in Ukraine and as American tensions with China are rising over cyberspying and China’s territorial disputes with its neighbors.
Russia secures a contract, worth an estimated $400 billion over 30 years, that is the biggest in the history of its natural gas industry and provides Mr. Putin with an important new market for natural gas just when the European Union, its most important Western customer, is seeking to diminish its reliance on Russian gas.
China, the world’s leading consumer of energy, secures an important source of clean fuel at an advantageous price, decreasing the country’s reliance on imported coal and oil.
MAY 21, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/world/asia/china-russia-gas-deal.html [with comments]


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Full Show: The War on Climate Scientists

May 16, 2014

Climate change is increasingly making mainstream media headlines and this week was no exception.

On Tuesday, scientists said that the long-feared collapse [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/science/earth/collapse-of-parts-of-west-antarctica-ice-sheet-has-begun-scientists-say.html ] of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun, kicking off what they believe will be a centuries-long, irreversible process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet.

News reports like this show that climate change is serious, but corporations and even some governments seem recklessly determined to minimize or deny the reality of global warming, as well as undermine the authority of scientists.

In the second part of his conversation with Bill, Canadian scientist and environmental activist David Suzuki says killing the messenger is a 50-year-0ld strategy ripped straight from big tobacco’s playbook.

“This is a very effective thing that we know has been done by the tobacco industry [and] it’s being done by the fossil fuel industry… You attack a person on the basis of their trustworthiness, their ulterior motives, anything to get away from dealing with the issues”

For Suzuki, it’s a tactic he’s personally confronted as a result of his outspoken views on climate change and government collusion with the petrochemical industry. Although he’s considered Canada’s most admired figure, Suzuki has been the target of relentless attacks from his nation’s prime minister, corporations and right-wing ideologues.

“The fossil fuel industry knows that fossil fuel use is at the heart of climate change,” Suzuki says. “But the problem is their job as CEOs and executives is to make money for their shareholders, and they’ll do it.”

Producer: Candace White. Segment Producer: Robert Booth. Editor: Robert Kuhns.

© 2014 Public Affairs Television, Inc.

http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-the-war-on-climate-scientists/ [the above YouTube of the show at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnSicq6Y1lY (with comments); with full show video embedded, transcript and comments]


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Full Show: Time to Get Real on Climate Change

May 9, 2014

This week, as the White House issued a landmark report detailing [ http://billmoyers.com/2014/05/07/seven-scary-facts-about-how-global-warming-is-scorching-the-united-states/ ] the frightening affects of global warming on our country and President Obama took to the airwaves to drive home that message, Bill Moyers talks with a scientist who has sounded the alarm for decades.

For nearly 35 years, David Suzuki has brought science into the homes of millions on the Canadian television series, The Nature of Things. He has become a godfather of the environmental movement, and in a poll of his fellow Canadians last fall he was named that country’s most admired figure. Nonetheless, his outspoken views on climate change and the government’s collusion with the petrochemical industry in developing Canada’s oil-rich tar sands have made him the target of relentless attacks from his nation’s prime minister, corporations and right-wing ideologues.

“Our politicians should be thrown in the slammer for willful blindness. …I think that we are being willfully blind to the consequences for our children and grandchildren. It’s an intergenerational crime,” Suzuki tells Moyers.

Producer: Candace White. Segment Producer: Robert Booth. Editor: Rob Kuhns.

© 2014 Public Affairs Television, Inc.

http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-time-to-get-real-on-climate-change/ [the above YouTube of the show at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA-fNEhOUgw (with comments); with full show video embedded, transcript and comments]


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Dust in the Wind Never Looked So Stunning
May 16th, 2014
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/aeresols-climate-change-ted-talk-17453 [with video ( http://vimeo.com/93164060 ) embedded, and comments]


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Solar FREAKIN' Roadways!

Published on May 18, 2014 by Scott Brusaw [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC82se11_uN48yEDeOgnVJJA ]

It's the roadway of the future! Feel inspired? Help us bring this project to the next step:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/solar-roadways

Check out our other videos for more info!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTA3rnpgzU [with comments] [via/more (linked) at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/solar-freakin-roadways-el_b_5352544.html (with comment)]


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Countdown to oblivion: The real reason we can’t stop global warming


(Credit: AP/NASA)

The effects of climate change are being felt across international borders—and it's a bigger problem than you think

Saskia Sassen
Sunday, May 18, 2014 05:59 AM CDT

There was a time when the environmental damage we produced remained somewhat localized, confined to specific places. That time is gone. Today, nonindustrial areas, such as Greenland and the Antarctic, experience the industrial pollution generated in the United States and in Russia, to mention just two countries. Damage produced in particular sites now scales up, driven by the vastness of destruction, and becomes a planetary problem that drifts back down to hit even those places that did not contribute to the damage.

Greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and particulate matter such as black carbon) are key causes of climate change. Diverse measures arrive at an estimate that human activity has generated 350 billion tonnes of carbon since 1959; 55 percent of this has been taken up by the oceans and land, and the rest has been left in the atmosphere. In 2009 alone, global carbon dioxide emissions totaled 30 billion tonnes. By 2011, annual emissions had increased by 5.3 percent to 31.6 billion tonnes. And by early 2013, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed the critical level of 400 parts per million. This is a level not seen on earth since the Pliocene era 3 million years ago.

Under current conditions, global CO2 emissions (including emissions related to deforestation) will reach 41 billion tonnes per year in 2020. The EPA estimates that industrial emissions account for 50 percent of greenhouse gases emitted in the United States, and industry is almost certainly responsible for an even higher proportion of China’s huge and growing emissions. At this scale, and with the relationship of carbon dioxide to climate change, industrial pollution is a driver of massive global problems.

One major effect is rising land temperature. The numbers for the current warming phase are extreme compared to the available historical records. May 2012 was “the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average,” writes Bill McKibben. The spring of 2012 was the hottest ever, and marked the biggest difference with the average seasonal temperature recorded for any season. In the United States, the month of June 2012 broke 3,215 heat records across the country, and May 2012 was the warmest May in the country’s recorded history. There are debates and disagreements about the precise rate, timing, and level of increase. But very diverse types of studies all document this upward trend.

Climate change has already started to affect global agricultural output. The Club of Rome predicts that climate change will cause an increase of 2°C in average temperature by the year 2052 and a 2.8°C rise in average temperature by 2080. An increase of that magnitude is predicted to “reduce yields across two-thirds of the maize-growing region of Africa, even in the absence of drought”; crop losses for maize could reach 20 percent by midcentury.

Not all droughts (or floods) can be attributed to this type of climate change, as I indicated earlier in this chapter. For instance, what is referred to as the “Dust Bowl” in the United States—a dry plain extending from the central United States into Canada, with Oklahoma and Texas as its center—predates anthropogenic climate change. Seager et al. write that one difference today is that the impact of greenhouse gases on the climate has caused the Chihuahuan Desert to expand, or, in Mingfang’s words “We’re essentially moving the desert further north.” There is research on climate change suggesting that by the year 2020, the American Southwest will face permanent drought.

In Asia, the Aral Sea is one instance of a shockingly dried-out lake. Like the Dust Bowl in the United States, climate change is not the sole cause of the drying. But the scale and velocity of water loss may be partly due to the global scale-up of climate change and its blowback to sites only indirectly implicated. Not unlike the United States at the time, Soviet-era irrigation projects are known to have been wildly inefficient. One example is that of the world’s largest irrigation canal, the Qaraqum Canal, which diverted 13 cubic kilometers of water from the Aral Sea for years; as much as 50 percent of this water was lost en route due to poor engineering. On top of these inefficiencies, climate-change-induced drought and desertification sharply increased the stress on the Aral Sea. The end result is that what was once the world’s fourth-largest body of fresh water has been reduced to less than 10 percent of its original volume.

The other major planetary transformation arising from direct and indirect effects of greenhouse gases is the rise of ocean levels and their acidity. Between 443 billion and 629 billion tons of meltwater are added to the world’s oceans each year, which raises sea level by about 1.5 millimeters a year. This is in addition to the 2-millimeter yearly rise caused by expansion of the warming ocean. It’s true, of course, that not all ice-bound areas are melting. Some glaciers are seeing as much ice added to higher-elevation points as melts away from the base; this may occur because thaw at the periphery evaporates into the air and then recondenses and freezes at the colder, less humid peaks. Further, for a variety of meteorological reasons, parts of the Antarctic, as well as particular glaciers elsewhere, are not losing ice due to melting; this is partly explained by the fact that ice forms more easily over land than over the ocean. However, the extent of ice melt is indeed alarming.

Every now and then the major effects of environmental destruction become visible to a larger public. In 2012, 57 [sic - 97] percent of [the surface of] Greenland’s ice sheet melted between July 8 and July 12. This reduced [surface] ice coverage to 3 percent of its maximum, stunning scientists, terrifying climate watchers, and mobilizing the media into reporting it.

The melting of ice at this scale becomes a major factor in raising sea levels. The interaction between water temperature and ice melt arises from the fact that ice reflects more solar energy than water: this insulates the ocean beneath the ice from the sun. When the ice melts, that insulation thins or disappears, and the ocean water warms, which in turn melts more ice, and so on in a chain of warming water, melting ice, and rising ocean levels. At present, the losses of ice are shared roughly equally between Greenland and Antarctica. If the present acceleration continues, ice sheet melting alone could contribute up to 56 centimeters to sea level rise by 2100.

A distinct type of melt is the thawing of permafrost in the Arctic Circle. This too is caused by anthropogenic climate change. In 2008, the permafrost under the town of Newtok, Alaska, began to thaw and the buildings started to sink. The Bering Sea ate away at what had become a permeable coastline. The 320-person community of Yup’ik Inuit, whose forebears had lived in the same location for two thousand years, was forced to leave. Of Alaska’s 213 Alaska Native villages, 184 have been seriously affected by erosion and flooding; six of them have been deemed to be in need of immediate help.

Permafrost thaw creates a feedback loop that accelerates the type of climate change we are observing. As permafrost thaws, the trapped organic matter begins to decay and to release methane and carbon dioxide. Permafrost thaw is especially dangerous because it is likely to produce methane (CH4), which has a much stronger warming effect than carbon dioxide. Scientists generally agree that between 9 percent and 15 percent of the top three levels of permafrost will melt by 2040; this is expected to increase to between 47 percent and 61 percent by 2100. The estimated carbon release from permafrost degradation is 30 billion to 63 billion tons of carbon by 2040, 232 billion to 380 billion tons by 2100, and 549 billion to 865 billion tons by 2300.

Current efforts by many governments to stem this kind of climate change are not going to be enough. Even if we implement existing agreed-upon standards, we would still not secure the planet’s sustainability. Consider two future patterns: one under current conditions and the second if we implemented all current agreements to reduce environmental damage. It would make a difference, but one far too small to alter the basic trajectory. Existing agreements to address environmental destruction operate at a level and through formats that fail to address the deeper dynamics causing the climate change. These dynamics cut across the existing boundaries and divisions of the interstate system.

Excerpted from “Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy [ http://www.amazon.com/Expulsions-Brutality-Complexity-Global-Economy/dp/0674599225 ]” by Saskia Sassen.

Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/18/countdown_to_oblivion_the_real_reason_we_cant_stop_global_warming/ [with comments]


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2012 surface melt of Greenland ice sheet driven by combined effects of rising temperatures and ash from forest fires


Kaitlin Keegan, of Dartmouth College, in a snow pit on the Greenland ice sheet. The pit shows layers of annual accumulation.
Credit: NSF photo


A view of the Greenland ice sheet, which experienced widespread surface melting in 2012.
Credit: Peter West, NSF

Dartmouth, Desert Research Institute researchers suggest nearly annual surface melting expected by century's end

May 19, 2014

NSF-funded researchers at Dartmouth College and the Desert Research Institute have found that a combination of rising temperatures and ash from Northern Hemisphere forest fires caused the large-scale surface melting of the Greenland ice sheet in 1889 and 2012.

The findings also suggest that continued climate warming will result in nearly annual melting of the ice sheet's surface by the year 2100. Melting in the dry snow region does not contribute to sea level rise; instead, the meltwater percolates into the snowpack and refreezes, causing less sunlight to be reflected--which scientists refer to as lower albedo--and leaving the ice-sheet surface even more susceptible to future melting.

"Forest fires burning far from Greenland provided the ash that, along with the warm temperatures, caused widespread melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet," said Kaitlin Keegan, the lead author of the paper [ http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/14/1405397111.abstract ], which appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It required the combination of both of these effects--lowered snow albedo from ash and unusually warm temperatures--to push the ice sheet over the threshold," said Keegan. "With both the frequency of forest fires and warmer temperatures predicted to increase with climate change, widespread melt events are likely to happen much more frequently in the future."

The study did not focus explicitly on analyzing the ash to determine the source of the fires, but the presence of a high concentration of ammonium concurrent with the black carbon indicates the ash's source was large boreal forest fires in Siberia and North America in June and July 2012. Air masses from these two areas arrived at the Greenland ice sheet's summit just before the widespread melt event.

As for 1889, there are historical records of testimony to Congress of large-scale forest fires in the Pacific Northwest of the United States that summer, but it would be difficult to pinpoint which forest fires deposited ash onto the ice sheet that summer.

The research was supported by portions of several NSF awards and by NASA grant NAG04GI66G.

The massive Greenland ice sheet experiences annual melting at low elevations near the coastline, but melting at the surface is rare in the dry snow region at higher elevations in its center. In mid-July 2012, however, more than 97 percent of the ice sheet experienced surface melt, the first widespread melt during the era of satellite observation.

The Dartmouth-led team's analysis of six Greenland shallow ice cores from the dry snow region confirmed that the most recent prior widespread melt occurred in 1889. An ice core, a cylinder of ice, from the center of the ice sheet demonstrated that exceptionally warm temperatures combined with black-carbon sediments from Northern Hemisphere forest fires reduced albedo below a critical threshold in the dry snow region and caused the large-scale melting events in both 1889 and 2012.

The researchers also used Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data to project the frequency of widespread surface melting into the year 2100.

If, as expected, Arctic temperatures and the frequency of forest fires increase with climate change, the researchers' results suggest that large-scale melt events on the Greenland ice sheet may begin to occur almost annually by the end of century. These events are likely to alter the surface mass-balance of the ice sheet, leaving the surface susceptible to further melting. The Greenland ice sheet is the second largest ice body in the world after the Antarctic ice sheet.

"Our Earth is a system of systems; improved understanding of the complexity of the linkages and feedbacks, as in this paper, is one challenge facing the next generation of engineers and scientists--people like Kaitlin," said Mary Albert, director of the NSF-supported Ice Drilling Program Office at the Thayer School of Engineering and Keegan's doctoral adviser.

-NSF-

Media Contacts
Peter West, NSF, [phone], [e-mail]

Principal Investigators
Kaitlin Keegan, Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, [phone], [e-mail]

Co-Investigators
Mary Albert, U.S. Ice Drilling Program Office, [phone], [e-mail]

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=131422


--


Nearly All of Greenland’s Surface Melted Overnight in 2012—Here’s Why

The interior of Greenland (seen here with researchers’ tents pitched) is usually covered in frozen ice and snow. In July 2012, though, 97 percent of the surface melted for the first time in more than 100 years. Scientists now know why that happened.

In just a few days in July 2012, the interior of Greenland underwent widespread surface melting (red color), which was detected by the satellite Oceansat-2.

June and July 2012 saw many forest fires in North America and Siberia. NASA’s Terra satellite captured more than 30 fires burning in this far eastern portion of Siberia on July 9, 2012. (Red outlines indicate unusually warm surface temperatures that are associated with fires.)
High temperatures and black carbon from forest fires and fossil fuels combined to push the huge ice sheet over the edge
May 19, 2014
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Greenland-surface-melted-overnight-why-180951501/ [with comments]


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Wildfires Worse Due To Man-Made Climate Change, Studies Show


A firefighter hoses flames at the Cocos fire on May 15, 2014 in San Marcos, California.
(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

by SETH BORENSTEIN
Posted: 05/19/2014 10:17 am EDT Updated: 05/19/2014 10:59 am EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The devastating wildfires scorching Southern California offer a glimpse of a warmer and more fiery future, according to scientists and federal and international reports.

In the past three months, at least three different studies and reports have warned that wildfires are getting bigger, that man-made climate change is to blame, and it's only going to get worse with more fires starting earlier in the year. While scientists are reluctant to blame global warming for any specific fire, they have been warning for years about how it will lead to more fires and earlier fire seasons.

"The fires in California and here in Arizona are a clear example of what happens as the Earth warms, particularly as the West warms, and the warming caused by humans is making fire season longer and longer with each decade," said University of Arizona geoscientist Jonathan Overpeck. "It's certainly an example of what we'll see more of in the future."

Since 1984, the area burned by the West's largest wildfires — those of more than 1,000 acres — have increased by about 87,700 acres a year, according to an April study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. And the areas where fire has been increasing the most are areas where drought has been worsening and "that certainly points to climate being a major contributor," study main author Philip Dennison of the University of Utah said Friday.

The top five years with the most acres burned have all happened in the last decade, according to federal records. From 2010-2013, about 6.4 million acres a year burned on average; in the 1980s it was 2.9 million acres a year.

"We are going to see increased fire activity all across the West as the climate warms," Dennison said.

That was one of a dozen "key messages" in the 841-page National Climate Assessment released by the federal government earlier this month. It mentioned wildfires 200 times.

"Increased warming, drought and insect outbreaks, all caused by or linked to climate change have increased wildfires and impacts to people and ecosystems in the Southwest," the federal report said. "Fire models project more wildfire and increased risks to communities across extensive areas."

Likewise, the Nobel prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted in March that wildfires are on the rise in the western U.S., have killed 103 Americans in 30 years, and will likely get worse.

The immediate cause of the fires can be anything from lightning to arson; the first of the San Diego area fires, which destroyed at least eight houses, an 18-unit condominium complex and two businesses, seemed to start from sparks from faulty construction equipment working on a graded field, said California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokeswoman Lynne Tolmachoff.

But the California fires are fueled by three major ingredients: drought, heat and winds. California and Arizona have had their hottest first four months of the year on record, according to National Weather Service records. Parts of Southern California broke records Thursday, racing past 100 degrees. For the past two weeks the entire state of California has been in a severe or worse drought, up from 46 percent a year ago, according to the U.S. drought monitor.

"With the drought this year, we're certainly going to see increased frequency of this type of event," Dennison said. "Because of the drought the fuels (dry plants and trees) are very susceptible to burning."

Another study last month in Geophysical Research Letters linked the ongoing drought to man-made climate change. Other scientists say that is not yet proven.

Scientists will have to do a lot of time-consuming computer simulations before they can officially link the drought to climate change. But Overpeck said what is clear is that it's not just a drought, but "a hot drought," which is more connected to man-made warming.

The other factor is the unusual early season Santa Ana winds, whose strength is a key factor in whipping the flames. So far, scientists haven't connected early Santa Ana to climate change, Dennison said.

Online:

The National Climate Assessment: http://www.globalchange.gov

© 2014 Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/19/wildfires-climate-change_n_5351549.html [with comments]


===


Greenland will be far greater contributor to sea rise than expected


Details of the large-scale map for Upernavik Isstrøm and Nunatakassaap Sermia (a), Hayes Gletscher, Allison Gletscher and Illullip Sermia (b), Petermann, Steensby and Ryder Gletscher (c), Marie Sophie Gletscher, Academy Gletscher and Hagen Bræ (d), F. Graae, Charcot and Daugaard-Jensen (e), and Kangerlussuaq Gletscher (f); glaciers are listed in clockwise order. The white contour line delineates the limit of land ice. The mass conservation method is employed for the glaciers. Kriging is used to map the interior regions.
[ http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/ngeo2167_F1.html , via http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2167.html ]


Profiles A (a), B (b) and C (c), with their locations given in d, show the surface elevation in black, reference sea level in dashed black, bed topography B2001 from ref. 7 in brown, B2013 from ref. 16 and associated error in green, the mass conservation topography and associated error (2s) in blue, and OIB bed elevation derived from radar tracks as black squares with error bars. d, Locations of the profiles A, B and C are shown as white lines, with a bed topography colour-coded between -900 and +1,300 m, overlaid on a radar mosaic of Greenland. Profiles B and C coincide with OIB flight lines.
[ http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/ngeo2167_F2.html , via http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2167.html ]

Major UCI-NASA work reveals long, deep valleys connecting ice cap to the ocean

Irvine, Calif., May 19, 2014 — Greenland’s icy reaches are far more vulnerable to warm ocean waters from climate change than had been thought, according to new research by UC Irvine and NASA glaciologists. The work, published today [ http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2167.html ] in Nature Geoscience, shows previously uncharted deep valleys stretching for dozens of miles under the Greenland Ice Sheet.

The bedrock canyons sit well below sea level, meaning that as subtropical Atlantic waters hit the fronts of hundreds of glaciers, those edges will erode much further than had been assumed and release far greater amounts of water.

Ice melt from the subcontinent has already accelerated as warmer marine currents have migrated north, but older models predicted that once higher ground was reached in a few years, the ocean-induced melting would halt. Greenland’s frozen mass would stop shrinking, and its effect on higher sea waters would be curtailed.

“That turns out to be incorrect. The glaciers of Greenland are likely to retreat faster and farther inland than anticipated – and for much longer – according to this very different topography we’ve discovered beneath the ice,” said lead author Mathieu Morlighem, a UC Irvine associate project scientist. “This has major implications, because the glacier melt will contribute much more to rising seas around the globe.”

To obtain the results, Morlighem developed a breakthrough method that for the first time offers a comprehensive view of Greenland’s entire periphery. It’s nearly impossible to accurately survey at ground level the subcontinent’s rugged, rocky subsurface, which descends as much as 3 miles beneath the thick ice cap.

Since the 1970s, limited ice thickness data has been collected via radar pinging of the boundary between the ice and the bedrock. Along the coastline, though, rough surface ice and pockets of water cluttered the radar sounding, so large swaths of the bed remained invisible.

Measurements of Greenland’s topography have tripled since 2009, thanks to NASA Operation IceBridge flights. But Morlighem quickly realized that while that data provided a fuller picture than had the earlier radar readings, there were still major gaps between the flight lines.

To reveal the full subterranean landscape, he designed a novel “mass conservation algorithm” that combined the previous ice thickness measurements with information on the velocity and direction of its movement and estimates of snowfall and surface melt.

The difference was dramatic. What appeared to be shallow glaciers at the very edges of Greenland are actually long, deep fingers stretching more than 100 kilometers (almost 65 miles) inland.

“We anticipate that these results will have a profound and transforming impact on computer models of ice sheet evolution in Greenland in a warming climate,” the researchers conclude.

“Operation IceBridge vastly improved our knowledge of bed topography beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet,” said co-author Eric Rignot of UC Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This new study takes a quantum leap at filling the remaining, critical data gaps on the map.”

Other co-authors are Jeremie Mouginot of UC Irvine and Helene Seroussi and Eric Larour of JPL. Funding was provided by NASA.

The team also reported stark new findings last week on accelerated glacial melt in West Antarctica. Together, the papers “suggest that the globe’s ice sheets will contribute far more to sea level rise than current projections show,” Rignot said.

View Greenland Ice Canyons Video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzrBpAAxdWg (next below, as embedded; title and description of/from the YouTube included)]:

Bed Topography of West Greenland
On the left: Surface topography and ice velocities. On the right: bed topography beneath the ice sheet inferred from mass conservation.
Black squares are 50 km x 50 km and the vertical exaggeration factor is 3. Surface elevation is from GIMP (Howat et al. 2014), surface velocities from Rignot and Mouginot 2012, bed topography from Morlighem et al. 2014.
By Mathieu Morlighem.

© 2014 UC Regents

http://news.uci.edu/press-releases/greenland-will-be-far-greater-contributor-to-sea-rise-than-expected/


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Hidden Greenland Canyons Mean More Sea Level Rise


A glacier in the Sukkertoppen ice cap, southwest Greenland, flows down a rocky canyon like those mapped in this study.
Image credit: NASA

May 19, 2014

Scientists at NASA and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), have found that canyons under Greenland's ocean-feeding glaciers are deeper and longer than previously thought, increasing the amount of Greenland's estimated contribution to future sea level rise.

"The glaciers of Greenland are likely to retreat faster and farther inland than anticipated, and for much longer, according to this very different topography we have discovered," said Mathieu Morlighem, a UCI associate project scientist who is lead author of the new research paper. The results were published Sunday [ http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2167.html ] in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Ice loss from Greenland has accelerated during the last few decades. However, older ice sheet models predicted the speedup would be temporary because the glaciers would soon melt back onto higher ground and stabilize. The models therefore projected Greenland's contribution to global sea level rise would be limited.

Morlighem's new topography shows southern Greenland's ragged, crumbling coastline is scored by more than 100 canyons beneath glaciers that empty into the ocean. Many canyons are well below sea level as far as 60 miles (100 kilometers) inland. Higher ground, where glaciers could stabilize, is much farther from the coastline than previously thought. The finding calls into question the idea that the recent accelerated ice loss will be short-lived.

Buried under the Greenland Ice Sheet, the subcontinent's bedrock topography has been estimated using soundings from ice-penetrating radar. However, the wet and fractured ice along the southern coastline cluttered the radar soundings so that large swaths of the bed remained invisible. To overcome that problem, Morlighem and his colleagues devised an advanced technique to create a more accurate map. The technique makes the best use of several kinds of data: ice thickness measurements derived from airborne radar; satellite radar interferometry data on the speed and direction of ice movement: and estimates of snowfall and surface melt to the sea. By combining the different types of data, they were able to map the bed topography along Greenland's margins with unprecedented precision and detail.

"We have been able to make a quantum leap in our knowledge of bed topography beneath ice sheets in the last decade, thanks to the advent of missions like NASA's Operation IceBridge in combination with satellite data on the speed these ice sheets are flowing," said co-author Eric Rignot of UCI and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

The same research team reported new findings on glacial melt in West Antarctica last week.

"Together the papers illustrate clearly the globe's ice sheets will contribute far more to sea level rise than current projections show," said Rignot.

The study used synthetic aperture radar data collected in 2008-2009 by the Japanese Advanced Land Observing System Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (ALOS PALSAR), the Canadian RADARSAT-1, the German TerraSAR-X, and the European Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR). Ice thinning rates were derived from NASA's Airborne Topographic Mapper and ICESat data, and ice thickness data came from NASA's Operation IceBridge airborne campaigns.

The California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages JPL for NASA.

NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/earthrightnow

Alan Buis
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0474
[e-mail]

Steve Cole
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0918
[e-mail]

Janet Wilson
University of California, Irvine
949-824-3969
[e-mail]

2014-155

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-155 , http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/may/hidden-greenland-canyons-mean-more-sea-level-rise/ [with the YouTube included with the item just above embedded]


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Greenland's long glacier fjords point to higher seas

Greenland has more than 200 major outlet glaciers along its periphery.

The graphic shows the evolution of the techniques to determine the shape of fjords, from 2001 (L), 2013 (C) and the new UC Irvine approach (R). Modelling possible future change requires good bedrock information.
19 May 2014
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27469488


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CryoSat finds sharp increase in Antarctica’s ice losses


Antarctica’s ice loss


CryoSat-2 satellite


Thinning ice

19 May 2014

Three years of observations from ESA’s CryoSat satellite show that the Antarctic ice sheet is now losing 159 billion tonnes of ice each year – twice as much as when it was last surveyed.

The polar ice sheets are a major contributor to the rise in global sea levels, and these newly measured losses from Antarctica alone are enough to raise global sea levels by 0.45 mm each year.

These latest findings by a team of scientists from the UK’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling show that the pattern of imbalance continues to be dominated by glaciers thinning in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica.

Between 2010 and 2013, West Antarctica, East Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula lost 134, 3 and 23 billion tonnes of ice each year, respectively.

The average rate of ice thinning in West Antarctica has increased compared to previous measurements, and this area’s yearly loss is now one third more than measured over the five years before CryoSat’s launch.

Launched in 2010, CryoSat carries a radar altimeter that can measure the surface height variation of ice in fine detail, allowing scientists to record changes in its volume with unprecedented accuracy.

CryoSat surveys almost all – 96% – of the Antarctic continent, reaching to within 215 km of the South Pole. In addition, it has increased coverage over coastal regions, where today’s ice losses are concentrated.

“Thanks to its novel instrument design and to its near-polar orbit, CryoSat allows us to survey coastal and high-latitude regions of Antarctica that were beyond the capability of past altimeter missions, and it seems that these regions are crucial for determining the overall imbalance,” said Prof. Andrew Shepherd from the University of Leeds, UK, who led the study.

In particular, newly mapped areas by CryoSat in West Antarctica have now brought altimeter observations closer to estimates based on other approaches.

“We find that ice losses continue to be most pronounced along the fast-flowing ice streams of the Amundsen Sea sector, with thinning rates of 4-8 m per year near to the grounding lines – where the ice streams lift up off the land and begin to float out over the ocean – of the Pine Island, Thwaites and Smith Glaciers,” said Dr Malcolm McMillan from the University of Leeds, UK, and lead author of the study.

This area has long been identified as the most vulnerable to changes in climate. Recent assessments say its glaciers may have passed a point of irreversible retreat.

“Although we are fortunate to now have, in CryoSat, a routine capability to monitor the polar ice sheets, the increased thinning we have detected in West Antarctica is a worrying development,” said Prof. Shepherd.

“It adds concrete evidence that dramatic changes are under way in this part of our planet. The challenge is to use this evidence to test and improve the predictive skill of climate models.”

The findings were published [ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL060111/abstract ] in Geophysical Research Letters.

“We at ESA are extremely pleased to see CryoSat achieve yet another one of its primary mission objectives. It is a great testament to the hard work put in by the whole team, who have worked on the mission over the past 10 years, ” said Tommaso Parrinello, CryoSat Mission Manager.

Copyright 2014 ESA

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/CryoSat/CryoSat_finds_sharp_increase_in_Antarctica_s_ice_losses


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Esa's Cryosat mission sees Antarctic ice losses double

Antarctica is now losing about 160 billion tonnes of ice a year to the ocean - twice as much as when the continent was last surveyed.
19 May 2014
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27465050


===


The Big Melt Accelerates


Muir Glacier at Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska is among the many worldwide that are disappearing. Muir, left, as seen in August 1941, and photographed in August 2004.
Credit W. Field; B. Molnia/U.S.G.S., via Glacier Photograph Collection

By KENNETH CHANG
MAY 19, 2014

Centuries from now, a large swath of the West Antarctic ice sheet is likely to be gone, its hundreds of trillions of tons of ice melted, causing a four-foot rise in already swollen seas [N.B.: a cubic meter of ice weighs just over one ton/2,000 pounds ( http://www.aqua-calc.com/calculate/volume-to-weight/substance/ice-coma-and-blank-solid ); the West Antarctic ice sheet contains an estimated 2.2 million cubic kilometers of ice, of the entire Antarctic ice sheet's estimated 26.5 million cubic kilometers of ice ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Antarctic_Ice_Sheet ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet )].

Scientists reported last week that the scenario may be inevitable [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/science/earth/collapse-of-parts-of-west-antarctica-ice-sheet-has-begun-scientists-say.html ], with new research [ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL060140/abstract ] concluding that some giant glaciers had passed the point of no return, possibly setting off a chain reaction that could doom the rest of the ice sheet.

For many, the research signaled that changes in the earth’s climate have already reached a tipping point, even if global warming [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html ] halted immediately.

“We as people see it as closing doors and limiting our future choices,” said Richard Alley [ http://www.geosc.psu.edu/academic-faculty/alley-richard ], a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University. “Most of us personally like to keep those choices open.”

But these glaciers are just the latest signs that the thawing of earth’s icy regions is accelerating. While some glaciers are holding steady or even growing slightly, most are shrinking, and scientists believe they will continue to melt until greenhouse gas emissions are reined in.

“It’s possibly the best evidence of real global impact of warming,” said Theodore A. Scambos [ https://nsidc.org/research/bios/scambos.html ], lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center [ https://nsidc.org/ ].

Furthest along in melting are the smallest glaciers in the high mountainous regions of the Andes, the Alps and the Himalayas and in Alaska. By itself, their melting does not pose a grave threat; together they make up only 1 percent of the ice on the planet and would cause sea level to rise only by one to two feet.

But the mountain glaciers have been telling scientists what the West Antarctica glacier disintegration is now confirming: In the coming centuries, more land will be covered by water and more of nature will be disrupted. A full melt would cause sea level to rise 215 feet.

During recent ice ages, glaciers expanded from the poles and covered nearly a third of the continents. And in the distant past there were episodes known as Snowball Earth [ http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/science/scientists-try-to-explain-the-cold-mysterious-era-of-snowball-earth.html ], when the entire planet froze over. At the other extreme, a warm period near the end of the age of dinosaurs may have left the earth ice-free. Today the amount of ice is modest — 10 percent of land areas, nearly all of that in Greenland and Antarctica.

[embedded maps of Greenland and Antarctica showing losses in ice elevation, and sea level rise chart]

Glaciers are, simply, rivers of ice formed from snow in regions that are frozen year-round. The snow compacts over time into granular, porous ice, which glaciologists call firn [ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/208027/firn ]. When firn compacts even more, it becomes glacier ice, which flows, usually slowly, down mountainsides. Depending on how fast new snow accumulates at the top, or melts at the bottom, a glacier grows or shrinks in length and thickness.

Not long ago, the only way to measure glaciers was to put stakes in the ice. Using surveying tools, glaciologists would mark the location and return later to see how far the ice had moved. The method gave scientists a sense of only the areas measured during that study period. “We had these point measurements which were very labor-intensive,” said Tad Pfeffer [ http://ceae.colorado.edu/geotech/pfeffer.html ], a glaciologist at the University of Colorado.

Today, satellites provide a global view. Images show where the glaciers are and how areas change over the years. Most useful has been NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment [ http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Grace/ ], or Grace. Two identical spacecraft have been measuring the earth’s gravity. When glaciers melt, the water flows elsewhere, and that part of the planet weighs less, slightly weakening its gravitational pull. Grace isn’t precise enough to measure the mass changes in an individual glacier, but it does provide data on regional shifts.

Another NASA satellite, IceSat [ http://icesat.gsfc.nasa.gov/ ], bounced lasers off the ice to precisely measure glaciers’ height. (In operation from 2003 through 2009, when the last of its lasers stopped working, it is scheduled to be replaced by IceSat-2 in 2017.)

In an analysis last year of the satellite and ground measurements, a team of scientists led by Alex S. Gardner [ http://www.clarku.edu/departments/geography/facultybio.cfm?id=897&progid=15&; ], an earth scientist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who is moving to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, concluded that, on average, glaciers in all regions were withering away [ http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6134/852.abstract ], dumping 260 billion metric tons of water into the ocean every year.

“I can’t think of any major glacier region that’s growing right now,” Dr. Scambos said. “Almost everywhere we look we’re seeing mass loss.”

The melting from the mountain glaciers alone raises sea level about 0.7 millimeters a year.

The ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland together possess about 100 times as much ice as all of the mountain glaciers combined, but contribute only slightly more to the sea level rise: 310 billion tons a year, Dr. Scambos said. That is because most of the mountain glaciers lie in areas where temperatures are closer to the melting point than they are in Greenland or Antarctica, and so slight warming tips them to melting.

Greenland, with 10 percent of the world’s ice, has enough to raise sea level by 23 feet. “I still think Greenland is the most important thing to watch for this century,” Dr. Scambos said.

In 2012, when summer Arctic temperatures were particularly warm, surface melting was observed almost everywhere on Greenland’s glaciers, even in the mountains. That had not happened for decades.

Researchers from Dartmouth found that [ http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=131422 ] another side effect from global warming, forest fires, made the melting even worse. Soot from fires elsewhere in the world landed on Greenland snow, making it darker, causing it to absorb more heat.

A new study of Greenland, published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience [ http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2167.html ( http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/ngeo2167.pdf )], paints an even bleaker picture. The melting is accelerated because many of the glaciers flow in the warming waters around Greenland. However, scientists had believed that the melting would slow once the bottom of the glaciers melted and they were no longer touching the water.

The new research indicates otherwise. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, including Eric Rignot [ http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5467 ], the lead author of one of last week’s papers concluding that the melt in West Antarctica is irreversible, discovered long, deep canyons below sea level and under the ice sheet. So even as the glaciers retreat, they will still be in contact with the encroaching warm water, and as a result, more ice will melt. “They will contribute more to sea level rise,” said Mathieu Morlighem [ https://www.ess.uci.edu/people/mmorligh ], lead author of the Nature Geoscience paper.

Antarctica is the largest frozen mass on the planet, accounting for about 90 percent of the earth’s ice. Most of it is in East Antarctica, which is generally higher and colder and less likely to melt. By some estimates global warming is leading to increased snowfall there, which is limiting the loss. But as in West Antarctica, some of the ice resides in bowl-shape depressions, which are similarly vulnerable to melting.

Over all, data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat [ http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/CryoSat ] satellite, published on Monday [ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL060111/abstract ], indicates that the continent shed 160 billion tons a year from 2010 to 2013.

Scientists say that the melting will continue as long as the heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases. Even if carbon dioxide and temperatures stabilize, the melting and shifting of glaciers will continue for decades or centuries as they adjust to the new equilibrium.

But a vast majority of the ice is not yet destined to melt. “We have not committed to a lot more that could be committed if we keep turning up the thermostat,” said Dr. Alley of Penn State.

© 2014 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/20/science/the-melting-isnt-glacial.html


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How Rising Seas Could Sink Nuclear Plants On The East Coast
05/19/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/19/maps-rising-seas-storms-threaten-flood-coastal-nuclear-power-plants_n_5233306.html [with comments]


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Years of Living Dangerously Takes On Climate Denial, Anti-Science Attacks on Climate Solutions



by Brendan DeMelle
Executive Director, DeSmogBlog.com [ http://www.desmogblog.com/ ]
Posted: 05/19/2014 7:16 pm EDT Updated: 05/19/2014 7:59 pm EDT

"Sometimes you can't convince people, you just have to defeat them." That was Washington state governor Jay Inslee's message about dealing with climate deniers today at Climate Solutions' [ http://climatesolutions.org/ ] 6th annual breakfast in Seattle.

"We're not going to wait until the last person in Washington understands physics and chemistry in order to confront climate change," Inslee said, describing his view that the climate policy debate essentially pits optimists against pessimists. Those who understand the urgent need to address climate change are the optimists who see climate solutions as beneficial for our health and economic prosperity, while those who deny the problem or think there's nothing we can do about it are the pessimists. Nobody likes a pessimist.

Governor Inslee was joined on stage today by David Gelber [ http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/executive-producer/david-gelber/ ], the executive producer of the must-watch [ http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/04/07/years-living-dangerously-watch-most-important-premiere-2014-right-now ] Showtime climate change series, Years of Living Dangerously [ http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/ ]. These two optimists were both in agreement that "climate deniers are really back on their heels," as Gelber said about the increasing public pressure for politicians to stop waffling and move ahead with climate solutions.

Pacific Northwest coal export proposals were a hot topic of conversation, as usual whenever Governor Inslee makes a public appearance these days. Gelber noted that the potential climate impacts of coal expansion are "every bit as important" as the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and urged the media to be more aggressive in covering climate threats since we face "civilizational suicide" if we fail to act.

Gelber shared several stories about the success of the Years series in its first season, and revealed plans for wider distribution once the Showtime run concludes. The series will be released on DVD approximately three months after the final episode of season one airs, and the producers are getting closer to securing international distribution agreements. That will be welcome news to fans outside the U.S., along with the many schools and universities that want to screen the series for their students, Gelber said.

Governor Inslee was featured in episode 5 [ http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/story/the-governor/ ] for his leadership as a climate-focused governor who won election on a platform of climate action promises. That episode also looked at New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's refusal to acknowledge the role that climate change played in amplifying the impacts of Superstorm Sandy. The highlight of the episode is the conversion of Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY), a former climate skeptic who accepts the scientific consensus [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/25/3430952/grimm-embraces-climate-science/ ] by the end of the episode in an interview with host Chris Hayes.

If you happen to have Showtime or know someone who does, tune in tonight at 8 p.m. for episode 6, which looks at two important story lines.

Mark Bittman hosts the "Chasing Methane [ http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/story/chasing-methane/ ]" segment looking at the climate impacts of natural gas development, while America Ferrera hosts "Against the Wind [ http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/story/against-the-wind/ ]," a segment looking at the anti-science attacks on renewable energy by the Heartland Institute [ http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-institute ] and other fossil fuel front groups. That segment features an interview with yours truly as well as Center for Media and Democracy [ http://www.prwatch.org/ ] executive director Lisa Graves examining the history and tactics of James Taylor [ http://www.desmogblog.com/james-taylor ] and Heartland with America Ferrera.

Here is a Facebook-friendly graphic [ https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=630447700375625&set=a.450137155073348.1073741825.168876449866088&type=1&theater ] to share with your friends to alert them about tonight's episode.



Here is episode one of the series, which Showtime made available for free [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brvhCnYvxQQ (next below, as embedded)]:

Copyright 2014 DeSmogBlog.com

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brendan-demelle/years-of-living-dangerous_b_5354352.html [no comments yet] [original at http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/05/19/years-living-dangerously-takes-climate-denial-anti-science-attacks-climate-solutions ]


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Fire and ice: Melting Antarctic poses risk of volcanic activity, study shows


Measuring the Earth's uplift in the Antarctic Peninsula.
Photo: UTAS


GPS monitors pick up the Earth's uplift.
Photo: UTAS

Peter Hannam
Environment Editor, The Sydney Morning Herald
Date May 20, 2014 - 4:36PM

New research on the effects of ice sheet melt in the Antarctic shows climate change is deforming the Earth’s crust, potentially prompting volcanic activity that could cause global sea-levels to rise much more than predicted.

Scientists led by Newcastle University in the UK studied the impact of the collapse of the giant Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, using Global Positioning System (GPS) stations to gauge how the Earth’s mantle responded to the relatively sudden loss of billions of tonnes of ice as glaciers accelerated.

As expected, the bedrock rose without the weight but at a pace – as much as 5 centimetres a year in places – that was about five times the rate that could be attributed by the loss of ice mass alone, said Matt King, now at the University of Tasmania (UTAS), who oversaw the work.

“It’s like the earth in 2002 was prodded by a stick, a very big stick, and we’ve been able to watch how it responded,” Professor King said. “We see the earth as being tremendously dynamic and always changing, responding to the forces.”

Such dynamism - involving rocks hundreds of kilometres below the surface moving “like honey” - could have implications for volcanoes in the region, Professor King said.

“It’s one of the big unknowns: If something starts to happen with one of those volcanoes, our estimates of what sea levels might be like in the future may have a significant revision”, he said, adding “fire and ice generally don’t go well together”.

“It’s a big ‘if’ - but if a volcano erupted from underneath the ice sheet, it would dramatically accelerate the ice melt and the flows into the oceans.”

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2013 estimated global sea levels could rise between about 0.5 and 1 metre by 2100, based on high rates of greenhouse gas emissions. However, a rapid collapse of the Antarctic ice sheets, particularly in the continent’s west, could see much higher sea-level rises.

The new study [ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X14002519 ], published this month in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, may also have implications for regions with a similar geology, such as Alaska.

“The (Alaskan) glaciers are melting and the upper mantle is slightly runnier as well,” Professor King said, adding that there is already “the expectation of a very large earthquake” in the region as tectonic plates meet.

Australian researchers now want to extend the study to the remnant of Larsen B, which is holding back two glaciers and may prompt a southward spread of the uplifting effect if it collapses.

“That ice sheet is increasingly fractured and looks like it’s going to break up as well,” Professor King said. “When it does, we’d expect the glaciers to accelerate and lose ice mass.”

However, the ability of Australian scientists to conduct the work remains unclear in the wake of last week’s federal budget.

While UTAS, CSIRO and Antarctic Division received $24 million more over coming years for Antarctic research, the Australian Research Council and other parts of CSIRO lost funding, Professor King said.

The extra funding should be used for new science, not plugging the gaps caused by other cuts, he said.

Copyright © 2014 Fairfax Media

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/fire-and-ice-melting-antarctic-poses-risk-of-volcanic-activity-study-shows-20140520-zrj06.html


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April Ties For Hottest Ever On Record For The Globe

by SETH BORENSTEIN
Posted: 05/20/2014 6:33 pm EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Once again, the world hit record heat levels. The average global temperature last month tied the hottest April on record four years ago.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday say last month's average temperature was 58.1 degrees Fahrenheit (14.5 degrees Celsius). That was 1.39 degrees F (0.77 C) warmer than the average last century.

The last time the globe's monthly temperature was cooler than normal was February 1985.

NOAA scientist Jessica Blunden said April's heat was driven especially by Siberia and Eurasia. She said the United States and Canada were the few exceptions. Canada was a bit cooler than normal and the United States was a tad warmer than normal.

© 2014 Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/20/april-hottest_n_5360948.html [with comments]


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Pat Sajak Says People Concerned About Climate Change Are 'Unpatriotic Racists'


05/20/2014
I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends. Good night.
— Pat Sajak (@patsajak) May 20, 2014 [ https://twitter.com/patsajak/statuses/468581395237842945 ]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/20/pat-sajak-climate-change_n_5358656.html [with comments]


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History Under Water: Climate Change Imperils Historic, Cultural Sites


View of the Little Blackwater River, inside the new Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument. A new report looks at potential climate change impacts at cultural and historic sites across the country, including the Tubman site.
Kate Sheppard

by Kate Sheppard
Posted: 05/20/2014 7:34 am EDT Updated: 05/20/2014 10:59 am EDT

On a bright, unseasonably hot morning in early May, Susan Meredith pushed her kayak off the banks of the Little Blackwater River, a shallow, 15-mile tributary running through Dorchester County, on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The water, cool and dark, is almost perfectly still, broken only by the occasional leaping fish.

Today, the quiet marshes provide refuge for wildlife -- ospreys, bald eagles, muskrats, the endangered Delmarva fox squirrel. But 160 years ago, it was people who sought refuge in these marshes, using the water, grasses, and trees as they fled slavery. Harriet Tubman, herself born into slavery in Dorchester County in the early 1820s, led dozens of African-Americans through this region to freedom in the North as part of the Underground Railroad.



The region remains largely unchanged from Tubman's time, save the paved roads, a few buildings and a distant cell phone tower. Tubman's grandmother, Modesty, lived on a farm across the street from where Meredith launched her kayak. "What you're looking at is what she looked at," said Meredith, owner, along with her husband, of Blackwater Paddle and Pedal [ http://www.blackwaterpaddleandpedal.com/ ]. "What you're seeing, she saw."

In March 2013, President Barack Obama granted new protections for 11,750 acres here, with an executive order designating this as the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument. The state of Maryland is building a new visitor center not far away, where people will be able to learn about this chapter of American history.

But sea level rise fueled by climate change threatens this flat, low-lying peninsula. The Tubman site, though one of the newest in the national park system, is also among those most at risk from climate change impacts. It's included in a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists [ http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/impacts/national-landmarks-at-risk-from-climate-change.html ], released Tuesday, that details risks posed by climate change to 30 cultural and historic landmarks across the country.

The sites include the Cesar Chavez National Monument, in California's San Joaquin Valley, where the famed Latino labor leader led the United Farm Workers. Record droughts imperil the future of agriculture [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/california-drought-hits-farmers-hardest/2014/02/09/beec5e10-9043-11e3-b46a-5a3d0d2130da_story.html ] in that area. In southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, climate-fueled wildfires are threatening ancestral Pueblo sites, in places like Mesa Verde National Park [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=96401 ] and Bandelier National Monument [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/29/bandelier-national-monument-new-mexico-fire_n_913170.html ].

All along the East Coast, sites like Tubman are imperiled by rising seas and storm surges. That includes the oldest city in the country, Florida's St. Augustine, which the Spanish settled in 1565. It also includes Jamestown, Virginia. the site of the first permanent English settlement in the U.S., which dates back to 1607.

The reason the report highlights these locations, which include both national and state parks, as well as other cultural and historic sites, is simple, said Adam Markham, director of the Climate Impacts Initiative at Union of Concerned Scientists: "People care." Regardless of party affiliation, region, or background, parks and historic sites resonate with Americans -- and you don’t have to look any further than last year's government shutdown for evidence of that. At the same time, said Markham, "these are places that people probably will never have associated with climate change."

In Maryland's Dorchester County, Tubman's history dots the landscape. A signpost notes the location of the Brodess farm, where she was born Araminta Ross around 1822. Her first known act of defiance against slavery took place not far from there, at a small general store in Bucktown. As the story is retold in the 2004 biography Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC1AN4 ], she sought to protect a fellow slave from an overseer, who threw a lead counter weight that struck her in the head, causing a wound that was "deep and severe."



She took the surname Tubman when she married John Tubman, a local free black man, in 1844. She took the first name of her mother, "Harriet," when she escaped slavery at age 27. But Tubman's story in the region didn't end there. She came back repeatedly to free family members, including a niece and two brothers.

"It was the love of her family that brought her here," said Meredith as we paddle the river, looking out at marshes that Tubman might have used to her advantage as she eluded her would-be captors. "She knew this place like the back of her hand."

Historians estimate Tubman returned to the region around 13 times, and helped at least 70 others escape to freedom (some accounts say it was as many as 300). It was the rich history of the landscape, still largely untouched, that the monument designation seeks to protect.



"There hasn't been a lot of development in that area, so it probably looks as she would have remembered it," said Cherie Butler, superintendent of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument. "It's important that we preserve it. Her story is important, and we want visitors to be able to experience that area as Harriet would have experienced it."

For the National Park Service, climate change "is very much something we're thinking about," said Daniel Odess, chief scientist for cultural resources at the park service. "We have a lot of assets in harm's way."

The park service doesn't have an estimate of how much climate impacts might cost, said Odess, but there are a lot of areas of concern. That includes looking at museum facilities in flood plains that might need to be relocated, historic buildings that might need to be made more resilient to storms, or changes in things like mold, fungus, or termites—all of which could affect historic structures.

"We're really just starting to recognize the whole range of kinds of effects that are occurring," said Odess. At the same time, the National Park Service is already facing an $11 billion backlog in basic maintenance -- and that's without including climate-related costs in the future. "One of the challenges we're confronted with, in these austere budget times, is how do we set priorities? Where do we put our effort? Who gets to decide?" said Odess.

Because it is so new, planners working on the Tubman site are well aware of the risks of climate change. In this region, the land has long been slowly subsiding due to glacial retreat. But climate change, which causes thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of glaciers, is making the seas rise much faster than ever. By 2050, the area can expect about 2 feet of sea level rise [ http://www.umces.edu/project/sea-level-along-maryland%E2%80%99s-shorelines-could-rise-2-feet-2050-according-new-report ], according to a report the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science last year. By 2100, scientists anticipate sea level will rise 3.7 feet to 5.7 feet.



Sea level already has risen by one foot in the 20th century, said Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and chair of the group that assembled the sea level rise report. That is much faster than in the 19th century, when sea levels were relatively stable. "It is a quite dramatic change in really a short period of time in human history," Boesch said. "If you put it in the context of what it was like when Harriet Tubman was alive, it is something that is really unprecedented."

The implications here are severe. "Even the areas that aren't wetlands are not very high above sea level," said Boesch. "A small amount of sea level rise would result in a large amount of inundation, because the land is so flat."

The Tubman site includes areas owned by the National Park Service. A portion is part of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge and managed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and another piece is owned by the state. The state is in charge of the visitor's center, and earlier this month announced a $13.9 million contract [ http://www.cecildaily.com/news/state_news/article_b3bfb0bf-338b-50b0-92f2-b029b01491e5.html ] to begin construction. Officials said they expect it to be completed in early 2016.

Jordan Loran, director of engineering and construction for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, said the visitor center location will be built outside of the 50-year floodplain. And the base of the center will be constructed two feet above the 100-year floodplain, to make it even safer. "Obviously that area it is a low area, but because of the historical significance of the landscape, and being close to the story of Harriet Tubman, we needed to be in that area," said Loran.

Advocates had fought to get the landscape protected for years, said Alan Spears, government affairs cultural resources director at the National Parks Conservation Association. "It was a decades-long effort to honor Harriet Tubman," said Spears. "So the idea that in 40 years much of that could be underwater is a pretty reprehensible notion."

Of course, there are best-case and worse-case scenarios for future sea level rise, largely based on whether the world's nations take meaningful action to curb climate-changing emissions. Whether we're on the high end of the projected rise by 2100 or the low end remains to be seen -– and that could make all the difference for a site like the Tubman monument.

"We're hoping people don’t have to rent scuba gear to enjoy the resource," said Spears.

Copyright ©2014 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/20/climate-change-historic-sites_n_5354420.html [with comments]


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California Drought Will Cause Thousands To Lose Farm Jobs, Cost $1.7 Billion


The dry bed of the Stevens Creek Reservoir is seen on Thursday, March 13, 2014, in Cupertino, Calif. Lack of seasonal rain has meant water shortages for Californians this winter. Gov. Jerry Brown has asked for a 20% reduction in water usage, farmers are forecasting an increase in produce prices and ranchers are being forced to sell cattle at auction at a higher rate.
(AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

By Sharon Bernstein
Posted: 05/20/2014 3:35 pm EDT Updated: 05/20/2014 3:59 pm EDT

SACRAMENTO, Calif., May 19 (Reuters) - California's drought will cause thousands of workers to lose their jobs and cost farmers in the state's Central Valley breadbasket $1.7 billion, researchers said in the first economic study of what may be the state's driest year on record.

The most populous U.S. state is in its third year of what officials are calling a catastrophic drought, leaving some small communities at risk of running out of drinking water and leading farmers to leave fallow nearly a half-million acres of land.

"We wanted to provide a foundation for state agricultural and water policymakers to understand the impacts of the drought on farmers and farm communities," said Richard Howitt, professor emeritus of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis and the report's lead author.

As many as 14,500 full time and seasonal jobs could be lost as a result of the drought, as farmers fallow land and there are fewer crops to plant and pick, according to the preliminary study.

Altogether, 410,000 acres may be left unplanted in the San Joaquin Valley alone, the analysis showed, as farmers enter the growing season with about two-thirds of the water that they need.

By comparison, a drought in 2009 led to the fallowing of 270,000 acres of cropland and the loss of 7,500 jobs, the study showed.

"Everyone is trying to get a handle on how bad it's going to be," said Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation.

Most farmers in California rely on irrigation rather than rain, many purchasing supplies from federal and state projects that pump from the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta. But less water than normal is available from those sources this year.

Many are turning to other suppliers or to groundwater wells on their property, Kranz said, but the study showed that pumping from wells will cost farmers an additional $448 million.

California Governor Jerry Brown, who blames the drought in part on climate change, said Monday the state would do everything possible to help farmers weather the drought.

"We're going to be steadfast in the state of California in doing everything we need to do to make agriculture work, to use our water as carefully as possible," Brown told attendees at the university's conference on climate change and agriculture in Sacramento on Monday.

To make more water available to farmers, his administration has eased some environmental protections for endangered fish, and allowed flexibility in some water rights regulations.

Copyright 2014 Thomson Reuters

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/20/california-drought-cost_n_5354913.html [with comments]


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EPA's Power Plant Emissions Limits Will Likely Aid Existing Cap-And-Trade Programs


James Jordan Photography via Getty Images

By Valerie Volcovici
Posted: 05/20/2014 10:06 am EDT Updated: 05/20/2014 10:59 am EDT

WASHINGTON, May 20 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's landmark rules to cut power plant emissions will likely give a fresh push to regional U.S. carbon cap-and-trade systems by allowing for a holistic, state-wide view of new pollution targets, sources familiar with the process said.

The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to allow states including California and Maryland to use existing emission-cutting schemes to reach their goals, according to the sources, instead of adopting a narrower method that would have limited states to tackling emissions at individual plants.

As a result, existing trading schemes that many states are already using to reduce greenhouse gas output may now expand and flourish, experts and officials say. That would be a welcome if ironic outcome four years after Obama's initial effort to foster a federal cap-and-trade plan failed to get through Congress.

Cap-and-trade systems, which are essentially mass-based methods to limit emissions by allowing polluters to trade emission allowances, have been slowly gaining traction in certain parts of the United States, but the uncertainty over EPA rules has threatened to stunt their growth.

The EPA has said for some time that it would pursue a flexible approach with the rules, which will be the first to establish mandatory carbon limits on existing power plants.

But the question of whether it would pursue a systemic approach - or stick with its usual method of setting standards "inside the fence line" of specific plants or units - has been one of the biggest unknowns for foes and proponents alike.

According to a summary document prepared in advance of the release of the new regulations, states will be given the "option to convert" the target emission rate to a mass-based goal, which means they can measure compliance in terms of the total tonnage of greenhouse gases that they emit, including initiatives such as reducing power use or encouraging more renewable sources.

The exact calculations for the conversion were not immediately clear. The rules, currently under review by the White House, are expected to be released on June 2.

"A mass-based regional approach is simple, transparent and able to accommodate many carbon emission reductions including energy efficiency and renewable power," said Kelly Speakes-Backman, Commissioner of the Maryland Public Service Commission and chair of the board of directors of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a trading scheme of nine Northeast states.

The alternative would have been using an "inside the fence line" approach focused on use of cleaner fuels and improved efficiency at specific power plants.

The narrower approach - advocated by states such as heavily coal-dependent West Virginia - might have limited the EPA's ability to set more ambitious targets, and given some states an excuse for failing to meet them, according to experts. Power plants account for 40 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

The EPA declined to comment on the specifics of its proposal until it was released.

CAP AND TRADE IT

The initiative is the centerpiece of Obama's climate action plan, a strategy based on executive actions that would help the United States meet a target of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by the year 2020, compared with 2005 levels.

By setting state-specific standards that take into account their different power plant fuel mixes, the EPA would be rewarding states that have already put in place measures to cut carbon emissions from power plants, such as cap-and-trade systems and renewable energy mandates.

"The EPA has been signaling that whether or not to adopt cap and trade programs is for individual states to decide," said David Doniger, policy director for the climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has been closely involved with the EPA effort.

"This is important to the Northeastern states and California that already have established those programs, and could encourage other states to join their efforts."

The EPA standard would be set as targets of pounds of carbon dioxide emitted per megawatt hour, according to a source familiar with the proposal.

California has had an economy-wide cap-and-trade system in place since 2012, part of a suite of programs to help cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 down to levels achieved in 1990.

The nine states that are part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative scheme, which applies to the power sector only, saw their carbon emissions fall by more than 40 percent from 2005 to 2012.

TARGETS STILL UNCLEAR

The basis for the emission targets is one of many key details that will determine the impact of Obama's signature climate reforms, which are already being fiercely fought by groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the coal industry.

It is unclear what overall emissions reduction target the EPA plans to set, another vital detail. Some industry sources said they anticipate an overall target cut in carbon dioxide of 25 percent but are unsure about what baseline year the EPA will choose to measure the reduction against.

The advantage for early-mover states could be diminished if the EPA were to set the baseline at 2013, an option one industry source says is under consideration. Energy-related carbon emissions last year were slightly more than 10 percent below 2005 levels, according to the Energy Information Administration.

"This would make any reduction target more of a challenge to meet, and it would seem to penalize states that have taken early action to reduce emissions," said one industry representative.

(Editing by Jonathan Leff and Matthew Lewis)

Copyright 2014 Thomson Reuters

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/20/epa-power-plant_n_5356784.html [with comments]


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Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Miles O'Brien Slam CNN Over Climate Change Coverage
05/20/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/20/neil-degrasse-tyson-climate-change_n_5357177.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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Climate Realist Marc Morano Debates Bill Nye the Science Guy on Global Warming

Published on Dec 4, 2012 by Canal de OnlyWaxing [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_C7UC6XCKB3D-zKypSbT7Q ]

http://piersmorgan.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/05/clips-from-last-night-bill-nye-vs-marc-morano-on-global-warming-newt-gingrich-on-the-fiscal-cliff/

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/12/04/climate-realist-marc-morano-debates-bill-nye-science-guy-global-warmi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWT-EWKIR3M [with (over 15,000) comments]


--


Bill Nye Debates Climate Change With Economist - CNN 5-6-14

Published on May 6, 2014 by MrTreknation [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkCrLWvO43Og_1CWUJ0HIAg ]

Bill Nye Debates Climate Change With Economist Nicolas Loris - Heritage Foundation - CNN 5-6-14

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJj0JlcFKzY [with comments]


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CNN's Jeff Zucker: Climate Change Coverage Bores Our Audience

05/21/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/21/cnn-climate-change-coverage-jeff-zucker_n_5364275.html [with comments]


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bonus:

Climate Change Debate: BILL NYE vs CONGRESSWOMAN MARSHA BLACKBURN

Published on Feb 16, 2014 by MOXNEWSd0tC0M [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP59nN5G3HIM2hKC_jxP3Uw ]

February 16, 2014 NBC Meet the Press

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zFruNyiUHQ [with (over 7,000) comments] [also at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfHUcvHV-Rw (with comments)]


===


The Declaration of Ignorance?

by Robert Walker
President, Population Institute [ http://www.populationinstitute.org/ ]
Posted: 05/20/2014 12:18 pm EDT Updated: 05/20/2014 12:59 pm EDT

If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, would he be a climate change denier? Would he join with fellow skeptics and write the "Declaration of Ignorance"....

When in the course of climatic events absolutely and unequivocally not caused by humans, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands of reasoned political discourse and to assume among the powers of the earth our God-given right to plunder the planet without regard for nature or posterity, a decent respect for uninformed opinions requires that we should declare the causes which impel us to the separation of government and science.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men, except climate scientists, are created superior to all other creatures on God's earth; that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and chief among these is the headlong pursuit of happiness without regard to the tireless whining and warnings of scientists. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men unfettered by scientists; that whenever governments begin relying on scientific findings, it is the right of the people to change it or to abolish it altogether, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such non-scientific principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to neglect scientific warnings and effect no change whatsoever in public policy.

Prudence, indeed, may dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind is disposed to suffer scientists and their findings. But when a long train of scientific studies and reports, pursuing invariably the same object (scientific truth), evinces a design to subject public policy to the tyranny of their scientific methods and their findings, it is our right, it is our duty, to throw out such government leaders as may cite or heed such reports, and to provide new guards for our continued happiness and accustomed ways of doing things. Such has been the patient sufferance of we, the willfully uninformed, and such is now the necessity which constrains us to defeat at the polls all those who would have us submit to the tyranny of science.

The history of scientists, climate scientists in particular, is a history of repeated usurpations of popular opinion, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over our uninformed views. To prove this, let the facts, as we choose to construe them, be submitted to the world.

They have refused to bend their scientific conclusions to fit our prejudices and preconceived notions.

They have urged governors and legislators to pass laws and measures of immediate and pressing importance.

They have endeavored to collect and analyze scientific data without regard to the possible discomfort that such analysis might produce.

Rather than consulting us, the uninformed, they have subjected their work to scientific peer review and called upon scientists from other disciplines to check their analysis and findings.

They have claimed, without any plausible supporting evidence, that we live on a finite planet, and have even dared to suggest that humanity, a mere 7.2 billion of us, could be overusing planetary resources and causing irreparable harm to the environment and the welfare of future generations.

They have persisted in issuing, despite our fervent desire not to hear them, warnings about climate change, deforestation, rising seas, water scarcity, the extinction of plant and animal species, food insecurity, and the acidification of the oceans, whatever that is.

They would, if they could, substitute their science and facts for our hopes and intuition.

In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for them to disavow their conclusions, and our repeated petitions have been answered only by further scientific investigation and inquiry. We have reminded them of our fervent desire to go on living without rule or regulation, and yet they have persisted in their belief that only concerted government action can save humanity.

We, in our turn, have appealed to their self-interest, but they have persisted in talking about posterity and the kind of world our children will inherit.

We, therefore, the ignorant and the willfully uninformed, do swear by all our worldly possessions, that all connections between government and science must be severed. And in the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on our preconceived ideas and our uninformed opinions, we hereby forfeit the wellbeing of our children and the future of the planet.

[No one can say with any certainty what position Thomas Jefferson would take today on climate change, but given his lifelong interests in the "pursuits of science" and his belief that the oceans and the air were the "common birth-right of mankind," it is difficult to conceive that he would side with Sen. Marco Rubio and others in rejecting the scientific consensus. To the contrary, I suspect he would have been highly respectful of the concerns being expressed by climatologists and other scientists. Jefferson may have been a political conservative, but he was also a progressive thinker. He insisted that: "... laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times."]

Copyright ©2014 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-walker/the-declaration-of-ignora_b_5352811.html [with comments]


--


POLL: Tea Party Members Really, Really Don't Trust Scientists


May 20, 2014
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/tea-party-climate-trust-science [with comments]


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270 Fracking Wells Account For 60 Percent Of All Flaring In North Dakota


A gas flare is seen at an oil well site on July 26, 2013 outside Williston, North Dakota.
Andrew Burton via Getty Images

Posted: 05/21/2014 9:13 am EDT Updated: 05/21/2014 9:59 am EDT

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — Just 274 wells accounted for around 60 percent of all flaring of natural gas in North Dakota in December, a researcher said Tuesday at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck.

Chad Wocken, senior research manager at the Energy and Environmental Research Center, a contract research firm housed at the University of North Dakota, discussed flaring and how to better utilize natural gas at the conference.

In March, the latest month for which figures are available, North Dakota's oil wells flared 33 percent of natural gas they produced. In December, North Dakota's flaring rate matched an all-time high at 36 percent.

Oil companies sometimes flare, or burn off, natural gas where it's found, rather than gathering it and processing it for the market. Nationwide, around 1 percent of natural gas is flared according to the U.S. Energy Department.

While there is no "silver bullet," Wocken said North Dakota's flaring rate could move into the single digits eventually, but it will require the development of pipeline and gas capturing infrastructure along with the implementation of gas capturing technologies at more remote sites.

But several things complicate this mission.

Wocken said that while between 200 and 300 wells are responsible for the bulk of the state's flaring every month, it's not always the same wells producing the large amounts of gas. The amount of gas produced by a well can shift dramatically over the course of a well's life.

Gas capturing technology "needs to meet the transient nature of the resource — and the source of these flares is moving with time."

To make an impact on overall flaring, Wocken said gas capturing technology needs to be mobile so it can get to the wells that are producing the most gas.

© 2014 Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/21/fracking-wells-flaring_n_5361394.html [with comments]


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Singapore Braces For Worst 'Haze' Season As Indonesia Fails To Halt Slash-And-Burn


In this picture taken on Thursday, June 20, 2013, the Central Business District of Singapore is shrouded by unhealthy levels of haze.
(AP Photo/Joseph Nair)

By Rujun Shen
Posted: 05/21/2014 8:37 am EDT Updated: 05/21/2014 8:59 am EDT

SINGAPORE, May 21 (Reuters) - Singapore is approaching its yearly "haze" season, when smoke from forest clearing in Indonesia chokes the air, with this year likely to be worse than 2013's record pollution thanks to lack of action in Jakarta and an expected El Nino weather pattern.

The prosperous city-state, which prides itself on its clean air, was shrouded in heavy smog from slash-and-burn clearances on the neighboring Indonesian island of Sumatra last June which sent its air pollution index to a record high.

One year on, and an election-distracted government in Indonesia has still not ratified the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) 2002 Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution, and fires continue to burn in Sumatra.

That is despite outrage in Singapore as well as environmental groups putting pressure on Jakarta. Fires are used to clear land on plantations and can burn for weeks because of peat deposits below the surface.

There is also a growing likelihood of an El Nino weather pattern this year, meaning Singapore, as well as parts of Indonesia and Malaysia, could be set for months of intense haze with a knock-on effect on health and business, especially tourism.

A strong El Nino, marked by a warming of the surface of the Pacific, can cause severe drought in Australia, Southeast Asia and India, while drenching other parts of the world such as the U.S. Midwest and Brazil in rain.

"If we get four to six months of dry period in Southeast Asia starting from June, we could be in for a very difficult period, if companies' and people's behavior do not change," Singapore Environment Minister Vivian Balakrishnan told a conference.

Frustrated by the lack of progress, Singapore is taking matters into its own hands by proposing a new law that aims to punish individuals and companies outside its borders that are responsible for polluting its air.

That's expected to be tabled in parliament later this year. Legal experts hail the bill as a bold move, but question how it will be implemented.

Finding who is responsible for the haze is hard given the lack of evidence like maps showing who owns the land where fires are burning. Both Indonesia and Malaysia have refused to share clear and updated land use and concession maps so far.

Bringing a prosecution in Singapore courts will be even tougher.

"The basic evidential inquiry needed to resolve the problem - i.e. to find out who is setting fires to whose land - cannot even be conducted," said Alan Tan, professor at the Faculty of Law and Center for International Law at the National University of Singapore. "Let alone the more complex tasks of actually prosecuting perpetrators or managing land use conflicts for the longer term."

Two of the world's largest palm oil companies - Wilmar International Ltd and Golden Agri-Resources Ltd - have been applauded for committing to no deforestation policies after criticism in the past.

Alongside the palm oil industry, paper and pulp companies have also been blamed for haze.

Indonesia's Riau province declared a state of emergency in February as haze from raging forest fires disrupted flights and marine navigation and tens of thousands fell sick with respiratory problems. The airport in the provincial capital closed for more than three weeks.

"The task force the president sent to the field was able to quench the fire but not solve the fundamental problem," Heru Prasetyo, head of Indonesia's REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), told Reuters.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Toh in SINGAPORE and Michael Taylor in JAKARTA; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Copyright 2014 Thomson Reuters

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/21/singapore-haze_n_5363611.html [with comments]


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Unclouding Our View of Future Climate

Atmospheric General Circulation
The animation shows how the atmosphere's general circulation is expected to change in 50 or 60 years as a result of increasing greenhouse gases. Air currents rise on both sides of the equator, flow toward both poles and sink, then return to the equator at lower altitudes. In the future, the currents near the equator will strengthen and loft clouds higher into the atmosphere. In the mid-latitudes, clouds will be more sparse, making the air drier and hotter. The sinking air flow will shift farther toward the poles, with more clouds building up closer to the polar regions.
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/SVS

May 21, 2014

If we had a second Earth, we could experiment with its atmosphere to see how increased levels of greenhouse gases would change it, without the risks that come with performing such an experiment. Since we don’t, scientists use global climate models.

In the virtual Earths of the models, interlocking mathematical equations take the place of our planet's atmosphere, water, land and ice. Supercomputers do the math that keeps these virtual worlds turning -- as many as 100 billion calculations for one modeled year in a typical experiment. Groups that project the future of our planet use input from about 30 such climate models, run by governments and organizations worldwide.

When these models calculate the potential climate impacts of the real-life experiment we are conducting by emitting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, they all agree that Earth will be warmer 50 years from now. They don’t agree on how much warmer.

For a convenient global-change benchmark, climate scientists use "doubled CO2," meaning twice as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as before the Industrial Revolution, when humans started adding large amounts of the greenhouse gas to the air. The undisturbed level was about 280 parts per million (that is, 280 molecules of carbon dioxide in every million molecules of air), and today's level is around 400 parts per million. We could reach the doubled-CO2 benchmark as soon as 50 or 60 years from now.

The highest and lowest forecasts of average global temperature when we reach the doubled-CO2 benchmark differ by 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius). That's greater than the difference between the average global temperature during the last ice age and today. Despite increases in model complexity and sophistication in recent decades, that 5.4-degree range of uncertainty has shrunk very little.

Modelers have known for decades that clouds are the largest source of the uncertainty. But almost every process in the atmosphere affects clouds. It hasn’t been clear which processes are driving cloud changes as the climate warms.

A new NASA-led study suggests that the processes most closely related to the cloud changes are connected with the global pattern of air movements called the atmospheric general circulation. The study also finds that the models with the most realistic representation of the general circulation are those that produce warmer forecasts of the time when we reach the doubled-CO2 benchmark.

Hui Su of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and colleagues recently evaluated 15 of the world’s leading global climate models, evaluating links among atmospheric processes, modeled clouds and probable forecast accuracy. "People have been searching for the culprit for these model differences for a long time," said Su. "Our research suggests that how models handle atmospheric circulation in a warming climate is directly linked to how clouds will change -- and therefore linked to how much warmer the climate will be.” A paper on the research is published online May 20 [ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014JD021642/abstract ] in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Scientists expect to see a complicated pattern of changes in the general circulation as the climate warms -- prevailing winds are likely to weaken in some areas and strengthen in others, zones of ascending winds will migrate closer to the equator, and descending winds will move closer to the poles, etc. (see illustration).

Su and her research team from JPL; the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena; and UCLA found dramatic variations in the way in which the models simulated these changes. The differences set off a chain of consequences: different environmental conditions within each model led it to produce different forms of clouds, which finally led to a different overall response to greenhouse warming.

The atmosphere’s general circulation can't be observed directly from space, so the scientists used satellite observations of clouds and relative humidity as a stand-in for general circulation. They compared the models' simulations of clouds and relative humidity over the last decade with observations from four NASA spaceborne instruments: the CloudSat satellite, Cloud Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO), the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA’s Aqua spacecraft and the Microwave Limb Sounder instrument on NASA’s Aura spacecraft.

Five of the climate models tested closely reproduced the clouds and relative humidity observed by the satellites. These same five models all have greater changes in atmospheric circulation than the other models. The circulation changes decrease the cooling effect of clouds in the future.

The five models predict a relatively warmer future climate than the other 10 models. They forecast that global surface temperatures will rise by 6.5 to 8.5 degrees Fahrenheit (3.6 to 4.7 degrees Celsius) when atmospheric carbon dioxide has doubled from its pre-industrial level. That’s in the top one-third of the range of all 15 forecasts.

“We’ve used NASA satellite observations to narrow the range of the climate projections. Based on the observations, we’ve seen that the models that best represent these observations are at the higher end of the modeled warming. We hope these results, and those of other consistent studies recently published, will have value to policy makers who are responding to this global threat,” said Su.

For more information about the satellites used in the study, visit:
http://www-calipso.larc.nasa.gov/
http://cloudsat.atmos.colostate.edu/
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/
http://mls.jpl.nasa.gov

NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/earthrightnow

Written by Carol Rasmussen
NASA Earth Science News Team

Alan Buis 818-354-0474
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
[e-mail]

2014-160

http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/earth-climate-20140521/ [the YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S19Ass7qa0o (no comments yet), as embedded; title and description of/from the YouTube included]


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The Reality of a Hotter World is Already Here


Phoenix glows even after 10 p.m. one April night in this image made with a camera sensitive to infrared light, which is generated by heat and invisible to the naked eye. Researchers call the city an “urban heat island.”
(Brent C. Hedquist)


Science fiction has long experimented with the idea of a hotter world. In a 1961 “Twilight Zone,” New Yorkers go mad when Earth moves closer to the Sun.
(CBS via Getty Images)


If Phoenix today offers a glimpse of a hotter future, studies by Douglas Kenrick suggest that tempers will flare. Water is increasingly precious in the pavement-laced and golf course-dotted desert.
(Peter McBride)


At the Australian Open this past January, Édouard Roger- Vasselin and other tennis players battled 104-degree temperatures.
(Rex Features via AP Images)


A polar vortex (dark blue) chilled the lower 48 this past winter but left Alaska warmer than usual.
(NASA)


In Chicago, a 2012 heat wave called for more ice.
(Sitthixay Ditthavong / AP Images)

As global warming makes sizzling temperatures more common, will human beings be able to keep their cool? New research suggests not

By Jerry Adler
Smithsonian Magazine
May 2014

Douglas Kenrick, rangy and grizzled, squints through the shimmering heat of a late-summer afternoon in the Sonora desert. “You live here long enough,” he says, crossing to the south side of an empty street for the five-minute walk across the campus of Arizona State University, “and you become like a desert animal, searching out shade.” Having grown up on Long Island, and coming from the frequently snowbound campus of Montana State University, he relished the heat when he moved to Phoenix in 1980, but by the end of his first full summer, it had become oppressive. “I came from New York with the attitude that it can’t ever be too hot for me,” says Kenrick, “but I was wrong.” It seems likely that most people who move to Phoenix, where the temperature reached 118 degrees one day last June, make the same discovery, but as an evolutionary psychologist, Kenrick wanted to do more than complain about the climate. So he did an experiment.

His method had the elegance of all great science: He recruited a volunteer to stop her car at a green light and he counted the seconds until the driver behind honked the horn. He did this once a week from April to August, on days when the high temperature ranged from 84 degrees to 108, and he found that the thermometer accurately predicted how soon, and how many times, thwarted drivers would protest before the light changed. “When the weather was comfortably cool, the typical driver just politely tapped on the horn for a second,” Kenrick wrote. “When it got up near 100, though, they started blaring their horns, yelling out the window, and making hand signals they probably did not learn in driver’s education.”

The link between heat and anger—people are “fired up” or “steamed up,” or they “keep their cool”—is so deeply embedded in folk wisdom that it has gone mostly unquestioned. But it is increasingly a subject for psychologists and other social scientists concerned about the implications of a world in which 108 degrees may no longer be exceptional. Under one scenario studied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by the end of the century, today’s North Carolina summers would become the norm for New Hampshire, while Louisiana’s climate would migrate up to Illinois. In Phoenix itself, “temperatures could regularly hit the 130s...by the second half of this century,” University of Arizona climatologist Jonathan Overpeck has predicted.

The various environmental effects of greenhouse gases are potentially devastating, as we have often heard. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, made public in March, underscored the danger of widespread hunger, even starvation, resulting from crop failures. Other health threats have been enumerated by Robert Repetto, a United Nations Foundation economist, who says climate change will intensify smog, leading to “increased outbreaks of asthma and allergies,” and “exacerbate vector-borne diseases such as hantavirus, West Nile virus, Lyme disease and dengue fever.” Repetto also worries about the “extreme weather events” that some researchers say climate change will engender. “Biological systems and engineering systems are all designed for a range of climatic conditions,” he says. “Within those limits, we’re OK, ...but outside those limits, the damage increases rapidly and becomes catastrophic, and we’re going outside those limits.” Heat waves themselves pose a health risk, especially for young children and the elderly—and world-class athletes. Temperatures at the Australian Open in January reached 104 degrees for four consecutive days, a condition that one tennis player called “inhumane” after competitors collapsed on the court.

The weather is always changing, to be sure, and any given event might have happened independent of global warming, but some trends are clear. Melting glaciers and disappearing sea ice, combined with the thermal expansion of the oceans, will almost certainly lead to increased coastal flooding of low-lying areas around the world, including parts of the United States. Like the iconic polar bear stranded on a shrinking ice floe, we are all facing an uncertain and perilous ecological future.

There may be hordes of climate refugees, fleeing homes on islands and coasts made uninhabitable by climate change—anywhere from 25 million to 1 billion people by 2050, according to the International Organization for Migration. Even people who don’t have to move will experience a bewildering sense of dislocation as the environment changes around them—as Northern winters start to be measured in weeks rather than months. Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher, coined the term “solastalgia” for this emotion, a kind of homesickness you can experience without leaving home.

“We will see the emergence of novel climates, environments we’ve not seen before in human times, and the extinction of others, around the Arctic and in high Alpine regions,” says Laurence C. Smith, a professor of geography at UCLA and author of The World in 2050. Smith says cities, industry and agriculture may benefit in places such as Canada and Scandinavia, though at some cost in psychological and cultural disruption. “Very bitterly cold winters will be less common in some places,” he says, “but instead of a nice blanket of white snow, they will have slush.” And people who move north for the weather, or for jobs that may open up as the Arctic melts, will discover that climate change doesn’t make the winter nights any shorter.

But climate is about more than ecology: It’s also a force in human behavior, a fact often overlooked in global-warming scenarios. And new research suggests that a hotter world may, for one thing, be more dangerous, and not just because of road rage. Craig A. Anderson, of Iowa State University, pioneered research on climate and aggression, and derived the formula that each additional degree of warming increases the rate of violent crime (homicides and assaults) by 4.19 cases per 100,000 people. Solomon Hsiang, a public policy specialist at UC Berkeley, has found that climate change historically leads to social disruption, up to and including war. Property crime, personal violence, domestic violence, police violence—everything you want less of, climate change seems to bring more of, either directly by making individuals more violence-prone, or indirectly by promoting conflict related to diminishing resources or deteriorating economic conditions.

For reasons Hsiang is still studying, hotter temperatures depress economic activity. In a study of 28 Caribbean economies, he found that “short-term increases in surface temperature are associated with large reductions in economic output. I was stunned by how large the effect was. I don’t want to be alarmist, but I think the evidence is extremely concerning, and it hasn’t been seriously considered by policy makers.”

Violence, disease, social chaos—these are irresistible themes for science fiction, at least since the classic “Twilight Zone” episode “The Midnight Sun” in 1961, in which a cosmic accident sends the Earth out of its orbit and spiraling toward the Sun. Since then, of course, we’ve come to realize that humanity has supplied the mechanism for calamity all by itself, through greenhouse gas emissions. Global warming does pose some special challenges for fiction, as the editor Gordon Van Gelder points out: “It’s hard to write a story where the characters are grappling with climate change. You can’t just pull out a laser gun and shoot at it.” Still, Van Gelder managed to recruit 16 contributors for his 2011 collection of stories, Welcome to the Greenhouse. Families driven out of their homes struggle to reach the Arctic, where temperatures are bearable; monster tornadoes level whole towns; the military battles six-inch-long honeybees. And, in a story in Van Gelder’s magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction, tribunals in the future pass judgment on “tippers,” the wastrels whose giant carbon footprints led the world over the edge to disaster.

Science fiction is one way to get a feel for what daily life might be like in a hotter world. Another way is to go to Phoenix during a late-September heat wave when temperatures hover around 105, where the first thing you learn about the future is that it will apparently be lived indoors.

*

It is, as they say, a dry heat. On the East Coast, summer heat envelops you, like a hot, wet blanket, but step outside in Phoenix and it swats you, like a rolled-up newspaper. “When I worked in Atlanta it was hot and humid, but there was never a day I couldn’t go outside and hit a tennis ball,” says Royal Norman, a meteorologist for station KTVK. “But there are days here where I’m never outside except to get in and out of my car.” An advertisement for air conditioners in Phoenix uses the slogan, “Some of the best moments in life happen indoors,” which could well be true, unless your passion is, say, golf or gardening. Newcomers have to learn the hard way what happens to a soda can left inside a car parked in the sun, or to dogs whose owners take them out on sidewalks without protective booties.

Outside my hotel, in the heart of downtown, the streets illustrate why the noun “desert” is cognate with “deserted.” At mid-morning on an ordinary weekday, I can walk around the block twice without encountering another human being on foot. In late afternoon, I meet a radio reporter named Jude Joffe-Block. She arrives a few minutes late, apologetically; she says she was once two minutes late to meet a friend at a bar, which happened to be closed that day; he was gone, unable to bear 120 seconds on the sidewalk. Phoenicians defend their city with variations of the claim that “everyone has air conditioning,” but during a heat wave last June, whose average high temperature was 107, Joffe-Block interviewed people who were doing without it, usually because they couldn’t afford monthly electric bills of $400 or more. Sharon Harlan, a sociologist at Arizona State University, who has been studying how communities are affected by extreme heat, says that in some poor neighborhoods a third of the population says the high cost of electricity keeps them from using their air conditioning. Joffe-Block herself was living in a rented apartment with a device called a “swamp cooler,” a machine that blows air over a water-saturated pad, lowering the temperature by evaporation. On a recent 105-degree day, the swamp cooler chilled Joffe-Block’s apartment all the way down to 95. The machines are common in the small stucco and cinder-block houses that line the streets of south-central Phoenix, a low-income neighborhood a 15-minute walk from the skyscrapers of downtown, if anyone was around to walk it.

And by the iron law of real estate values, people too poor for air conditioning tend to live in the hottest parts of town, flat and shadeless under the relentless desert sun, far from the soothing balm of golf courses and parks. Wealthy neighborhoods receive the “microclimate ecosystem services” of trees and shrubs. Over the course of a summer, Harlan measured temperatures in the yards of houses in various neighborhoods and found differences up to 14 degrees. Plants provide shade, intercept sunlight and cool the surrounding environment as water evaporates from their leaves, whereas the built environment absorbs energy from the sun and radiates it back as heat. Driving by a golf course at night during summer, with the windows down, the change in air temperature can be “startling,” says Chris Martin, a professor of horticulture at Arizona State.

Unfortunately, the cooling effects of plants come at a cost, namely water, which is becoming increasingly a precious commodity in the Southwest as the climate warms and population increases. With the advent of air conditioning and high-insulation building materials, people felt less need to surround their houses with shade trees. Improvements in artificial turf have made it an acceptable alternative to grass in small patches, even in wealthy neighborhoods. Such a yard “can be 15 or 20 degrees warmer at night than the same yard if it were irrigated,” Martin says. “You can see very nice homes in a yard without a single living thing in it. It’s one hot place, but most people are inside so they don’t care.”

*

Phoenix, like most big cities, is what meteorologists call a “heat island,” hotter than the surrounding countryside, or than the land would be without the burden of civilization: of asphalt parking lots and tinted-glass skyscrapers, of the air conditioners, automobile engines, appliances and light bulbs of 1.5 million people. (Or, for that matter, the people themselves: The population of the Phoenix metropolitan area, over four million, generates as much energy in the form of body heat as a medium-size power plant.) The heat island effect creates a phenomenon that meteorologists and ordinary citizens find even more disturbing than the occasional 115-degree afternoon: the trend toward higher nighttime temperatures.

Citing National Weather Service data, Norman, the meteorologist, said the last record low in Phoenix was in December 1990. “Since then we have set 144 record [daytime] highs and 230 record-high [nighttime] lows. Back in the 1980s, even in the hottest part of the year, there were cool mornings, but this year there were nights it never got out of the 90s. I wonder if eventually we will never get below freezing, and that worries me because when it happens, the next summer we get hammered by the bugs—spiders, roaches, ants—even mice.”

Fifteen to 20 times a year, Ken Waters of the National Weather Service issues a heat warning for the region, based on predicted highs and, equally important, nighttime lows. “No question it has a major impact on people,” he says. “When it stays above 90 all night, it makes it very difficult to recover from daytime heating.” If you don’t have a home to go to, you are at the mercy of the elements, Harlan says, no less than someone sleeping on a subway grate in Manhattan to stay warm in December. In a study that looked at heat-related death by occupation, men in the category “unknown”—which usually means homeless—had a rate ten times that of men in known occupations.

For the rest of us—well, we will just have to get used to sweating more, and put up with what Anderson, of Iowa State, describes as the “crankiness” factor. “Being uncomfortable colors the way people see things,” he says. “Minor insults may be perceived as major ones, inviting, even demanding, retaliation.”

That was just what Richard Larrick of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, along with his co-authors, found when they examined the box scores of some 57,000 Major League Baseball games played since 1952—about 4.5 million plate appearances in all. They were looking into whether hot weather made pitchers more likely to throw at batters, and based on records of game-time temperatures, they found that it did, but in a specific and telling way. In theory, hot weather might increase the incidence of wild pitches by affecting pitchers’ control (distracting them, or making their palms sweaty), but that’s not what the study focused on. Instead, it found that after one or more batters were hit, intentionally or not, hot weather made it more likely that the opposing pitcher would retaliate later in the game. “What’s interesting is that the same act—your teammate being hit by a pitch—seems to mean something different in a hot temperature than a low one,” Larrick says. “An ambiguous act now seems more provocative when your own mind is in turmoil because of the heat.”

Of course, very cold weather makes people uncomfortable also, and in laboratory experiments cold has in fact been shown to increase aggression. But that doesn’t appear to translate into more crime during cold spells. There is some evidence from brain imaging that the perception and regulation of heat involves some of the same regions that process anger—the proverbial “hothead”—although the significance of those findings is unclear. Anderson speculates that in evolutionary history, extreme cold has generally posed a more immediate threat to personal survival than heat, and people are driven to escape it, with clothing, fire and shelter. “If I’m cold, I have to deal with that right away,” he muses. “I don’t have time to be irritable.”

And if you suffer from the heat, like Kenrick, the Arizona researcher, and you work on an academic schedule, you can head north for relief. “I go to Vancouver for a couple of weeks a year,” he says, “and I enjoy being able to go out for coffee without having to stop each time and think, is it worth it.” He should enjoy it while he can, because Vancouver recorded its two hottest days ever in 2009, and the city is considered at risk of flooding owing to climate change in the coming decades.

That honking sound you hear? It may be the climate apocalypse, right behind you.

Copyright 2014 The Smithsonian Institution

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/reality-hotter-world-already-here-180951172/ [ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/reality-hotter-world-already-here-180951172/?all ] [with comments]


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Climate Change Is The Single Most Divisive Political Issue, Says Poll

A plume of exhaust extends from the Mitchell Power Station, a coal-fired power plant located 20 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, on September 24, 2013. New polling data finds a significant gap between Republicans and Democrats on the issue of whether or not emissions from power plants and other human activities are causing climate change.

05/21/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/21/republicans-climate-chang_n_5368134.html [with comments]


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Steyer’s PAC targets 7 races for November


It could become one of the most expensive pro-environment campaigns in U.S. history.
Getty

By ANDREW RESTUCCIA | 5/22/14 12:03 AM EDT

Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer is launching on-the-ground operations to aid Democrats and attack Republicans in seven Senate and gubernatorial races in the midterm elections, all part of his $100 million effort to make climate change a prime campaign issue.

The former hedge fund executive’s super PAC, NextGen Climate Action [ https://nextgenclimate.org/ ], is targeting the Senate races in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan and New Hampshire and the governor’s races in Florida, Maine and Pennsylvania, according to NextGen officials who briefed reporters for the first time Wednesday about the scope of the group’s plans.

It could become one of the most expensive pro-environment campaigns in U.S. history.

Steyer’s multistate push will be the biggest test yet of whether Democrats can take advantage of the freewheeling outside spending wrought by Citizens United, which until now has been wielded most prominently by Republican benefactors like industrialists Charles and David Koch. But his involvement will also provoke a furious counterattack from the GOP, which is already lambasting Democrats as hypocrites who curry favor with Steyer yet demonize the Kochs.

The group’s approach will include reaching out to young, female and minority voters most affected by the threat of climate change.

The Senate races all involve Democratic-held seats that are in danger of flipping to Republicans, including the neck-and-neck contest [ https://www.politicopro.com/story/energy/?id=33736 ] between embattled Sen. Mark Udall and GOP challenger Rep. Cory Gardner. In contrast, the governor’s races involve states where Democrats are optimistic about unseating Republicans, perhaps most of all with Florida Gov. Rick Scott.

But as expected, NextGen is bypassing key Senate races in which the Democratic incumbent has not put a major priority on climate change and renewable energy. The prime example is Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Mary Landrieu’s reelection bid in Louisiana, where she has been a champion of her state’s oil and gas industry and a vocal supporter of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

While Steyer puts a priority on maintaining Democrats’ majority in the Senate — he donated $5 million [ https://www.politicopro.com/story/energy/?id=34028 ] to a political committee tasked with getting Senate Democrats reelected — his first order of business is changing the conversation on climate change, said Chris Lehane, a veteran Democratic operative who serves as Steyer’s top political adviser.

“This is the year, in our view, where we’re able to demonstrate that you can use climate, if you do it well and you do it in a smart way, as a wedge issue to win political races,” Lehane said.

Lehane said NextGen could get involved in more states eventually, and he indicated Steyer is already looking ahead to the 2016 presidential race. “Obviously we do have an eye both on 2014 and 2016,” he said, adding that NextGen believes that questioning climate science “functionally disqualifies you from being president.”

Steyer has previously said [ https://www.politicopro.com/story/energy/?id=30914 ] he’ll spend $50 million or more of his personal fortune on the campaign, a sum he hopes to match with $50 million in donations from green-minded donors. But until now, his group hasn’t fully spelled out all of the states and races where it intends to make its stand.

It’s a formidable task. Voters rate the economy and jobs as much higher priorities than climate change in almost every poll. And most of the Democrats that NextGen is supporting haven’t made climate change a major focus of their campaigns so far, even if they occasionally mention it.

Meanwhile, Republicans have been busy trying to make Steyer a liability for Democrats, accusing them of being “beholden” to his money. Among other accusations, they’ve charged that Steyer is influencing the debate on Keystone, and that he even played a role in Senate Democrats’ decision to hold an all-night colloquy on climate change earlier this year. It’s also not clear that Steyer’s money will be able to match [ https://www.politicopro.com/story/energy/?id=31015 ] the Kochs’ operation, which raised $400 million for the 2012 election and is promising an even more organized push this year.

Lehane isn’t blind to the hurdles. “The forces in opposition are pretty significant here,” he said. “You’ve got arguably the most well-funded opposition that has been involved in politics, at least in our history, in terms of the fossil fuel industry. You have the inherent political paralysis that exists here in Washington, D.C.”

But he said he’s taking cues from past political and cultural fights, including the country’s shifts in attitudes about gay marriage and smoking.

“The one common denominator when you look at all of those is that change occurred once those issues were defined in moral terms, as right versus wrong, and then used within our political system as a wedge issue,” Lehane said.

NextGen’s strategy is to appeal to Hispanic, black, female and young voters by talking about climate change in stark terms — everything from the threat of sea-level rise in Florida to the risk of droughts in Iowa. The group plans to use modeling to identify and target pockets of voters who will be most affected by climate change, extreme weather or local oil and natural gas development.

“Mother Nature has a vote out there and Mother Nature has increasingly exercised her vote with intensity,” Lehane said. “And what that means is that the issue of climate has become far less abstract and much more real to folks on an everyday basis. It impacts their health. It impacts their economics. It impacts their security.”

The group will aggressively target Republican candidates like Gardner in Colorado or Scott in Florida for disputing climate science, arguing that they aren’t looking out for the best interests of their states. It will highlight their donations from fossil fuel companies to raise questions about the candidates’ integrity.

The group will also spend big to tout Democrats’ records on climate change and renewable energy.

NextGen cut its teeth on the 2013 Massachusetts Senate race and Virginia governor’s race, where the Democratic candidates Steyer supported with multimillion-dollar outside spending campaigns — Ed Markey and Terry McAuliffe, respectively — emerged victorious.

Lehane described Virginia as a “beta test” for the group’s midterm plans. But he said each state requires a targeted strategy. “You can’t do a cookie-cutter approach,” he said.

Here’s a state-by-state breakdown of NextGen’s strategy:

Colorado Senate:

NextGen will attempt to persuade voters frustrated by the state’s booming oil and gas development to vote for Udall by painting Gardner as a shill for industry. The group will specifically focus on voters who live near oil and gas operations but don’t receive royalties.

Lehane said NextGen has made no decisions on whether to get involved in possible ballot measures that would restrict fracking in Colorado, an issue that has proved politically tricky for Udall.

Florida governor:

NextGen plans to go after Scott for raising questions about human-caused climate change and by painting him as beholden to BP after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The group will focus on turning out Hispanic voters in South Florida and other parts of the state by talking about sea-level rise and increasing flood insurance costs.

Scott’s leading Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, is a former Republican governor who used to hold statewide climate summits and was a fierce critic of BP during the spill.

Iowa Senate:

NextGen will appeal to students on Iowa campuses and voters in rural communities whose farms could be affected by climate change. The group is already collecting ammunition to use against the GOP candidates, state Sen. Joni Ernst and Mark Jacobs, the former CEO of Reliant Energy. “We will disrupt the race by focusing either on how Jacobs’ company was one of the country’s top polluters under his watch, or Ernst’s close ties to the Koch brothers,” NextGen said in a document outlining its midterm strategy.

Maine governor:

The group will argue that Gov. Paul LePage is an extremist on environmental issues. It will also localize the climate change issue by warning of risks to the state’s forests and fishing industry.

Michigan Senate:

In the race to fill the seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, NextGen has already begun criticizing GOP candidate Terri Lynn Land for questioning climate science. It will try to appeal to black and Hispanic voters affected by pollution by making the case that it’s causing their children to do worse in school.

Democratic Rep. Gary Peters, who is running for the seat, has pledged [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/05/12/a-senate-race-about-climate-change/ ] to make climate change a significant campaign issue.

New Hampshire Senate:

NextGen will target Republican candidate Scott Brown for supporting the Keystone pipeline and opposing measures to eliminate tax breaks for the oil industry. It will focus on students and young voters while warning of climate change’s effects on the state’s outdoor tourism industry.

Pennsylvania governor:

The group will dismiss Gov. Tom Corbett as an extremist on climate change. It will target low-income voters affected by pollution in the state and voters in Philadelphia who didn’t vote in 2010.

© 2014 POLITICO LLC

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/steyers-pac-targets-seven-races-for-november-106979.html [with comments]


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Steyer adds ‘moneyball’ to climate politics

By Laura Barron-Lopez - 05/22/14 12:00 AM EDT

Billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer is launching a data-driven campaign across seven states for the 2014 midterms to prove he’s not all talk when it comes to hurting “climate deniers” at the polls.

Steyer is using his success in last year’s Virginia governor’s race, where he funneled $8 million to destroy then-Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s bid, as a beta test for his midterm models.

Now, the hedge fund manager turned environmentalist wants to bring “moneyball” to politics, and he says his team of strategists at NextGen Climate, who come from every “winning” Democratic presidential campaign over the last 30 years, are just the people to do it.

To put global warming at the forefront of American politics in 2014, which Steyer’s right-hand man and top Democratic strategist Chris Lehane has called a “pivot” year for climate, NextGen will focus on the data of climate change and turning out voters who will back candidates that want action on the issue.

That means borrowing an idea based on the “moneyball” thesis of baseball. The book by Michael Lewis, which inspired a movie of the same name, starring Brad Pitt, tells the story of how the 2002 Oakland A’s used statistical analysis to buy assets, or players, that were undervalued by other teams and sell ones overvalued by other teams to level the playing field in what many consider the unfair game of baseball.

That’s what Steyer says he wants: to “level the political playing field” through field work and data-driven modeling to locally and strategically target voters and identify non-traditional voter blocs. Much like the A’s plan that brought in some once written-off players, it’s about targeting undervalued voters that the opposition previously expected to be out of play in a midterm election year.

“This is the year, in our view, where we are able to demonstrate you can use climate — if you do it well and in a smart way — as a wedge issue to win in political races,” Lehane told a small group of reporters on Wednesday. “The side that does a better job of changing or expanding the voter pool is the side that has the competitive advantage.”

NextGen has no illusions. While Steyer has said he will commit $50 million of his own money and fundraise $50 million from donors toward the goal, the groups know its fiscal contributions to the midterms will be a “drop in the big oil bucket” compared to what the other side is throwing into the game.

But when it comes to pro-Democratic groups, NextGen is one of, if not the, biggest players out there. And Steyer’s $50 million isn’t a ceiling: he could very well spend more.

Undeterred by the odds, he’s choosing to pick fights with known, staunch climate skeptics in the Colorado, Michigan, New Hampshire and Iowa Senate races, and the Florida, Maine and Pennsylvania gubernatorial campaigns.

Step 1 in each race will be to brand the opponent as a “science denier.”

From there, NextGen will utilize nano voter mobilization, targeting voters it predicts will react to a message on climate change.

That means college students, millennials, Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and mothers.

Next comes the moneyball. By strategically extending its “get out the vote” and “persuasion” tactics beyond typical base voters, NextGen will target communities significantly hit by climate-related issues.

The streamlined strategy also goes back to Steyer’s background in the business world.

“The guy is a wizard with numbers,” Lehane said of Steyer, which is why NextGen is playing “moneyball” politics to fight conservative goliaths like billionaire businessmen Charles and David Koch.

And once climate change is framed as “an enterprise challenge or an enterprise threat” to families, then everything changes and it’s cast in a different light, Lehane said.

To Steyer, it’s about localizing the issue through conversation, such as on increased cases of asthma for children or whether homeowners’ flood insurance is going up.

The final element in the equation for NextGen is to disrupt the dynamics of races by undermining the trust and character of climate skeptics.

The fight, Lehane says, is the modern-day version of doctors versus the tobacco industry. They will pin the opponent on their ties to the fossil fuel industry, pitting them against the best interest of specific communities within their state.

Despite the heavy partisan rhetoric coming out of Congress, NextGen is optimistic that its granular strategy will triumph over the likes of the conservative fossil fuel-friendly Koch brothers.

“We are never going to have as much money but all we need is enough for David’s slingshot is to fire through, and to fire fast and to fire quick to be able to reach the big oil Goliath,” Lehane said.

Still, NextGen won’t be involved in top races for vulnerable Democrats that could put the party’s control of Senate in jeopardy. Top targeted seats in Louisiana, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alaska and others are held by pro-energy Democrats.

It signals the underlying goal: climate change policies, not political domination. It’s bigger than 2014 for Steyer and his team of climate activists — they want the conversation around greenhouse gas emissions, carbon taxes on big polluters and the like to change and to dominate campaigns for years to come.

©2014 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/206898-steyer-brings-moneyball-to-climate-change-politics [with comments]


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NextGen Climate Action using $100 million to fight Koch brothers

By JOSH LEDERMAN
Thu, 05/22/2014 - 8:47am

WASHINGTON (AP) — Setting his sights on Republicans who reject climate change, an environmentalist billionaire is unveiling plans to spend $100 million this year in seven competitive Senate and gubernatorial races, as his super PAC works to counteract a flood of conservative spending by the Koch brothers. said it plans to spend at least $50 million contributed by founder Tom Steyer, a retired hedge fund manager and longtime Democratic donor, and another $50 million the group is seeking to raise from likeminded donors. The money will be used to back Democrats and attack Republicans running for Senate in New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado and Michigan, and for governor in Pennsylvania, Florida and Maine.

"Our goal is very clear: to impact the politics as it relates to climate in a time period that will result in policies that allow our country and the world to avoid the perils of climate change," said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist advising the super PAC. "In a sense, it's a race against time."

With Democrats on the defensive this year in races across the country, Steyer is pursuing a two-pronged goal: helping Democrats keep the Senate and capture governor's mansions, and elevating climate change as a make-or-break issue for voters. That effort comes despite the fact that Democrats are fighting most of their toughest races this year in conservative, oil-dependent states where even Democrats are seeking to fashion themselves as friendly to the energy industry.

The playbook, Lehane and other NextGen officials said Wednesday, is to adopt strategies that have been effective in other cultural fights over tobacco, recycling and women's suffrage: persuade voters that climate change is a matter of right versus wrong, then use the issue to drive a "wedge" between voters and Republicans who align themselves with what environmentalists argue is the wrong side of history.

To that end, NextGen will order up television ads that drill down on how climate change is already upsetting the environment in each state, hoping to transform climate change from a hypothetical issue to a pocketbook issue. Voters in those states can expect a steady dose of hard-hitting ads mocking GOP candidates for questioning the science that says climate change is real.

In Florida, where Republican Gov. Rick Scott is fighting for another term, NextGen said it plans to remind voters how climate change will raise their premiums for flood insurance and affect the state's drinking water. They also plan to attack Scott for initially refusing to join a multi-state lawsuit against BP after the 2010 oil spill.

Republican Scott Brown, who is running for the Senate in New Hampshire, will likely get hit with ads deriding a recent op-ed he penned backing the Keystone XL pipeline that "spouted regular Republican talking points that are absolute misinformation," said Sky Gallegos, NextGen's political director.

Steyer's infusion of cash comes as Democrats are seeking to restore balance to political spending following the Supreme Court ruling that allowed unlimited, largely untraceable money to flow into elections. Wary of being outspent, Democrats are looking to counter a deluge from outside groups like the Karl Rove-endorsed Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity, a group backed by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch with plans to spend more than $125 million this year.

"Two words: Koch brothers," said Lehane, adding that Steyer disagrees with the high court's ruling. "We're spending a drop in the big-oil bucket compare to what the fossil fuel industry is spending. All Tom is trying to do is really to level the playing field."

Freedom Partners, an outside group at the center of the Koch network, accused Steyer of trying to burden Americans with new energy regulations to protect his own investments in green energy projects. "Surely the media will call him out on the hypocrisy of his claims," said spokesman James Davis.

NextGen spokeswoman Heather Wong said Steyer's investments in green energy are held by charitable groups and trusts that donate their earnings to nonprofits. "Steyer does not personally benefit financially from any of these investments," she said in response to Freedom Partners.

The map of races where NextGen plans to invest shows the group is avoiding states where aggressive policies to curb climate change are unpopular — such as Louisiana, Arkansas and Alaska. Rather, NextGen is trying to raise the specter of climate change in states where voters tend to support environmental steps but may not cast their votes based on the issue.

The effort could have implications for elections beyond 2014. Nearly all the states where NextGen is spending play are important presidential states, and the group said that rather than swooping into states briefly just before an election, NextGen intends to launch an ongoing, long-term dialogue with voters about climate.

In taking on the Koch brothers, Steyer is also elevating his role as one of the most prominent billionaire donors on the left. A major fundraiser and donor for Obama's presidential campaigns, Steyer has hosted fundraisers at his San Francisco home featuring Obama, and will host Vice President Joe Biden next week.

The $50 million that Steyer has pledged is the floor, not the ceiling, Lehane said. The super PAC is evaluating other races and could expand its map later this year.

"Tom has not been shy about opening up his pocketbook," Lehane said. "This is someone who is worth — depending on whose version you believe — somewhere around $2 billion [N.B.: compared to the Koch brothers' combined c. $80 billion]."

© 2014 Associated Press

http://politics.suntimes.com/article/washington/nextgen-climate-action-using-100-million-fight-koch-brothers/thu-05222014-847am


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Battle of the Billionaires Shapes This Year's Midterm Elections

by Aiko Stevenson
Posted: 05/21/2014 2:18 pm EDT Updated: 05/21/2014 2:59 pm EDT

In a clash that harks back to the gilded era, oil titans David and Charles Koch will square off [ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e58b1326-de14-11e3-ba13-00144feabdc0.html#axzz327hP5F4Y ] with hedge fund billionaire turned climate activist Tom Steyer in this year's midterm elections.

The Koch brothers, who have built up their vast fortune through oil, gas and coal, will battle to protect their fossil fuel interests from Steyer, who is determined to make climate change a winning political issue.

The face-off comes as the International Energy Agency echoed the United Nation's recent trilogy of reports on the state of our climate. According to the IEA [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/14/3437715/climate-action-delayed-is-climate-action-denied/ (above)], global temperatures are poised to hit the 6 degrees celsius mark by the end of this century.

That is three times higher than the safe limit endorsed by governments.

The battle of the billionaires comes after an easing [ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e58b1326-de14-11e3-ba13-00144feabdc0.html#axzz327hP5F4Y ] in political financing rules has allowed for "unlimited donations," enabling the very wealthy to enter the political fray.

To ensure that the Republicans control both the House and the Senate this November, the Koch brothers have spent at least $30 million [ http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/200919-climate-and-the-midterms-billionaire-vs-billionaire ] over the past nine months to try and topple vulnerable House and Senate Democrats.

If they succeed, it would mark doom for Barack Obama's final two years in office, and potentially scupper any of the president's second-term green agenda.

The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity advocacy group has not indicated how much it will spend this year. But, according to the Financial Times, money into such groups is currently running at about three times the rate of the 2012 presidential elections, and 17 times [ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e58b1326-de14-11e3-ba13-00144feabdc0.html#axzz327hP5F4Y ] that of the 2010 midterms.

And, the Center of Responsive Politics says that these groups might spend more than $1 billion [ http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/04/how-2014-is-shaping-up-to-be-the-da.html ] this year.

The Koch's congressional campaign comes as they try to torpedo [ http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/02/barack-obamas-emissions-plan-comes-under-new-line-of-attack ] Obama's upcoming restrictions [ http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/04/climate-change-present-us-national-assessment ] for power plant emissions by entangling them with several lawsuits.

Scheduled for release next month, the new rules mark's the president's signature piece of climate legislation: power plants account for most of the country's carbon pollution.

The news comes one year after the Kochs spent millions of dollars on setting up quasi [ http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/14/funding-climate-change-denial-thinktanks-network ] think tanks to deny the science behind climate change.

In a bid to confuse the public, such misinformation campaigns are designed to keep the debate about global warming alive so that legislation on the matter does not pass. It's the same tactic that Big Tobacco used in the eighties to deny the link between smoking and cancer.

"The Kochs' bid for a hostile takeover of the American democracy is calculated to make themselves even richer," says Senate majority leader Harry Reid. His comments came after he endorsed amending the constitution to restrict "unlimited campaign spending."

In a bid to fight back, Steyer has set up his own super PAC to run a series of attack ads revealing the Koch brothers' shady ties to such obstructive campaigns. Unlike the Koch's who are gunning for a Republican Senate win, Steyer is only backing politicians with climate aspirations.

But, the $100 million that he has pledged to spend is but a fraction of what the Koch brothers have in their vast war chest.

In the end, the battle may just boil down to a handful of crucial seats that the Democrats must hold onto if they want to maintain control of the Senate.

Although Steyer may have less money to play with, Mother Nature may step in to lend a helping hand: El Niño [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/20/upshot/how-el-nino-might-alter-the-political-climate.html ] is expected to arrive this summer.

The weather phenomenon ushers in unusually warm water temperatures across the Pacific, ultimately warming up the atmosphere. Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research describes it as a "mini" global warming event.

The opposite happens during el Nina, its colder sister.

According to recent models, there is a 75 percent chance of El Niño arriving before the midterms, and Trenberth says that this could make 2015 the hottest year on record.

This could have a radical impact on public attitudes towards global warming.

According to Jon Krosnick from Stanford University, one third of Americans do not trust climate scientists. They base their opinion on the actual weather: In warmer than usual years, their belief in climate change thus rises.

As El Niño unleashes a string of extreme weather that accompanies hotter weather, it could reenergize Steyer's campaign against the Kochs who may not be able to account for events which may include torrential downpours and floods across the southern part of America.

It could also push climate change onto the center stage for the 2016 presidential elections: El Niño tends to be accompanied by a sustained period of warming.

This could leave Republicans with a public relations disaster if Senator Marco Rubio ends up being their frontrunner. He recently denied the link between human activity and the warming of our planet.

According to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, most Republicans with political aspirations are forced [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/12/al-gore-republicans_n_5313028.html ] to deny the science behind climate change otherwise they will not receive enough money to run:

They will face primary opponents financed by the Koch Brothers, and others who are part of their group, if they even breathe the slightest breath of sympathy for the truth about climate science. It's not that complicated.

Mark McKinnon, a Republican strategist, says [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/20/upshot/how-el-nino-might-alter-the-political-climate.html ] catastrophic events will eventually soften the GOP's position on climate change. And, without such a change, legislation will not pass in Congress.

Challenging the Koch brothers to a climate duel last month, Steyer said [ http://www.salon.com/2014/04/28/billionaire_vs_billionaires_tom_steyer_challenges_the_koch_brothers_to_a_climate_debate/ ]:

Democracy isn't served by underhanded attacks and the voice of the American people shouldn't be drowned out by anonymous voices with expensive megaphones. Which is why today I am issuing a formal invitation to Charles and David Koch to come out of the shadows and join me in exactly what they've requested: a free and open debate.

Interestingly, they never replied [actually, they did; see next item below)].

Copyright ©2014 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aiko-stevenson/midterm-elections-climate-change_b_5362388.html [with comment]


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Kochs decline Steyer’s invitation to debate climate change, Keystone XL

By Timothy Cama - 05/05/14 08:54 AM EDT

The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have turned down [ http://www.kansas.com/2014/05/02/3435699/koch-brothers-decline-personal.html ] an invitation from environmentalist and fellow billionaire Tom Steyer to debate climate change and the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

Melissa Cohlmia, a spokeswoman for the Kochs, told the Wichita, Kansas, Eagle Friday that they “are not experts on climate change.”

“We do believe there should be free and open debate on the climate issue and it should be based on sound science and intellectual honesty,” Cohlmia said, adding that the debate should take place in the scientific community.

Heather Wong, a spokeswoman for Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action, said the group was glad to see the Kochs say they are not climate change experts, according to the Eagle. The scientific community has concluded that the climate is changing due to human-caused carbon emissions, Wong added.

Steyer first challenged [ http://thehill.com/campaign-issues/energy-and-environment/204469-steyer-challenges-kochs-to-keystone-debate ] the Kochs to a debate in late April on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.” NextGen followed up with a full-page advertisement in the Eagle — the Kochs’ hometown newspaper — Friday.

Steyer has set a goal of donating $100 million in this election cycle through NextGen, an environmentally focused group. He has said the Kochs are on the opposite side from him on issues such as climate change and the Keystone XL pipeline.

©2014 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/205172-kochs-decline-steyers-invitation-to-debate-climate-change-keystone [with comments]


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Morning Plum: A battle between billionaires over fate of the Earth

By Greg Sargent
May 22, 2014 at 9:14 am

It has long seemed like a hopeless dream of environmental activists: Is it possible to make Republicans pay a political price for climate denialism? Is it possible to turn climate change into an electoral issue that candidates must pay attention to?

This year, there are signs that climate change really could have a political impact. The latest news is that billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer is set to spend $100 million pushing climate change in multiple states with tough Senate races [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/billionaire-tom-steyer-will-use-clout-and-cash-to-boost-democrats-environment-in-key-races/2014/05/21/aeb5a2ca-e12b-11e3-8dcc-d6b7fede081a_story.html ]:

The independent efforts run by his super PAC, NextGen Climate, will include television ads, on-the-ground field organizing and get-out-the-vote operations that seek to mobilize voters on the local impacts of climate change. The group plans to…spotlight the climate-change skepticism of GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidates, and the campaign donations they have received from the fossil-fuel industry.

So far, the list of targeted Republicans includes Senate hopefuls Cory Gardner in Colorado, Terri Lynn Land in Michigan and Scott Brown in New Hampshire…the group also plans to target the GOP’s Senate nominee in Iowa.

Theoretically, this should mean that the GOP Senate candidates in those states will come under some media pressure to clarify their positions on the scientific consensus that human activity is the cause of global warming.

This is already becoming an issue in Michigan, where Dem Senate candidate Gary Peters is calling on GOP foe Terri Lynn Land to take a stand on climate [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/05/12/a-senate-race-about-climate-change/ ], in part because of the Great Lakes’ importance to the state. Land has responded with mealy-mouthed climate skepticism [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/05/12/a-senate-race-about-climate-change/ ]. The GOP Senate candidates in Iowa and Colorado, Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner, have also flirted with climate skepticism [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/05/19/the-gop-senate-candidates-climate-skeptics-and-believers-in-personhood/ ], though their views aren’t really clear. Perhaps now we’ll hear more from them. One also looks forward to hearing Scott Brown hold forth on the topic.

Climate is also assuming a higher profile because of the enormous spending of the Koch brothers. As Forbes reports [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2012/12/05/inside-the-koch-empire-how-the-brothers-plan-to-reshape-america/ ], they have “contributed millions to organizations that have studied human-induced global warming with skepticism,” raising questions about “whether their political activities are blatantly self-interested,” because Koch Industries is a “major carbon emitter, vulnerable to tighter emissions controls.”

And right on cue, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity is attacking Steyer’s plans [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/us/politics/tom-steyer-hopes-nextgen-climate-gets-voters-to-consider-environment.html ], with a spokesman claiming: “The left knows that the global warming agenda is a loser for them with the American people.” The AFP spokesman also notes that red state Dem Senators are not embracing climate policy.

It’s true red state Dems might be skittish here. Note that Steyer’s group is not targeting Louisiana, Arkansas, North Carolina, or Alaska. Into all this will land Obama’s regulations on existing power plants — an issue with enormous consequences — and as I noted here yesterday [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/05/21/the-next-big-freakout-over-red-state-democrats/ ], red state Dems might struggle with the issue.

But still, all of this really sharpens the stakes, and gives more significance to the Kochs’ efforts to influence who controls the Senate. Global warming is a “loser,” the Kochs’ political group tells us. Okay, let’s find out if that’s true. Even if the issue is politically worrisome to some Dems, it can only be a good thing if the debate over climate science is pushed to the fore. The mere fact that the issue could assume a higher profile than usual in the context of Senate races is itself a step forward.

© 2014 The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/05/22/morning-plum-a-battle-between-billionaires-over-fate-of-the-earth/ [with comments]


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Tomgram: Engelhardt, Is Climate Change a Crime Against Humanity?

The 95% Doctrine
Climate Change as a Weapon of Mass Destruction
May 22, 2014
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175847/ [also at/image from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-engelhardt/climate-change-as-a-weapon_b_5372010.html (no comments yet)]


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