Tag: climate change

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has reported that 2012 was the warmest year on record since it started keeping records in 1895, eclipsing 1998 by 1ºF.

The 1°F difference from 1998 is an unusually large margin, considering that annual temperature records are typically broken by just tenths of a degree Fahrenheit. In fact, the entire range between the coldest year on record, which occurred in 1917, and the previous record warm year of 1998 was just 4.2°F.

The year consisted of the fourth-warmest winter, the warmest spring, second-warmest summer, and a warmer-than-average fall. With an average temperature that was 3.6°F above average, July became the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous U.S. The average springtime temperature in the lower 48 was so far above the 1901-2000 average – 5.2°F, to be exact – that the country set a record for the largest temperature departure for any season on record. [..]

With 34,008 daily high temperature records set or tied the year compared to just 6,664 daily record lows – a ratio of about five high temperature records for every one low temperature record – 2012 was no ordinary weather year in the U.S. It wasn’t just the high temperatures that set records, though. Overnight low temperatures were also extremely warm, and in a few cases the overnight low was so warm that it set a high temperature record, a rare feat. [..]

Not alarmed yet? Australia is not only experiencing its hottest Summer but its also on fire.

Australia Climate Change? New Colors Added To Forecast Maps To Track Potential Record Heat

Click on image to enlarge

Right now, things are pretty hot in Australia. So hot, in fact, that meteorologists Down Under have added new, never-before-used colors to temperature maps in anticipation of record-breaking heat.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology amended its interactive weather chart Tuesday, adding the colors deep purple and pink to indicate a temperature range of up to 54 degrees Celsius, or 129.2 degrees Fahrenheit. The previous range had capped at 50 Celsius, or 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

The change was based on one weather prediction model that forecasts temperatures to climb above 50 Celsius early next week.

The all-time hottest temperature recorded in Australia was 50.7 Celsius on Jan. 2, 1960 at Oodnadatta Airport in South Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

According to the current model, the forecast for next Monday will bring a “Tasmania-sized” area of heat in excess of 50 degrees to South Australia.

50ºC is 122ºF. That’s hot. Too hot.

Australian heatwave puts south-east on alert as wildfires burn out of control

by Alison Rourke, The Gusardian

Fire service issues ‘catastrophic’ warnings in New South Wales with temperatures expected to breach 45C in coming days

A record-breaking heatwave and high winds across south-eastern Australia have produced some of the worst fire conditions seen in the country, with blazes destroying thousands of hectares of land (video) and threatening properties, but – so far – sparing lives.

Emergency teams fought more than 130 fires across New South Wales, the country’s most populous state, on Tuesday, with at least 40 burning out of control. Fires also continued to burn in Tasmania, after blazes at the weekend destroyed more than 20,000 hectares of land and dozens of properties. [..]

The NSW rural fire service issued “catastrophic” fire warnings for four areas in the state – the most severe fire warning level.

“The word catastrophic is being used for good reason,” the Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, said on morning television. “So it is very important that people keep themselves safe, that they listen to local authorities and local warnings. This is a very dangerous day.”

Alarmed after the NOAA report, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a new climate bill.

Sanders announced the bill a day after federal officials reported that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the lower 48 states, smashing the record set in 1998 by a full degree Fahrenheit.

The bill from Sanders would create a “transparent fee on greenhouse gas emissions from the biggest polluters,” his office said in a brief summary.

“After the hottest year on record and extreme weather disturbances such as Hurricane Sandy, we must take strong action to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and move toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy,” said Sanders, a member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “I intend to introduce legislation in the Senate to do just that.” [..]

Environmentalists are pressing President Obama to take tougher steps using his administrative powers, including establishment of first-time carbon emissions standards for existing power plants.

Sanders’ plan also aims to boost green energy development and nix tax incentives for oil companies.

Not just the US but countries around the world need to take action to curb carbon emissions. The Unites States should be taking the lead and setting the example.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Naomi Klein, author of Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,, joined Bill Moyers to discuss how the the destructive force of Hurricane Sandy and climate change can alter politics and the economy.

The full transcript can be read here.

Lambert Strether, posting at naked capitalism, thought this part of the interview particularly interesting.

   NAOMI KLEIN: So one of the things that you find out in a disaster is you really do need a public sector. It really important. And coming back to what we were talking about earlier, why is climate change so threatening to people on the conservative end of the political spectrum? One of the things it makes an argument for is the public sphere. You need public transit to prevent climate change. But you also need a public health care system to respond to it. It can’t just be ad hoc. It can’t just be charity and goodwill.

   BILL MOYERS: When you use terms like “collective action,” “central planning,” you scare corporate executive and the American Enterprise Institute and The Heritage Foundation because they say you want to do away with capitalism.

   NAOMI KLEIN: Well, first of all, I don’t use a phrase like “central planning.” I talk about planning, but I don’t think it should be central. And one of the things that one must admit when looking at climate change is that the only thing just as bad or maybe even worse for the climate than capitalism was communism. And when we look at the carbon emissions for the eastern bloc countries, they were actually, in some cases, worse than countries like Australia or Canada. So, let’s just call it a tie. So we need to look for other models. And I think there needs to be much more decentralization and a much deeper definition of democracy than we have right now.

   BILL MOYERS: Decentralization of what, Naomi?

   NAOMI KLEIN: Well, for instance, you know, if we think about renewable energy, well, one of the things that’s happened is that when you try to get wind farms set up, really big wind farms, there’s usually a lot of community resistance that’s happened in the United States. It’s happened in Britain. Where it hasn’t happened is Germany and Denmark. And the reason for that is that in those places you have movements that have demanded that the renewable energy be community controlled, not centrally planned, but community controlled. So that there’s a sense of ownership, not by some big, faceless state, but by the people who actually live in the community that is impacted.

What Yves said: “These pesky issues of governance, the nature of the state, and legitimacy seem to popping up all over these days.”

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

It’s getting warmer and that appears to be the trend. Is it too late to so something? What are the consequences? Is there the political will to take action? Naomi Wolf exams those questions in this article from The Guardian about the impact of the current American drought, the American phenomenon of climate change denial and the effects of “political polarization” on public opinion:

America has led the world in climate change denial, a phenomenon noted with amazement by Europeans, not to mention thinking people around the world. Year after year, the US has failed to sign global treaties or curb emissions, even as our status as a source of a third of the world’s carbon emissions goes unchanged. [..]

But could our denial be cracking, this summer, as, in the heartland – that most iconic of American landscapes – broiling temperatures injure humans and cook fish in the water? This summer a crisis has occurred (though one that, again, is seldom reported on in terms of our outsize contribution to the disaster), as midwestern farmers lost vast swaths of their corn crop to scalding heat and drought. In the American unconscious of wishful ignorance, this disaster and loss was to be borne, as usual, by other people far away. [..]

But we face some serious problems in rising out of our torpor. In “Shifting Public Opinion on Climate Change: An Empirical Assessment of Factors Influencing Concern over Climate Change in the US, 2002-2010“, John Wihbey shows that Gallup surveys reveal Americans’ level of concern varying widely [..]

Wihbey and colleagues’ study found that this fluctuation was caused by, among other factors, political polarization. In other words, when one party says global warming is a crisis and the other says all that is nonsense, and there is no cooperation between political elites at both ends of the spectrum, the net result is apathy.

What is even more ominous, is how China and India have manipulated carbon credits to make a profits from the production of HFC-23, a gaseous byproduct of a coolant that causes global warming and is used in air-conditioners and then destroying it:

When the United Nations wanted to help slow climate change, it established what seemed a sensible system.

Greenhouse gases were rated based on their power to warm the atmosphere. The more dangerous the gas, the more that manufacturers in developing nations would be compensated as they reduced their emissions.

But where the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity.

They quickly figured out that they could earn one carbon credit by eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide, but could earn more than 11,000 credits by simply destroying a ton of an obscure waste gas normally released in the manufacturing of a widely used coolant gas. That is because that byproduct has a huge global warming effect. The credits could be sold on international markets, earning tens of millions of dollars a year. [..]

What was intended to fix the problem of hydro-chlorofluorocarbons has now created its own major problem:

The United Nations and the European Union, through new rules and an outright ban, are trying to undo this unintended bonanza. But the lucrative incentive has become so entrenched that efforts to roll it back are proving tricky, even risky.

China and India, where most of the 19 factories are, have been resisting mightily. The manufacturers have grown accustomed to an income stream that in some years accounted for half their profits. The windfall has enhanced their power and influence. As a result, many environmental experts fear that if manufacturers are not paid to destroy the waste gas, they will simply resume releasing it into the atmosphere. [..]

Some Chinese producers have said that if the payments were to end, they would vent gas skyward. Such releases are illegal in most developed countries, but still permissible in China and India. [..]

Already, a small number of coolant factories in China that did not qualify for the United Nations carbon credits freely vent this dangerous chemical. And atmospheric levels are rapidly rising.

Wall St. also has their grubby paws in this, too. Goldman Sachs invested in carbon credits and a coolant factory in Monterrey, Mexico, that receives carbon credits is 49 percent owned by Honeywell. So these companies, especially in China and India, are holding the world hostage. Pay up or we kill the climate faster.

James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies joined Eliot Spitzer, host of “Viewpoint” to discuss how heat waves are a indicator of global warming.

“If we continue with business as usual this century, we will drive to extinction 20 to 50 percent of the species on the planet,” Hansen says. “We are pushing the system an order of magnitude faster than any natural changes of climate in the past.”

“We’re gonna have to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and that is not as difficult as you think. If we would just make fossil fuels pay for their true cost to society, we could begin to move to different energies and energy efficiency,” Hansen contends. “We should be collecting a fee from fossil fuel companies that gradually rises over time and 100 percent of that money should be distributed to the public, not one dime to the government. If we did that, the people who do better than average in limiting their fossil fuel use will actually get more in this dividend than they would pay in increased energy prices.”

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data

by Brad Plumer

Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. Remember, this was not long after the Climategate affair had erupted, at a time when skeptics were griping that climatologists had based their claims on faulty temperature data.

Muller’s stated aims were simple. He and his team would scour and re-analyze the climate data, putting all their calculations and methods online. Skeptics cheered the effort. “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong,” wrote Anthony Watts, a blogger who has criticized the quality of the weather stations in the United Statse that provide temperature data. The Charles G. Koch Foundation even gave Muller’s project $150,000 – and the Koch brothers, recall, are hardly fans of mainstream climate science.

So what are the end results? Muller’s team appears to have confirmed the basic tenets of climate science. Back in March, Muller told the House Science and Technology Committee that, contrary to what he expected, the existing temperature data was “excellent.” He went on: “We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.” And, today, the BEST team has released a flurry of new papers that confirm that the planet is getting hotter. As the team’s two-page summary flatly concludes, “Global warming is real“.

While Prof Muller admitted that global warming was very real, he was still a skeptic as to its cause. Until now:

The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic

by Richard A. Muller

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

(Richard A.) Muller’s research was intended to prove the opposite. The physicist and his team even took the most common arguments raised by climate deniers, putting them to the test to see if skeptics’ claims had merit. It’s why the Kochs got out their checkbook in the first place.

But Muller is now telling his benefactors what they don’t want to hear (a.k.a., the truth): the climate crisis is real and it’s caused by human activity. Whether humanity chooses to deal with the reality of the crisis remains to be seen, but we can’t say we weren’t warned.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Amidst the worst drought in 50 years, Up host Chris Hayes discusses climate change on the price of food. Joining Chris are:

Bryn Bird, second-generation farmer in Granville, Ohio at Bird’s Haven Farms.  She is also a field outreach coordinator for Rural Coalition;

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” and syndicated columnist for King Features;

Josh Barro (@jbarro), contributor to Forbes.com with “The Barrometer;”

Stacy-Marie Ishmael (@s_m_i), adjunct professor at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, former editor of “FT Tilt;”

Gary Gensler (@cftc), chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission since May 2009. Gensler previously served as the under-secretary of domestic finance at the Treasury Department.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

It’s been pretty hot across the United States with little rain crops are withering and wild fires rage throughout the West. There is no denying that this year has been really warm. Actually, it’s been warmer for a year now:

According to the NOAA National Climatic Data Center’s “State of the Climate: National Overview for June 2012” report released Monday, the 12-month period from July 2011 to June 2012 was the warmest on record (since recordkeeping began in 1895) for the contiguous United States, with a nationally-averaged temperature of 56.0 degrees, 3.2 degrees higher than the long-term average.

According to the report, every single state in the contiguous U.S. except for Washington saw warmer-than-average temperatures during this time period. The period from January to June of this year also has been the warmest first half of a year on record for the U.S. mainland.

For a large portion of the contiguous U.S., these first six months were also drier than average=Statewideprank&submitted=Submit]. The U.S. Drought Monitor showed that as of July 3, 56 percent of the contiguous U.S. is experiencing drought conditions. In June, wildfires burned over 1.3 million acres, the second most on record for the month.

We need to have better conversations about climate than having hacks like George Will pontificating that “it’s Summer” as though the evidence for change doesn’t exist. Or as The Washington Post columnist Joel Achenbach puts it, Global warming is a fact:

At some point we should stop litigating the basic question of whether climate change is happening. Climate change is a fact. The spike in atmospheric CO2 is a fact. The dramatic high-latitude warming is a fact. That the trends aren’t uniform and linear, and that there are anomalies here and there, does not change the long-term pattern. The warming trend has flattened out in the last decade but probably only because of air pollution from Chinese coal-fired power plants or somesuch forcing we haven’t fully discovered (smog is hardly the long-term solution we should be seeking). The broader patterns are clear.

Models show the greatest warming spike down the road still, decades hence. Thus in a sense, saying that “this is what global warming is like” whenever we have a heat wave actually understates the problem. Having spent much of my life in Florida, I can tell you, what kills you in summer is not the temperature but the duration of the season, which lasts basically forever – into November or even December in South Florida. So, yeah, 100 degrees in July gets my attention here in DC, but so will a stretch of 85-degree high temperatures in October.

This past Sunday, Chris Hayes on his MSNBC show “Up with Chris Hayes” hosted a panel that discussed the recent wave of extreme heat and it relationship to climate change. His guests were Bill McKibben (@billmckibben), author of “Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet” and founder of 350.org, a global grassroots environmental movement to solve the climate crisis; Eric Klinenberg (@EricKlinenberg), professor of sociology at New York University and author of “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago;” Thomas Mann co-author with Norman Ornstein of “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism“, a senior fellow for governance studies and the W. Averell Harriman Chair at the Brookings Institution; Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh), MSNBC political analyst and Salon’s editor-at-large; and Esther Armah (@estherarmah), playwright and author, host of “Wake Up Call” on WBAI-FM.

Shell Oil is on its way right now to a location less than 15 miles from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. “Shell has proposed drilling up to four shallow water exploration wells in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea this summer, beginning on July 1,” Subsea World News reported last month.

“The potential harm from a BP-scale spill is almost beyond comprehension,” David Yarnold, president of the National Audubon Society wrote at the Huffington Post.

If there is a spot on Earth as sacred or as critical to the future of our wild birds as the Gulf of Mexico, it is probably the unspoiled Arctic. Here, hundreds of bird species arrive every spring from all four North American flyways — the superhighways in the sky that birds use to travel up and down the Americas. Here, they mate, lay eggs and raise their young. Here also, many of America’s remaining polar bears make their winter dens along the coasts.

Siri wrote earlier today on Daily Kos on how the BP-spill in 2010 has caused unprecedented mutations and deformities in ocean life in Gulf of Mexico. Today, I’ll look at how our government and Big Oil are setting the stage in the Arctic for the sequel to Deepwater Horizon disaster. The script is already written and the leading actors are already on their way to the set.  

It seemed like the afterthought in the payroll tax cut extension fight, a small consolation prize to the Republicans on what should have been the easiest of bi-partisan votes. But the two-month clock is now ticking on whether Obama will approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s environmentally disastrous tar sands. If we want him to make the right decision and deny the permit, maybe it’s time to Occupy Exxon, with creative protests at local Exxon/Mobil stations. Of course we need to keep pressuring Obama. The bill’s deadline precludes anything close to the kind of comprehensive environmental review that he called for after rallies and civil disobedience at the White House led him to delay approval for a year. But why not also go after the oil companies whose influence led the Republicans to hold the rest of the unemployment and payroll tax bill hostage to the fast-track requirement. Exxon/Mobil has long been the dirtiest of the dirty among these companies. This makes them a logical target.

(also published to DKOS)

I don’t like occupying myself with politics very much. It’s a part of life but a relatively minor part for me. If I had my druthers I would and pursue my real love which is art in all its forms. I am attuned and immersed in beauty not politics, business or economic life.  However, political issues have to be front and center for all of us right now.

We are faced with such overwhelming collective issues that no one can stay on the sidelines-we must all carry some weight in the struggles we are facing. The most obvious and critical issue we face is the matter of climate-change. Because the Earth is a very complex system it is hard to arrive at any conclusive finding on what the results of human activity on climate are. In short, the science of any complex system can only be approximate and even then there’s always a possibility that the opposite of what we think is true may be true due to one critical detail we missed in our analysis. Such is the nature of complex systems. It is also a matter of philosophy that there is always dramatically more to life than we can ever know even if science were to systematically chart all possible avenues from here to eternity. I will not go through why I have come to that conclusion but that’s the conclusion I’ve come to from a lifetime of questioning, searching and, frankly, finding what I can only call “the mysterious.”  

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The GOP and some of the blue dog Democrats would like to decimate the EPA and the Interior Department. They believe that carbon emissions are harmless, that fracking is safe and want to reduce clean water standards. They want to allow mining next to our precious nature preserves and water supplies, as well as, continued mountain top mining. A bill currently under consideration in the House has that has been aptly called “Pro-Pollution Omnibus Bill,” that contains an industry wish list of riders:

• allows uranium mining on federal lands adjacent to the Grand Canyon by lifting the moratorium on uranium mining along the Colorado River, potentially exposing 17 million people, dependent on the river for drinking water, to radioactive waste.

• stop new protections for animals at risk of extinction and their habitat. Clark says this could be “disastrous” for species like walruses, which are struggling to survive.

• prevent legal action to challenge Wyoming’s shoot-on-sight wolf plan.

• prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from doing more to protect waters and the wildlife and communities that depend on them. Pesticides are already a major threat to salmon, frogs and other wildlife.

• reduce grant programs that provide funding to states to protect declining and imperiled species and to other countries to protect migratory species that live in the United States during parts of the year.

• slash funding for national wildlife refuges, habitat restoration and other key conservation spending. The committee approved billions in spending cuts, which would damage already underfunded refuges and undercut environmental protection.

• paves the way for more mountain-top mining by blocking protections against toxic chemicals from mining waste running into our streams.

• protects BP and makes schools less safe by rejecting additional funding for the air toxic monitoring at schools or for the Deepwater Horizon litigation.

• allows thousands of pounds of pollutants into the air by exempting big oil companies like Shell, Exxon and BP from the Clean Air Act for any new drilling area outside the Gulf of Mexico

• increases the odds of another oil spill by rejecting requested funds for additional staff and funding for increased facility inspections on offshore drilling rigs.

• prohibits funding for the Wild Lands Secretarial Order, which Republicans say would negatively impact ranching, energy production, recreation, and other activities on public lands. A similar measure passed the House in the FY 2011 continuing budget resolution.

• prohibits funding for the EPA to regulate levels of particulate matter in the air, including farm dust, under the Clean Air Act.

• prohibits funding for the EPA to develop additional financial assurance requirements for hard rock mining operations.

• prohibits states from receiving EPA Great Lakes funding if they have adopted ballast water requirements that are more stringent than federal requirements.

• directs the EPA to do a cumulative assessment of the impacts of EPA regulations.

• prohibits funding for the Utility Maximum Achievable Control Technology rule and the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, also called the “Transport” rule, which both require power plants to limit toxic air emissions. Both rules respond to court orders.

The GOP claims that they want to cut spending and end regulations to create jobs. There will be no jobs if they continue with policies that destroy the environment and kill our home, Earth.

h/t to Edger who asked that we use the video liberally.