Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 120

Judge Shuts Down Attack On Colorado’s Ambitious Clean Energy Law

Colorado’s ambitious renewable energy standard will remain in place thanks to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which on Monday shielded the law from a legal attack by a right-wing litigation group.

Writing for a three-judge panel, U.S. Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch affirmed that the clean energy law does not violate the U.S. Constitution, as the plaintiff Energy and Environment Legal Institute had argued. E&E Legal, formerly called the American Tradition Institute, is a nonprofit that advocates a “free-market approach” to environmentalism. It is the same entity that launched a high-profile lawsuit against climate scientist Michael Mann seeking to view his email communications, an effort which ultimately failed.

The case over Colorado’s renewable energy law was E&E Legal’s second most high-profile case. The group launched the lawsuit back in 2011, arguing that the clean energy standard — which requires utilities to get 20 percent of the electricity they sell to Colorado customers from renewable sources — violated the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

More specifically, the group said that the law unfairly harmed out-of-state businesses. Colorado relies on other states to get a good portion of its electricity, the group argued, and therefore out-of-state coal producers would be disproportionately harmed.

Judge Gorsuch disagreed, saying that while out-of-state coal producers would likely be hurt, it wasn’t disproportionate. Indeed, financial harm to fossil fuel companies would likely be equal across the board.

“To be sure, fossil fuel producers like [E&E Legal]’s member will be hurt,” Judge Gorsuch wrote. “But as far as we know, all fossil fuel producers in the area served by the grid will be hurt equally and all renewable energy producers in the area will be helped equally. If there’s any disproportionate adverse effect felt by out-of-state producers or any disproportionate advantage enjoyed by in-state producers, it hasn’t been explained to this court.”

Gorsuch also noted that if the mandate raises electricity prices for Colorado residents, that didn’t matter either — because Colorado voters had approved the law in 2004 with “overwhelming support.”

“That’s a cost they are apparently happy to bear,” he wrote.

Colorado is a national leader in clean energy, in part due to the state’s ambitious renewable energy standard. The state is home to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is the federal government’s primary research facility for renewable energy and energy efficiency.

E&E Legal did not respond to ThinkProgress’ requests for comment on Tuesday. But David Schnare of the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, which represented the group, told Law360 that it would likely not appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Either way, Schare reportedly said they were disappointed in the ruling, and that Judge Gorsuch failed to consider many of their points regarding constitutionality.

“They simply ignored our arguments,” he reportedly said. “They did not cite or mention or discuss any of our arguments or our cases. They had ignored the fact that we had undercut their argument and shown it wasn’t a valid point.”

The ruling was a win not only for the law, but for environmental groups looking to promote renewable energy in Colorado. In a statement, the group Conservation Colorado said the ruling would ensure the protection of public health via cleaner air and continued reduction of greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

“Today is a good day for renewable energy in Colorado and our efforts to clean our air and combat climate change,” Carrie Curtiss, Conservation Colorado’s deputy director said. “It is time for the climate deniers and dirty energy lobby to end their frivolous lawsuits and recognize that clean, renewable energy is here to stay.”

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ColoradoRenewable EnergySolarWind

The post Judge Shuts Down Attack On Colorado’s Ambitious Clean Energy Law appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Coal’s Slow Demise As A Power Source Leads To Role Reversal With Natural Gas

Before this year, natural gas had never accounted for more electricity generation than coal in the U.S. That is no longer the case.

In April, 31 percent of electricity generation came from natural gas while 30 percent came from coal, according to data analyzed by the research firm SNL Energy and compiled by the U.S. Department of Energy. This one percent difference marks a long-anticipated role reversal for these two electricity generating fossil fuels, and another sign of the slow demise of coal as a primary power source in the U.S.

A recent analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) found that about 17 percent of U.S. coal-fired power production generation will cease to exist within the next few years, with Bloomberg Business stating that “the industrial age was built on coal. The next 25 years will be the end of its dominance.”

“The U.S. coal fleet is entering an unprecedented period of retirements,” the BNEF analysis states. “As the industry faces a three-pronged assault from low gas prices, an aging fleet, and stringent environmental compliance.”

Coal is dirty. It creates local air pollution, uses a lot of water and a lot of greenhouse gases. There are already regulations on arsenic, mercury, and lead pollution from coal-fired power plants, bur those regulations have recently been put in jeopardy by the Supreme Court. The Obama administration and the EPA are working on the first carbon pollution limits for existing power plants in the form of the Clean Power Plan, which aim to reduce power plant greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030. The EPA is expected to release the final rule later this summer.

As for water use, a recent analysis by Climate Central found that water being withdrawn from lakes and rivers to cool power plants fell dramatically to 33 trillion gallons in 2012 from 52 trillion gallons in 2005. According to Climate Central, natural gas power plants use four times less water per megawatt-hour generated than coal-fired power plants on average.

Even without the specter of future regulations influencing coal’s role in energy production, the advance of hydraulic fracturing has made natural gas prices nearly a third of what they were a decade ago. The drilling boom has also made the United States the world’s biggest combined producer of oil and natural gas, and has boosted natural gas production by 30 percent since 2008.

 

[image error]

CREDIT: U.S. EIA

 

In May, a report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) stated that the “increase in natural gas-fired generation has largely come at the expense of coal generation.”

With heating and air conditioning minimized during the spring months, generation from coal- and natural gas-fired power plants falls due to low demand. As natural gas costs rise over the summer and coal plants return from springtime maintenance, the EIA still expects coal’s share of U.S. total generation this year to be around 35.6 percent, compared to 30.9 percent for natural gas. In 2014, coal’s share was 38.8 percent and natural gas was 27.4 percent.

Just five years ago, this difference was far more dramatic. According to SNL Energy, in April 2010, 44 percent of electric power generation came from coal and 22 percent from gas. Steve Piper, associate director of energy fundamentals at SNL Energy, told CNBC that “the transition from coal has been stunning.”

“There’s been a change both from a regulatory and economic perspective in terms of the competitiveness of natural gas,” he said. “It could be the beginning of the end for the current fleet of coal plants.”

Piper also said he thought it might be the beginning of another paradigm shift: The coal industry might actually starting looking at ways to reduce pollution and burn coal more efficiently. Not only is coal struggling in the U.S., but in China — where coal-fired power production has grown rapidly for years — the picture is also starting to change. Coal imports fell dramatically in June and the Chinese leadership has committed to peaking greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, with an aim of doing it sooner.

When it comes to mitigating climate change, natural gas is preferable to coal. But it is by no means an outright solution. Natural gas is made up of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that traps up to 34 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over the course of a century. As ThinkProgress’ Joe Romm has written, “even small leaks in the natural gas production and delivery system can have a large climate impact — enough to gut the entire benefit of switching from coal-fired power to gas.”

The methane leaks are both hard to measure and significant, an issue the EPA is well aware of.

In January, the Obama administration announced plans to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 40 to 45 percent from 2012 levels by 2025. In 2012, methane emissions accounted for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas pollution, and of that total nearly 30 percent came from the production, transmission, and distribution of oil and natural gas. Emissions from the oil and gas sector are projected to rise more than 25 percent by 2025 without substantial efforts to reduce them.

Michael Levi, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently authored an essay on the value to natural gas as a fuel in the fight against climate change. He argued that while its mitigating effect may not be as sharp as renewables, its political economy is great. He writes that “shale gas is no panacea:”

But with the right policies to protect communities where gas is produced and to harness the fuel as part of a broader climate strategy, it can play a critical role in confronting global warming. Without shale gas, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would be higher, our climate policies would be weaker, and the odds of slashing future carbon dioxide emissions and meeting U.S. climate goals would be greatly reduced.

The turn against shale gas rests on three beliefs that have calcified into conventional wisdom among many environmental advocates. The first is that shale gas development causes massive damage to communities and the local environment — regardless of what regulations are put in place. This sets a daunting bar for any climate strategy that includes shale gas production. The second is that gas is no better than coal when it comes to climate change — at least not without big changes to the way gas is produced — and might even increase greenhouse gas emissions. This undercuts any imperative to wrestle with trade-offs between local risks and climate benefits from gas. The third is that renewable energy has made such rapid progress that a shift to a zero-carbon energy future is imminent. This makes natural gas unnecessary, and potentially a threat to a complete and speedy transition away from fossil fuels.

But each of these is a myth or half-truth. Strict rules and smart planning can safeguard communities. If policy drives natural gas to displace coal, the result can be much lower emissions. And, while renewables have made big strides, the biggest beneficiary of a setback to natural gas would, for now, still be coal.

Tags

Clean Power PlanCoalElectricityNatural Gas

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Is Scott Walker Terrible At Science?

If elected president, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker might make a very science-literate commander-in-chief. At least that’s if his high school science teacher’s memory is correct.

“I do recall that Scott was very accepting of everything in science class,” Ann Serpe, the chair of Walker’s high school science department, told TIME back in February. “He had a good sense of it.”

It would certainly be refreshing if it were true. In the vast field of Republican presidential contenders, science seems low on the collective list of priorities. Almost every Republican candidate denies that climate change exists and is caused by humans, a premise that 97 percent of climate researchers accept. Some stand by the idea that creationism should be taught in schools, and others refuse to talk about evolution at all. Nearly 100 percent of scientists accept the science of evolution.

All of which begs the question: Is Scott Walker different? Does he have a “good sense” of science?

It’s a harder question than it seems. On what are probably the two most hot-button scientific issues — climate change and evolution — Walker hasn’t actually given answers. On evolution, he has refused to say whether he accepts it, instead reasoning that it’s a question “a politician shouldn’t be involved in.” He also has never given his position on whether he thinks human-caused climate change is real, though he has has strongly opposed nearly every effort to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause it.

Indeed, science just doesn’t seem to be a driving political force for Walker. Yes, he does support policies that many would consider anti-science. But the scientific justification for those policies is generally not what convinces Walker to support them. Instead, Walker seems eager to ignore science in order to make a moral or political point.

Take the 20-week abortion ban that Walker is about to sign. It is a bill based on the unscientific idea that fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks. But Walker does not talk about fetal pain when he expresses support for the ban. His “open letter on life” only cites the “sanctity of life” and his general pro-life positions. It is just the presence of the fetus — not that the fetus might feel pain — that drives his support.

The same goes for Walker’s previous support for stopping embryonic stem cell research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While he made an off-hand incorrect claim that adult stem cell research was more valuable, his main reason was moral — embryonic stem cell research results in the destruction of an embryo, he said, and therefore the destruction of a developing human being.

It’s a similar story with climate change. Walker has been called “the worst” and “most dangerous” candidate when it comes to the climate and the environment, attacking efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at every turn. But Walker’s argument is always about jobs and the reliability of the electricity grid. It’s never about the scientific reality of climate change.

It’s not like Walker has never made an unscientific statement. His support for mandatory ultrasounds is based on the belief that women will change their minds about ending a pregnancy when they see the images, and he has said as much. “We just knew if we signed that law … that more people if they saw that unborn child would make a decision to protect and keep the life of that unborn child,” he has said. Several studies have found that this is not the case.

But based on how he’s handled most science-based policy issues, it wouldn’t be surprising if Walker’s high school science teacher was right. Maybe he does have a good sense of what the science says. Whether he actually cares, though, is another question.

Tags

AbortionClimate ChangeElectionElection 2016Scott Walkerstem cells

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Zooplankton Are Eating Plastic, And That’s Bad News For Ocean Life

Tiny ocean animals that make up a base of the marine food web are ingesting tiny particles of plastic pollution, and that could be bad news for the health of the oceans.

That’s the main finding of a recent study published in the journal Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. The study focused on zooplankton, a group of organisms that are typically microscopic and that are eaten by small predators like krill, shrimp, and small fish. It looked at two types of zooplankton that live in the Northeast Pacific Ocean — copepods and euphausiids, both of which are tiny crustaceans. It found that one out every 34 copepods were eating tiny bits of plastic, along with one in every 17 euphausiids.

The findings represent the first time that zooplankton in the wild have been confirmed to be ingesting plastic, said Peter Ross, co-author of the study and head of the Ocean Pollution Research Program at the Vancouver Aquarium. Previous studies have demonstrated zooplankton eating plastic, but have done so in a lab — a setting that that’s less labor-intensive than going out into the ocean and that’s easier to control.

[image error]

Zooplankton are shown to have ingested tiny particles of plastic.

CREDIT: Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology

The zooplankton, Ross said, ingest the plastic because they’re looking for something of a certain size — that of a diatom or phytoplankton — and some tiny pieces of plastic fit the bill. The study focused on microplastics, tiny particles or fibers of plastic that are either manufactured to be small – microbeads in face wash, for instance — or that entered the environment as larger pieces of plastic but that have been broken down into small fragments. Both kinds of microplastic are widespread forms of pollution in the ocean — the debris has even been found in Arctic sea ice — but in this study, the plastic found in zooplankton didn’t include manufactured microplastic.

The study didn’t look at how zooplankton are affected by the plastic, but Ross said in a statement that the plastics could potentially block up the zooplanktons’ guts or leach into their bodies. And the transfer of these microplastics up the food chain is worrisome to Ross. The study notes that previous studies have found reproductive impacts and other health effects in marine organisms that have consumed plastic. The transfer of these plastics up the food chain, as zooplankton are eaten by larger creatures, is also worrisome.

“We’re concerned, obviously, that this is a way in which even if you’re a salmon and you don’t deliberately target a piece of plastic, you’re going to get exposed as a result of feeding on zooplankton,” Ross told ThinkProgress.

Baby salmon that spawn in British Columbia’s rivers and head out to sea once they’re mature enough will likely consume between two and seven particles per day just from eating zooplankton, according to the study. And a humpback whale, the study’s authors write, eats 1.5 percent of its body weight in krill and zooplankton every day, which means it would be ingesting 300,000 microplastic particles on a daily basis.

This isn’t the first study to examine the impacts plastic pollution is having on zooplankton. A 2013 study also found that, along with the phytoplankton and floating and other, smaller zooplankton that typically make up their diets, the tiny marine animals were eating microplastics. That plastic addition to the creatures’ diets could “negatively impact” their health, the study concluded.

One of the authors from that study helped create a video showing footage of zooplankton ingesting plastic:

Manufactured microplastic has been the subject of substantial attention lately, as scientists warn of the harm they pose when they make their way into the world’s oceans and lakes — mostly to creatures, like plankton, that mistake them for food.

“They are about the same size as fish eggs, which means that, essentially, they look like food. To any organism that lives in the water, they are food,” Sherri Mason, an associate professor of chemistry at the State University of New York, Fredonia, told NPR last year. “So our concern is that, essentially, they are making their way into the food web.”

Several states have heeded scientists’ warnings. Last year, Illinois became the first state to pass a statewide ban on microbeads. Since then, six other states, including Wisconsin and New Jersey, have passed bans on the plastic.

But microbeads are only a small portion of the ocean’s massive plastic pollution problem. A study earlier this year found that in 2010, countries around the world contributed eight million tons of plastic to the oceans. That’s a lot more trash than has been measured so far in the ocean’s “garbage patches.” And, the study found, that amount is supposed to only increase in the next decade if the planet doesn’t seriously address its waste practices. Larger animals than zooplankton have also been found to eat plastic, thinking that it’s food: baby albatross have been found with bottlecaps and other plastic debris in their guts after dying — pollution that’s fed to them by their parents. Sea turtles, too, are known to eat plastic bags, likely mistaking them for jellyfish.

Ross said his study raised two additional questions: what is the impact of zooplankton’s consumption of plastic on the marine food web, and where exactly is the plastic pollution eaten by the zooplankton coming from? The sources, he said, are varied: even washing polyester clothes can cause plastic fibers to make their way into the water system. What Ross isn’t as concerned about, however, is the potential impacts of zooplankton’s plastic consumption on human health. Since humans typically eat fish filets — not fish guts — and have varied diets, he doesn’t think there’s a large chance of people being exposed to high levels of plastic from eating fish.

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PlasticWater Pollution

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Media Reports The World Will Enter A ‘Mini Ice Age’ In The 2030s. The Reverse Is True.

U.K. tabloids, conservative media, and others are (mis)reporting that the Earth will enter a “mini ice age” in the 2030s. In fact, not only is the story wrong, the reverse is actually true.

The Earth is headed toward an imminent speed-up in global warming, as many recent studies have made clear, like this June study by NOAA. Indeed, a March study, entitled “Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change,” makes clear that a stunning acceleration in the rate of global warming is around the corner — with Arctic warming rising 1°F per decade by the 2020s!

Also, right now, we appear to be in the midst of a long-awaited jump in global temperatures. Not only was 2014 the hottest year on record, but 2015 is in the process of blowing that record away. On top of that, models say a massive El Niño is growing, as USA Today reported last week. Since El Niños tend to set the record for the hottest years (since the regional warming adds to the underlying global warming trend), if 2015/2016 does see a super El Niño then next year may well crush the record this year sets.

Whatever near-term jump we see in the global temperatures is thus likely to be followed by an accelerating global warming trend — one that would utterly overwhelm any natural variations such as a temporary reduction in solar intensity. A recent study concluded that “any reduction in global mean near-surface temperature due to a future decline in solar activity is likely to be a small fraction of projected anthropogenic warming.”

That’s true even for one as big as the Maunder Minimum, which was linked to the so-called Little Ice Age.

The “Little Ice Age” is a term used to cover what appears to have been two or three periods of modest cooling in the northern hemisphere between 1550 and 1850.

I know you are shocked, shocked to learn that unreliable climate stories appear in U.K. tabloids, the conservative media, and those who cite them without actually talking to leading climate scientists. Often there is a half truth underlying such stories, but in this case it is more like a nano-truth.

Last week, in Llandudno, north Wales, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) held Cyfarfod Seryddiaeth Cenedlaethol 2015 — the “National Astronomy Meeting 2015″ (in case you don’t speak Welsh). An RAS news release had this startling headline, “Irregular Heartbeat Of The Sun Driven By Double Dynamo.”

Okay, that wasn’t the startling part. This was: “Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645.”

[image error]

CREDIT: Wikipedia

Ah, but the word choice was confusing. We’re not going to have temperature “conditions” last seen during the Little Ice Age. If this one study does turn out to be right, we’d see solar conditions equivalent to the Maunder Minimum in the 2030s.

This won’t cause the world to enter a mini ice age — for three reasons:

The Little Ice Age turns out to have been quite little.
What cooling there was probably was driven more by volcanoes than the Maunder Minimum.
The warming effect from global greenhouse gases will overwhelm any reduction in solar forcing, even more so by the 2030s.

So how little was the Little Ice Age?

The most comprehensive reconstruction of the temperature of the past 2000 years done so far, the “PAGES 2k project,” concluded that “there were no globally synchronous multi-decadal hot or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age.”

[image error]

Green dots show the 30-year average of the new PAGES 2k reconstruction. The red curve shows the global mean temperature, according HadCRUT4 data from 1850 onwards. In blue is the original hockey stick of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1999 ) with its uncertainty range (light blue). Graph by Klaus Bitterman.

The Little Ice Age was little in duration and in geographic extent. It was an “Age” the way Pluto is a planet.

Writing on Climate Progress, climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf noted the researchers “identify some shorter intervals where extremely cold conditions coincide with major volcanic eruptions and/or solar minima (as already known from previous studies).”

That brings us to the second point: The latest research finds that what short-term cooling there was during the Little Ice Age was mostly due to volcanoes, not the solar minimum. As “Scientific American” explained in its 2012 piece on the LIA, “New simulations show that several large, closely spaced eruptions (and not decreased solar radiation) could have cooled the Northern Hemisphere enough to spark sea-ice growth and a subsequent feedback loop.” The period associated with the LIA “coincide with two of the most volcanically active half centuries in the past millennium, according to the researchers.”

The cooling effect from the drop in solar activity during even a Maunder Minimum is quite modest. Environmental scientist Dana Nuccitelli discussed the literature underscoring that point in a U.K. Guardian post from the summer of 2013, the last time the “Maunder Minimum” issue popped up.

That brings us to the third point: Whatever cooling the Little Ice Age saw as result of the Maunder Minimum, it pales in comparison to the warming we are already experiencing — let alone the accelerated warming projected by multiple studies. That’s clear even in Pages 2k reconstruction above.

Just last month “Nature Communications” published a study called, “Regional climate impacts of a possible future grand solar minimum.” This found that, “any reduction in global mean near-surface temperature due to a future decline in solar activity is likely to be a small fraction of projected anthropogenic warming.” As with the Little Ice Age, any significant effects are likely to be regional in nature — and, of course, temporary, since a grand solar minimum typically lasts only decades.

So, no, the Daily Mail is quite wrong when it trumpets, “Scientists warn the sun will ‘go to sleep’ in 2030 and could cause temperatures to plummet.”

In actuality, what is going to happen in the business-as-usual emissions scenario (RCP8.5) is closer to the figure below, which plots “rate of change” of warming:

Global rates of decadal temperature change over 40-year periods. Results are shown for: central climate assumptions (thick solid line), range due to uncertainty in aerosol forcing (grey shading), and range due to uncertainty in climate sensitivity (blue shading). The outer bounding cases are shown as dotted lines. The thin solid black line shows the historical rate of change using the HADCRU4 observational data. The vertical dashed line indicates 2014. Via PNNL.

In the RCP8.5 scenario, the rate of warming post-2050 becomes so fast that it is likely to be beyond adaptation for most species — and for humans in many parts of the world, as I discussed here. The warming rate in the central case hits a stunning 1°F per decade. Arctic warming would presumably be at least 2°F per decade. And this goes on for decades.

No Maunder Minimum can save homo sapiens from that catastrophic outcome. Only humanity can — by ignoring those who deny or mislead on climate science and instead taking aggressive action to slash carbon pollution ASAP.

Tags

Climate ChangeClimate Change Deniers

The post Media Reports The World Will Enter A ‘Mini Ice Age’ In The 2030s. The Reverse Is True. appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Media Reports The World Will Enter A ‘Mini Ice Age’ In The 2030’s. The Reverse Is True.

U.K. tabloids, conservative media, and others are (mis)reporting that the Earth will enter a “mini ice age” in the 2030s. In fact, not only is the story wrong, the reverse is actually true.

The Earth is headed toward an imminent speed-up in global warming, as many recent studies have made clear, like this June study by NOAA. Indeed, a March study, entitled “Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change,” makes clear that a stunning acceleration in the rate of global warming is around the corner — with Arctic warming rising 1°F per decade by the 2020s!

Also, right now, we appear to be in the midst of a long-awaited jump in global temperatures. Not only was 2014 the hottest year on record, but 2015 is in the process of blowing that record away. On top of that, models say a massive El Niño is growing, as USA Today reported last week. Since El Niños tend to set the record for the hottest years (since the regional warming adds to the underlying global warming trend), if 2015/2016 does see a super El Niño then next year may well crush the record this year sets.

Whatever near-term jump we see in the global temperatures is thus likely to be followed by an accelerating global warming trend — one that would utterly overwhelm any natural variations such as a temporary reduction in solar intensity. A recent study concluded that “any reduction in global mean near-surface temperature due to a future decline in solar activity is likely to be a small fraction of projected anthropogenic warming.”

That’s true even for one as big as the Maunder Minimum, which was linked to the so-called Little Ice Age.

The “Little Ice Age” is a term used to cover what appears to have been two or three periods of modest cooling in the northern hemisphere between 1550 and 1850.

I know you are shocked, shocked to learn that unreliable climate stories appear in U.K. tabloids, the conservative media, and those who cite them without actually talking to leading climate scientists. Often there is a half truth underlying such stories, but in this case it is more like a nano-truth.

Last week, in Llandudno, north Wales, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) held Cyfarfod Seryddiaeth Cenedlaethol 2015 — the “National Astronomy Meeting 2015″ (in case you don’t speak Welsh). An RAS news release had this startling headline, “Irregular Heartbeat Of The Sun Driven By Double Dynamo.”

Okay, that wasn’t the startling part. This was: “Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645.”

[image error]

CREDIT: Wikipedia

Ah, but the word choice was confusing. We’re not going to have temperature “conditions” last seen during the Little Ice Age. If this one study does turn out to be right, we’d see solar conditions equivalent to the Maunder Minimum in the 2030s.

This won’t cause the world to enter a mini ice age — for three reasons:

The Little Ice Age turns out to have been quite little.
What cooling there was probably was driven more by volcanoes than the Maunder Minimum.
The warming effect from global greenhouse gases will overwhelm any reduction in solar forcing, even more so by the 2030s.

So how little was the Little Ice Age?

The most comprehensive reconstruction of the temperature of the past 2000 years done so far, the “PAGES 2k project,” concluded that “there were no globally synchronous multi-decadal hot or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age.”

[image error]

Green dots show the 30-year average of the new PAGES 2k reconstruction. The red curve shows the global mean temperature, according HadCRUT4 data from 1850 onwards. In blue is the original hockey stick of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1999 ) with its uncertainty range (light blue). Graph by Klaus Bitterman.

The Little Ice Age was little in duration and in geographic extent. It was an “Age” the way Pluto is a planet.

Writing on Climate Progress, climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf noted the researchers “identify some shorter intervals where extremely cold conditions coincide with major volcanic eruptions and/or solar minima (as already known from previous studies).”

That brings us to the second point: The latest research finds that what short-term cooling there was during the Little Ice Age was mostly due to volcanoes, not the solar minimum. As “Scientific American” explained in its 2012 piece on the LIA, “New simulations show that several large, closely spaced eruptions (and not decreased solar radiation) could have cooled the Northern Hemisphere enough to spark sea-ice growth and a subsequent feedback loop.” The period associated with the LIA “coincide with two of the most volcanically active half centuries in the past millennium, according to the researchers.”

The cooling effect from the drop in solar activity during even a Maunder Minimum is quite modest. Environmental scientist Dana Nuccitelli discussed the literature underscoring that point in a U.K. Guardian post from the summer of 2013, the last time the “Maunder Minimum” issue popped up.

That brings us to the third point: Whatever cooling the Little Ice Age saw as result of the Maunder Minimum, it pales in comparison to the warming we are already experiencing — let alone the accelerated warming projected by multiple studies. That’s clear even in Pages 2k reconstruction above.

Just last month “Nature Communications” published a study called, “Regional climate impacts of a possible future grand solar minimum.” This found that, “any reduction in global mean near-surface temperature due to a future decline in solar activity is likely to be a small fraction of projected anthropogenic warming.” As with the Little Ice Age, any significant effects are likely to be regional in nature — and, of course, temporary, since a grand solar minimum typically lasts only decades.

So, no, the Daily Mail is quite wrong when it trumpets, “Scientists warn the sun will ‘go to sleep’ in 2030 and could cause temperatures to plummet.”

In actuality, what is going to happen in the business-as-usual emissions scenario (RCP8.5) is closer to the figure below, which plots “rate of change” of warming:

Global rates of decadal temperature change over 40-year periods. Results are shown for: central climate assumptions (thick solid line), range due to uncertainty in aerosol forcing (grey shading), and range due to uncertainty in climate sensitivity (blue shading). The outer bounding cases are shown as dotted lines. The thin solid black line shows the historical rate of change using the HADCRU4 observational data. The vertical dashed line indicates 2014. Via PNNL.

In the RCP8.5 scenario, the rate of warming post-2050 becomes so fast that it is likely to be beyond adaptation for most species — and for humans in many parts of the world, as I discussed here. The warming rate in the central case hits a stunning 1°F per decade. Arctic warming would presumably be at least 2°F per decade. And this goes on for decades.

No Maunder Minimum can save homo sapiens from that catastrophic outcome. Only humanity can — by ignoring those who deny or mislead on climate science and instead taking aggressive action to slash carbon pollution ASAP.

Tags

Climate ChangeClimate Change Deniers

The post Media Reports The World Will Enter A ‘Mini Ice Age’ In The 2030’s. The Reverse Is True. appeared first on ThinkProgress.

New Runway At World’s 3rd Busiest Airport Has Environmentalists Up In Arms And Activists In Chains

On Monday at 3:30 a.m., a group of environmental activists cut through a perimeter fence around London’s Heathrow Airport and chained themselves together on one of the airports two runways in protest of the construction of a third. One of the pro was dressed in a polar bear suit. Nine were arrested under suspicion of violating the Aviation Act, and the remaining four were taken to a safe area.

The undertaking, which delayed flights for hours and cost the world’s third largest airport millions of dollars, is the latest development this summer in an ongoing debate about how the U.K. can meet both airplane transportation demands and climate goals. At the center of the debate is a large new runway for Heathrow Airport, the main artery in a five-airport hub that makes London the busiest air traffic destination in the world, shuttling around some 135 million passengers a year. More than half of these, some 73.4 million, go through Heathrow.

According to the group Plane Stupid, which staged Monday’s act of civil disobedience, the U.K. cannot meet its climate target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050 compared to 1990 and also build new runways. The group argues that ninety percent of Heathrow’s flights are “short-haul” to places like Manchester and Paris — locations where rail alternatives, a much more efficient form of transportation, already exist.

“We want to say sorry to anyone whose day we’ve ruined, and we’re not saying that everybody who wants to fly is a bad person,” Ella Gilbert, an activist from Plane Stupid, said in a statement. “It’s those who fly frequently and unnecessarily who are driving the need for expansion, and we cannot keep ignoring the terrifying consequences of flying like there’s no tomorrow.”

Yep, still going on this one… #keepitontheground pic.twitter.com/voFhgDKtso

— Plane Stupid (@planestupid) July 13, 2015

A report released earlier this month by the Airports Commission, an independent body set up by the U.K. government to research the prospect of added airport capacity in London, reached a different conclusion by recommending a third runway be built at Heathrow. With local and global impacts in mind the report includes some caveats, such as a ban on night flights, caps on noise levels and air pollution, and legislation that rules out ever constructing a fourth runway. The government, led by Liberal prime minister David Cameron, must now decide whether to construct the runway.

Both the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper and London mayor Boris Johnson have come out vehemently against the third runway, which would add some 250,000 flights a year to the already bustling airport. On Monday, Johnson said he also disagrees with the protesters actions.

“There are ways of showing our disagreement,” Johnson said in a TV interview. “I disagree absolutely vehemently with the proposal to expand into a third runway. It is totally wrong and would be environmentally disastrous. However, I don’t believe in disrupting the travel arrangements of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.”

The Guardian compared the notion of expanding the airport to its recent campaign for fossil fuel divestment.

“Existing fossil-fuel stocks are more than sufficient to unleash climate chaos; the same thing is true of the existing infrastructure,” stated an editorial early in July. “Transport networks need to be re-engineered for decarbonisation. But that would require some real blue-sky thinking, and of that there is no sign.”

Supporters of the airport expansion argue that the added capacity is necessary for economic reasons, including business competitiveness and job growth.

In a recent op-ed, Gareth Thomas, a Labour MP and candidate for mayor of London, wrote that “a third runway is in London’s interest” because it would create 40,000 jobs and provide a significant boost to London’s global status.

“The new mayor must use their power and influence to turn Heathrow into the world’s greenest airport,” wrote Thomas, saying it could be an opportunity to “accelerate the greening of the aviation world — with lower-emission aircraft given preference, further incentives to new passengers to use public transport and further investment in low-carbon vehicles on the airport and noise insulation.”

Still smiling on the runway. Happy to be taking action on airport expansion and climate change. #NoThirdRunway pic.twitter.com/4AiQvoPeJK

— Plane Stupid (@planestupid) July 13, 2015

The U.K. is not the only country grappling with these issues. In fact, aviation is growing much faster in developing countries across the world. Demand for aviation is expected to grow around 1 to 3 percent annually in the U.K over the next 35 years, while global growth rates are expected to be 4 to 5 percent. According to the International Council on Clean Transportation, by 2050 the industry could contribute up to 15 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. In 2013, more than three billion people worldwide were airplane passengers. According to the Air Transport Action Group, aviation is responsible for 12 percent of all transportation emissions.

The U.S. is ostensibly starting to recognize the imminent increase in emissions. In June, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes are a health hazard and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. But the EPA won’t develop is own airplane emissions regulations — instead, it’s deferring to international deliberations on the issue by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency, which is expected to release an emissions standard early in 2016.

In the U.K., the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which advises the government on meeting its climate targets, has said the greenhouse gas emissions from aviation should not take up more than a quarter of the U.K.’s carbon budget by 2050. According to the Aviation Environment Federation (AEF), the Airport Commission has forecasted that aviation emissions will surpass this percentage of the total even if a new runway isn’t built at Heathrow. If the new runway is built, it will make meeting these benchmarks even harder.

“If aviation blows its budget, other sectors, such as agriculture, would have to shoulder tougher carbon cuts than the CCC considers to be feasible,” states the AEF.

One possible solution, runway or not, is a strict carbon tax on air travel. While international bodies are currently debating a moderate carbon tax to go into effect sometime in the next decade, for a tax to have a high enough impact it would have to add something like $125 to a one-way ticket from the U.K. to Europe, according to AEF. In today’s political climate, drastic action like this that would cut hard against perceived quality of life seems highly unlikely — especially when considered at a global scale.

“Our analysis shows that further reductions will be required and that emissions can only be reduced to a level compatible with the Climate Change Act if there is a significant increase in the cost of flying or restrictions on emissions, effectively a cap on traffic, at other U.K. airports,” Tim Johnson, director of AEF, told ThinkProgress. “Both solutions are politically challenging to deliver.”

As for the the Plane Stupid’s Heathrow protest, Johnson said it “highlights that climate change will be a key consideration in whether the runway goes ahead.”

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A New Court Ruling Could Threaten California’s Ability To Regulate Water Use Amid Drought

On Friday, a California court issued a ruling that could hinder the state’s ability to issue mass water cuts amid its historic drought.

Sacramento County Superior Court Judge ShelleyAnne Chang told the State Water Board that it can’t enforce water cuts without first letting farmers and irrigation districts defend their water rights at a hearing. Water rights, Chang said, are essentially property rights, and taking them away without a hearing violates due process.

“The practical implication is that the court has reminded the state board that water rights are a form of property rights, and they have to use a lot more care when they are trying to regulate them,” Jennifer Spaletta, an attorney with the Central Delta Water Agency, told the Associated Press.

Four irrigation districts in California’s Central Valley, including the Central Delta Water Agency, filed a petition in late June alleging that the California State Water Board violated property rights by issuing curtailment notices to farmers without first holding a public hearing. California issued notices of curtailments to senior water rights holders — those with claims to the water dating before 1914 — in mid-June. Almost immediately, several affected water districts filed lawsuits challenging the curtailments.

Chang sided with the plaintiffs, issuing a temporary restraining order on the curtailments.

“The curtailment letters … result in a taking of petitioners’ property rights without a pre-deprivation hearing, in violation of petitioners’ due process rights,” Chang wrote in her ruling. She disagreed with the state’s argument that curtailment notices were just notices, not technically orders, and therefore don’t require hearings. That line of reasoning, she wrote, is “not only misguided, it is also inaccurate.”

Following the ruling, the State Water Board issued a statement calling the order “limited in scope.” The curtailment notices, the board maintains, are merely intended to alert water rights holders to the fact that there might not be enough water in the system to support all of their needs. Before issuing any fines, the board would hold hearings.

The order, the board said, does not impact the state’s ability to enforce water cuts, or crack down on those who divert water illegally.

“While the order finds fault with the language of the notice, the order states: ‘To be clear, [the Water Board and its staff] are free to exercise their statutory authority to enforce the water code as to any water user, including these petitioners, if it deems them to be in violation of any provisions of the water code, so long as the bases for said action are not the Curtailment Letters,'” the board said in an emailed statement.

But lawyers for the irrigation districts — and some legal experts not involved with the case — say that the court’s ruling throws curtailment notices across the state into question. While Friday’s case deals with dozens of farmers in the Central Valley, California has issued thousands of curtailment notices this year. Stuart Somach, a water-law attorney not involved in the case, told the Sacramento Bee that the ruling could impact “everybody that received a curtailment order” from the State Water Board.

“I’m not suggesting that [the ruling] has a binding effect on every other letter that was issued,” Steve Herum, an attorney whose firm represented the West Side Irrigation District in the case, told the Los Angeles Times. “But it should cause the state agency to pause at least. And I would not be surprised if one or more recipients may rely on this opinion to say that the letter has an unconstitutional impediment in it.”

Nearly a dozen irrigation districts have sued the State Water Board, according to the Sacramento Bee, with many arguing that the board doesn’t have jurisdiction to limit pre-1914 water rights. Chang’s decision on Friday did little to clarify that point of contention, though she did order further hearings on the issue of curtailment letters for the end of the month.

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Australian Government Deals Big Blow To Public Investment In Renewable Energy

In another blow from Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s administration to clean power, Australia’s renewable energy investment agency has been told not to invest in wind farms or small-scale solar projects.

Opposition leaders and solar energy supporters say the government directive prohibiting the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) from investing in rooftop solar will cripple the industry and further diminish Australia’s chances of transitioning to a clean energy economy.

“I don’t agree with the prime minister that if you just don’t have any government support for the future of renewable energy, that the renewable energy will just miraculously grow and increase in Australia,” opposition leader Bill Shorten told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He told reporters that striking wind farms and rooftop solar from the CEFC will mean that “the only thing the CEFC can invest in is flying saucers.”

The CEFC is a public fund that has invested more than $3 billion in clean energy projects and technologies. Wind and solar accounted for nearly half of CEFC’s portfolio last year.

Without wind and small-scale solar, the CEFC can ostensibly only invest in what Abbott calls “new technologies,” such as bioenergy and ocean power. The fund also invests in efficiency projects, such as energy monitoring systems, industrial improvements, and refrigeration technology.

CEFC funding often goes to projects for low-income households, renters, and public housing residents. Those households often rely on the CEFC’s support to go solar, said John Grimes, the head of industry group Australian Solar Council.

“To say this is about lowering the costs of power is cynical in the extreme,” Grimes told Guardian Australia. “What they’re doing with this is the precise opposite.”

The directive followed failed attempts to completely dismantle the CEFC, despite broad public support for clean energy in Australia. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has been as clear in his desire to do away with the CEFC, as he has been strident in his support for the country’s coal industry.

“It is our policy to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation because we think that if the projects stack up economically, there’s no reason why they can’t be supported in the usual way,” Abbott told reporters in Darwin.

According to official documents, the CEFC currently expects an average lifetime investment portfolio yield of approximately 6.5 percent. That means its investments are expected to return the taxpayers’ money — with a profit .

It is possible the CEFC will fight the new policy, which could be in opposition to its mandate “to facilitate increased flows of finance into the clean energy sector.” In a statement on the fund’s website, the board said it is “seeking advice” on how to respond to the directive.

Under the 2012 law establishing the CECF, the organization is meant toinvest “using a commercial approach to overcome market barriers and mobilize investment in renewable energy, energy efficiency and low emissions technologies.”

From 2013 to 2014, Australia’s investment in clean energy projects fell 70 percent, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) found. Abbott came into power in September 2013.

In July 2014, Australia became the first country to repeal its carbon price, despite the fact that it was successfully working to cut carbon emissions. In May, the country slashed its renewable energy goal for 2020 by nearly a quarter — from 41,000 to 33,000 gigawatt hours.

The environment editor of the Sydney Morning Herald criticized the new directive in an op-ed Monday, writing, “If Australia is to realise its remarkable renewable energy wealth… banks and investors will need to active players. And that is where the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation — again under fire by the Abbott government — is absolutely crucial.”

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How To Talk To A 5-Year-Old About Climate Change

Climate change can be a scary thing to talk about with grown-ups, let alone children. It is also very complex, with long-term effects that reach into future decades and centuries, and causes that include an invisible, odorless gas. When the president’s top science adviser encounters problems explaining climate change to members of the House Science Committee, the prospect of explaining fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, or ocean acidification to a 5-year-old or pre-teen can seem daunting.

“When we talk to our kids, we have to explain the science of what’s happening,” said Lisa Hoyos, co-founder of Climate Parents, an organization focused on mobilizing families on the issue. “But it’s important to quickly pivot to what we can do to solve it.”

The grassroots organization Moms Clean Air Force hosted a “Play-In for Climate Action” last week, with parents from all over the country rallying in a park north of the U.S. Senate with their children. They played games, danced to music, heard speeches, and then marched to the front of the Capitol building.

Moms attending the event had different perspectives on how they talk to their kids about climate change and pollution. Many did their best to tie it into simple, everyday topics like not being wasteful or leaving things better than how you found them. Some found a way to make climate change real to their kids by monitoring household buying habits and energy consumption. Others got into the details of the science, and their children became the climate enforcers of the household. Some parents admitted they mostly avoided the topic.

Climate change can be kind of scary, especially for her age group

“I don’t know how well I’ve done with talking about climate change and pollution to my kids,” said Caroline Armijo, who lives with her two children in Greensboro, North Carolina. “In general I talk about it a lot, but that’s because I work in my community to advocate for coal ash cleanup. So I think my daughter hears about it a lot but I don’t know how great a job I’ve done.”

She asked her 6-year-old daughter, Lucy, if she knew a lot about climate change.

“No,” said Lucy, sitting on the lawn. “I don’t know what that is.”

Her parents then asked her about clean air, clean water, being outside in hot weather, and wasting energy. Lucy became very interested in the grass and said no more.

“Climate change can be kind of scary, especially for her age group,” Armijo said. “For her, because of what she can comprehend as a child, and also the impact it’s going to have on her generation — it feels almost futile. I know it’s not. But you can see the change as it happens.”

Armijo now reads Lucy and her brother children’s books that talk about cleaning the environment, recycling, planting trees, and helping their community. They talk about doing those things in their own lives. Climate change thus far has not been on the agenda.

“I guess I should do a better job of being more direct and trying to talk with her.”

It’s perfectly understandable for a parent to hesitate talking about climate change and the impacts of fossil fuel pollution with young children. A report from the American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica said that children “tend to be especially vulnerable to the psychological impacts of climate change, especially those related to stress and anxiety.”

Some parents, however, can’t avoid it.

“Climate change always comes up,” Victoria Gutierrez, an attendee of the Play-In, told ThinkProgress. Gutierrez lives with her patient and curious 4-year-old son Albino in the San Juan Basin, New Mexico. “We live on the Navajo Nation. We have to protect the water — water’s one of the most important things we have out there.”

Water conservation is also part of the family’s daily life.

“A lot of Navajos, especially younger ones — a lot of friends of mine who think like ‘Why are you conserving water? We’re surrounded by lakes and water.’ That doesn’t mean you waste the water — look at California.”

The San Juan Basin is also the home of the largest methane “hot spot” in the country thanks to coalbed methane production. That, she says, combined with the two major power plants she lives between, and the oil and gas fracking operations that have cropped up in the area, have made climate change and its causes an immediate, tangible presence in her child’s life. He suffers from childhood asthma, as do many other people on the community.

You’re going to have ignorant adults who think everything’s a fairy tale land, and it’s not

“My area is so concentrated and polluted with, not only carbon pollution from the plants, but fracking pollution, and methane. So it’s all tied in, because we live in a sacrifice zone. There’s a lot of people out there who are sick and dying — cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, asthma. My son has had breathing problems since he was born. Some people say it’s genetic. But it’s not only family members — it’s friends of family members. A lot of people are sick.”

Asked how she talks to her 4-year-old about such serious, scary issues, Gutierrez said, “I talk to him like I’m talking to you.”

“You have to be honest with your child,” she said. “Look at the world we’re raising our children in. It’s not all fun and games. And if you want to prepare your children for the things we’re going to have to be dealing with, you have to start in now.”

“Because otherwise you’re going to have ignorance,” she said, glancing toward the Capitol dome. “You’re going to have ignorant adults who think everything’s a fairy tale land, and it’s not.”

“Young children don’t explicitly know what’s going on, but they’re taking it all in,” she said. “We don’t talk to him about it directly all the time, until he asks certain questions. Children are smart. He’ll say ‘Mama, what is that big smoke, in the sky?’ — and we’ll tell him those power plants are where the pollution comes from. And a lot of the electricity that comes from those power plants… we don’t benefit from it, New Mexico doesn’t get that power.”

It would be a mistake to minimize the role parents talking to their kids about such topics can play. Psychiatric epidemiologist Helen Berry has found that children who do not feel connected to their families and communities risk being more traumatized by climate-related natural disasters than better-connected kids.

Some moms at the event come face-to-face with impacts of fossil fuel use in their day jobs.

It’s just making these plants overgrow and become more toxic. Poison ivy can also set off his asthma, too.

“The amount of children that have asthma exacerbations is just repetitive,” Suzanne Fortuna, a nurse in Cleveland, told ThinkProgress. “That means more emergency room visits.” She treats members of the community suffering from asthma, and has noticed an increase that she relates to air pollution and climate change.

Fortuna has a 9-year-old son, Aaron, who got diagnosed with asthma when he was 13 months old. She says she is “lucky” to have the education to stay up on his treatments, but not everyone can do that. Aaron loves to be outside, so asthma flare-ups are a constant battle, as are other less-obvious climate impacts.

“Just recently,” Fortuna continued, “this year in baseball, he got covered in poison ivy because the whole fenced area by the baseball field — it used to just be a little bit but has really proliferated, and I think it’s related to carbon emissions. It’s just making these plants overgrow and become more toxic. Poison ivy can also set off his asthma, too. There are a lot of impacts, it’s all related.”

Poison ivy does indeed thrive in higher temperatures and carbon dioxide levels, as does poison oak. Fortuna says these impacts add up and make it necessary to adjust her family’s behavior in response.

“Probably in the last five years or so it’s become more recognizable that we have so much that we could do to decrease carbon emissions,” she said. “It’s important to talk to him. From the use of electricity to natural gas, how do we teach him that there are other ways to produce energy, because these are going to be the kids that are going to create that in the future.

“It’s impacting his life so much now, that putting it in his head that we need to be doing things cleaner and better.”

She talks to her son about sea level rise impacting Atlantic beaches her family visits through erosion. “We try to tell him look at what has happened over your mom’s lifespan, and yes it makes him anxious,” she said. “Because then he’s like ‘well that means one day I might not be able to come here at all because it might be gone.’ We have those conversations — take pictures and remember things — but how do we change it so that it doesn’t happen in the future?”

“That’s why Aaron is more proactive about ‘who didn’t turn out the lights’ or ‘who didn’t recycle’ or ‘could we walk instead of ride.’ He brings that up, which I think it good.”

All too often, the numbers — and the journalism — explaining climate change can be boring to adults, let alone children. Yet to some kids, numbers drive the point home.

He kind of turns into the policeman of the household … He stays on us

Melanie Gibbs and her 7-year-old son Bryce live in Boca Raton, South Florida, and climate impacts surround them.

“He happens to love statistics, and math,” she told ThinkProgress at the Play-In event. “We were reading a recent issue of Time magazine, which had loads of these great, colorful infographics, very open and accessible and visual. I was looking at that with him and we were talking about carbon output and what that meant, and when we breathe out that’s carbon dioxide, and the plants absorb that. But now the problem is there aren’t enough plants to match the emissions.”

“I think the key is to not drop all the info on them at one time,” she continued, “just keep the conversation going a little bit at a time. He reads something and he asks us about it or we see something and we tell him about it. It needs to be a daily conversation.”

“He kind of turns into the policeman of the household, makes sure that we’re recycling things, we don’t want to drive too far, walk if we can, turn off lights. He stays on us,” Gibbs said.

Practicality, rather than big concepts or rite of passage “talks” about the birds and the bees, seems to be the name of the game to these parents.

The severity of it, nobody tends to take seriously. … It’s changing, slowly but surely.

“It starts in the household,” said Natalie Prime, who has three teenagers and lives on Long Island. “You use particular products. It depends who the vendors are, and we buy and use accordingly, always recycle. Simple stuff.”

“We live on an island, surrounded by water” she told ThinkProgress at the Play-In event. The family lost power during Superstorm Sandy, which brought home the reality climate-related disasters.

“The severity of it, nobody tends to take seriously. Fear is not there. Knowledge, awareness, it’s being applied. But the fear’s not there. It’s changing, slowly but surely.”

If the fear of climate change’s impacts isn’t always there, the hope and excitement that accompany the innovation behind low-carbon solutions, often is.

“The budding scientists at the Moms Clean Air Force event, and elsewhere, are captivated and challenged by clean energy technology in the same way that a Sputnik-era generation was fascinated by rocketry,” said RL Miller, cofounder of Climate Hawks Vote. “Today’s kids aren’t building rockets to the moon — they’re building ships with solar sails and they’re racing cars powered by the sun. And they’re getting a real life education in climate politics when their moms talk with their leaders.”

“It’s not a good idea to leave a child in a place of fear,” said Lisa Hoyos of the group Climate Parents. She noted that kids have many real-life examples of youth advocacy — divestment movements in schools, kids serving as plaintiffs in lawsuits, green conventions like Powershift, and groups working with educators like the Alliance for Climate Education.

“The truth of the situation is that we can either absorb the news and feel immobilized or we can absorb it and the get involved in working to implement solutions,” Hoyos said.

Parents raising children today can draw upon the original ecologically-minded child hero, Captain Planet.

In 1992, the premiere episode of the eco-cartoon Captain Planet and the Planeteers was called “Greenhouse Planet.” Its plot involved a villain who denied the existence of climate change, and who had convinced the American president that doing something about this “crazy theory that might not even happen” would be bad for the economy. The solution involved the president on a rocket trip to Venus — which started as the villain’s assassination attempt and ended as an up-close demonstration of a runaway greenhouse effect — but to save the day the protagonists had to have “courage” and switch to solar and wind energy.

Nowadays there are exponentially more resources parents can access to supplement their child’s climate education. These range from games to videos to apps to museum exhibits to sample projects — there are many basic everyday activities to slowly teach the concepts.

Many museums are steadily featuring climate exhibits. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History covers climate change in several of its exhibits. The one that sticks out is a strange exhibit funded by the Koch brothers that features a game allowing visitors to change cartoon humans’ biology to adapt to future climate conditions. While not exactly the video exhibit at the Creation Museum purporting to disprove mainstream climate science, parent-child conversations prior to seeing museum exhibits can make a world of clarifying difference.

We are ‘now’ people and our children, under our watch, have become ‘instant’ gratification kids

To some, there is a deeper purpose behind talking to children about climate science, energy, and the environment. Environmental philosophers like Glenn Albrecht have coined terms like eco-anxiety or “solastalgia” — which he defined as “an emplaced or existential melancholia experienced with the negative transformation (desolation) of a loved home environment.”

“We are all struggling to talk about that which is so hard to understand and see,” Albrecht told ThinkProgress via email. “We are ‘now’ people and our children, under our watch, have become ‘instant’ gratification kids.”

“The choice is now between life and death, sickness and health,” he said. “Parents struggle because of their own guilt about a life of excess and its pollution — in all forms.”

The Australian Psychological Society recommends getting kids out in nature, finding something good to do for the environment, listening to their concerns, letting them talk about the environment, finding out what they know and sharing what you know while monitoring what they hear. Finally, they say: give children hope.

Albrecht imagined he would tell his nine-week-old grandchild in a few years’ time “that I have done everything in my power to prevent a nasty future for her and her generation.” He said he had “converted a life from fossil fuel ignorance and maximising to one that minimises everything to do with fossil fuel energy within my means and my value system. I am now carbon neutral or negative and proud of it!”

He said his house has solar rooftop generated electricity with battery storage and solar hot water. All of his water is stored rainwater and all waste is recycled back into the ecosystem. He also grows a lot of his own food and distributes the excess to his community.

“In other words, you cannot tell young children about climate change and a nasty future,” Albrecht continued. “We must tell them about a bright future and how by living in more sustainable ways right now, we can live well and be happy with how we live. We cannot just talk about maybe living a better life, we must demonstrate such a life style and the set of choices needed to attain it.”

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