Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 154

New Report: March 2015 Easily Set The Record For Hottest March Ever Recorded

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This was easily the hottest March — and hottest January-to-March — on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA’s latest monthly report makes clear Mother Nature is just getting warmed up:

March 2015 was not only the hottest March in their 135-year of keeping records, it beat “the previous record of 2010 by 0.09°F (0.05°C).”
January-to-March was not only the hottest start to any year on record, it also beat “the previous record of 2002 by 0.09°F.”
March was so warm that only two other months ever had a higher “departure from average” (i.e. temperature above the norm), February 1998 and January 2007, and they only beat March by “just 0.01°C (0.02°F).”
Arctic sea ice hit its smallest March extent since records began in 1979.

The human-caused global warming trend that made 2014 the hottest year on record is continuing. We may even be witnessing the start of the long-awaited jump in global temperatures.

Last week, NASA also reported this was the hottest three-month start of any year on record. In NASA’s database, though, this was the third warmest March on record. It was the warmest in the dataset of the Japan Meteorological Agency. These three agencies use slightly different methods for tracking global temperature, so their monthly and yearly rankings differ slightly, even as they all show the same long-term trend driven by carbon pollution.

It is increasingly likely that 2015 will be the hottest year on record. El Niños typically lead to global temperature records, as the short-term El Niño warming adds to the underlying long-term global warming trend. NOAA has predicted there’s a 60 percent chance the El Niño it declared last month will continue all year. If it does, 2015 may well top the 2014 record by a significant margin.

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5 Years After Gulf Oil Spill, BP Spokesman Tells Public Not To Worry About Tar Balls In The Water

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April 21, 2010 file photo of Deepwater Horizon oil rig burning

CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File

Five years ago, BP’s historic 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill resulted in more than 210 million barrels of oil ending up in the Gulf of Mexico. But while scientists continue to observe ongoing problems, a BP spokesman appeared on ABC’s This Week on Sunday suggesting the remaining oil no longer poses a risk to humans or the aquatic ecosystem.

Alisha Renfro, the Mississippi River Delta Campaign staff scientist for the National Wildlife Federation told a This Week reporter that while you no longer see oil slicked islands today: “You see tar balls that are washing up. And what it points to is the fact that oil is still in the system and, just because we can’t always see it everywhere we go, it’s still out there.”

After Louisiana State University confirmed a sample tar ball as a nearly exact match to the Macondo well oil released during the 2010 spill, BP Senior Vice President of U.S. Communications Geoff Morrell told This Week. “The product that you have in your hand does not pose a threat to human or aquatic life. This, if it’s Macondo oil, is now five years old and likely weathered beyond the point of being harmful.”

Watch the video:

Renfro responded that while the outside of the ball is weathered, “it starts to break apart over time, and the oil compounds–particularly those that are toxic to wildlife, fish, and other organisms — it’s still there.”

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Neil deGrasse Tyson: Politicians Denying Science Is ‘Beginning Of The End Of An Informed Democracy’

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CREDIT: National Geographic Channels/Scott Gries

What will you be doing on Monday, 4/20, at 11 p.m.?

Perhaps watching the premiere of acclaimed astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson’s new show StarTalk. Tyson, who may be best known for hosting the reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series in 2014, will now be appearing weekly on the National Geographic Channel in what may be the first late-night science talk show. Along with a trusty cast of comedians and science-minded folks like Bill Nye, Tyson hopes the adaptation of his popular podcast to a broadcast format will make getting a regular dose of science as pain-free as possible. He thinks that by embedding it between pop culture discussions and entertaining asides, the science will go down easy, and even leave you wanting more. And he’s right.

The first episode features an interview with George Takei, who requires no introduction to any Star Trek fans: he played Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise. Takei has also become known for his activism surrounding human rights. Other guests this season include President Jimmy Carter, director Christopher Nolan, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, astronaut Chris Hadfield, and Ariana Huffington.

ThinkProgress was lucky enough to snag a few minutes of Tyson’s time to ask him about his new show, his feelings on how the media covers science, what we can do about climate change, and more.

Who is StarTalk trying to reach specifically?

There is this eternal golden braid that we’re attempting to weave.

We are trying to reach people who don’t know they like science, and people who know that they don’t like science. We are doing this through the use of three pillars: science, pop culture, and comedy. Who doesn’t like listening to a great comedian? Who doesn’t like occasionally, whether they’ll admit it or not, picking up an issue of People Magazine and checking out the latest stars. I think it might even be hardwired; seeking out people who get the adoring attention of others.

If you explore all the ways that science falls into that then you get people’s interest for free, because the pop culture got them there, and then they learn about the science as part of it. There is this eternal golden braid that we’re attempting to weave.

What was the reasoning for having the first episode feature George Takei?

There were other guests we had that could mislead you into thinking what future episodes would be like. For example, if we presented Richard Dawkins first, you might think StarTalk is about interviewing scientists, but we hardly ever interview scientists. We wanted a representative show that balanced science, pop culture and comedy and the Takei show did that in exactly the way we aim to do every week, whether or not we succeed. My stand-up comedian co-host is also a trekkie.

You recently spoke about who to blame for the state of the climate change debate in the U.S., the electorate or the politicians. Can you elaborate on that?

The issue here is not what politicians do because the electorate votes them into office. So what does it mean to complain about what politicians do? We should complain about what the electorate does. I’m an educator, so I see it as one of my duties, especially as a science educator, to alert people of what science is and how it works. About what it means for there to be an objective truth that we would then act upon.

You can’t just cherry-pick data and choose what is true about the world and what isn’t.

If you want to lean in a political way because that’s your politics, you should do that based on an objective truth rather than cherry-picking science before you even land at an objective truth. You can’t just cherry-pick data and choose what is true about the world and what isn’t.

So I’m not blaming the electorate in that sense. I’m blaming an educational system that is not positioned to educate an electorate such that they can make informed decisions in this, the 21st century, where informed decisions based on objective scientific truths will play a fundamental role in what kind of society we create for ourselves.

How does the media fit into this? What responsibility do we have?

There’s this journalistic ethos saying if I get one opinion then I need to get another opinion that countervails that. So if I say the world is round, are you obligated to say the world is flat, lest someone think you are being biased in your reporting? Well, that’s absurd. You wouldn’t do that, you’re educated. You know that there are certain points of view that have no foundation at all in objective truth.

So the question arises then at what point should a journalist give equal time to equal points of view that are opposite or in denial of emergent scientific truths. If you allocated column inches in proportion to the scientific consensus of experiments, there would be one sentence talking about people who deny climate change and the rest of the ten columns talking about research that supports it. But that’s not what we see in the public.

I think journalists are abandoning what would be their sensibility of following the emergent truths and in some cases painting a debate as though there’s a scientific debate when in fact there isn’t one — and that makes for headlines and more clicks.

There was one headline that said, “Tyson defends Scientology” and people said, “oh I didn’t know you like Scientology.” I would ask if they read the article, which made no such claim, and they’d say “oh no, i just clicked on the headline.” So I’ve seen some journalistically irresponsible headlines.

What’s your approach to dealing with climate deniers?

StarTalk is not about debates. The goal of StarTalk is to enlighten you, and in my judgement and my experience, observing a debate never enlightened anybody; all it does is make people dig in more strongly into the point of view they had entering the debate, typically. So you’ve never seen me in a debate, ever, because that implies that we each have opinions and “oh let’s see who can give the best argument for this audience so they can believe my opinion instead of yours.” But if you’re more charismatic than I am or have better word use, or are more articulate, then you’ll win the debate, and that means you’ll be right and I’ll be wrong. This is not how it works.

Going forward, can you predict where the conversation around climate change will be in a decade or two? And maybe where we’ll be in meeting the challenges it poses?

I can’t predict where it will be, but I can suggest where it should go. The conversation that needs to happen — here it is: you have conservatives and liberals in a room, people with power, let’s say they are representatives or senators. They shake hands and say, “ok humans are changing the climate of this planet, this is the consensus of scientific experiments being conducted, what policy and legislation should we debate in the face of the information?”

That is the beginning of the end of an informed democracy.

The Republican is thinking different suggestions from the Democrat, and that is the healthy political conversation that should unfold. Should there be carbon credits or not? Should there be trade regulations or not? Should we invest in solar panels rather than clean coal?

That would be a fruitful debate that could be held in the political arena. But the moment the politicians start saying they are in denial of what the scientists are telling them, of what the consensus of scientific experiments demonstrates, that is the beginning of the end of an informed democracy.

When can we expect you to run for public office?

I was asked that by the New York Times a few years ago when there was some impasse in Congress and they did a fun thing and found a set of people who were not traditionally associated with elected office and asked them what they would do if they were President. They were looking for ideas that maybe hadn’t surfaced yet and could possibly solve the problem. So I responded to that and it’s on my website. It’s pretty clear where I stand on the issue and you can quote it with abandon — provided the headline you put above it is accurate.

From Tyson’s “If I Were President” post:

When you’re scientifically literate, the world looks different to you. It’s a particular way of questioning what you see and hear. When empowered by this state of mind, objective realities matter. These are the truths of the world that exist outside of whatever your belief system tells you.

One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

New York, Aug. 21, 2011

The post Neil deGrasse Tyson: Politicians Denying Science Is ‘Beginning Of The End Of An Informed Democracy’ appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Even Big Oil Is Concerned About Climate Change

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CREDIT: Courtesy BP

Oil and gas giant BP held its annual meeting Thursday, and shareholders voted that the company should provide more information about its “preparation for the low carbon transition.”

While it may be historic that a major fossil fuel company has passed a climate change resolution, the decision is less about addressing the causes and effects of climate change than it is about navigating the new green economy to maximize the company’s profits.

In the resolution, investors asked for more information about BP’s “Alternative Energy” business, research and development in low carbon sources, and future plans “including any for carbon capture and storage.” The resolution came just one day before a group of investors petitioned the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to raise reporting requirements on oil and gas businesses.

BP’s platform already includes advocating for a transition from coal to natural gas. Coal accounts for three-quarters of the carbon emissions from the electricity sector, and natural gas makes up 50 percent of BP’s portfolio, the company reported.

“At BP we have consistently advocated for stronger government action and have been open and transparent about our environmental impact,” group chief officer Bob Dudley told shareholders. “The challenge ahead is to make the case for the necessary role of fossil fuels, and further transparency supports that case.”

Accepting the science of climate change has become a popular platform for investors. On Friday, a group of 62 investors representing nearly $2 trillion in assets, sent a letter to the SEC asking for higher disclosure standards for oil and gas companies.

“By failing to hold the fossil fuel industry to the same disclosure standards as other industries, the SEC is allowing the sector to hide its true level of risk and impeding investment capital from flowing to the low-carbon projects we desperately need,” Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, the group that organized the letter, said in a statement. “This is unfortunate in a world where an additional trillion dollars per year — a Clean Trillion — is needed in order to curb carbon pollution to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.”

The post Even Big Oil Is Concerned About Climate Change appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Australia Pledges Millions To Help Climate Contrarian Set Up Center To Argue Against Climate Action

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Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott pledges $4 million to set up a climate consensus center.

The Australian government has pledged $4 million to help Danish climate contrarian Bjørn Lomborg establish a “climate consensus center” at the University of Western Australia.

According to the Guardian Australia, a spokesman for education minister Christopher Pyne said that the country would pay $4 million over four years to help Lomborg establish a center based off the same methodology used at his Copenhagen Consensus Center, which operated from 2004 to 2012. In 2012, it was defunded by the Danish government, and has been operating in the United States with backing from private investors since.

Mark Butler, an environmental spokesperson for the opposition Labor party criticized the plan to set up the consensus center, arguing that Abbott was taking funds from an already cash-strapped government to further his own anti-climate agendas.

“Tony Abbott has found millions of taxpayers’ dollars to fund his attack on renewable energy while at the same time gutting Australia’s science and university funding,” Butler told local Australian newspaper the Mercury. “…[he] has deputized one of the world’s most well-known renewable energy skeptics to continue his climate change denial and attacks on renewable energy.”

Sources at the University of WA’s business school, where the center will be housed, told the Guardian that the establishment of the center came as a surprise and that even senior staff at the business school weren’t aware of the plans until shortly before they were announced. According to Pyne’s spokesman, the proposal for the center was put forth jointly by Lomborg and the university. The center is slated to open in June or July, with a staff of three or four. Lomborg will serve as an adjunct professor.

Lomborg believes climate change is man-made but argues that it’s not a top-priority problem, claiming that when looked at from an economic point of view, spending money on tackling climate change does little to better society. He has called fossil fuel subsidies “a way for governments to buy political stability,” and has called wind and power “expensive, feel-good measures that will have an imperceptible climate impact.”

But scientists have accused Lomborg of cherrypicking data to support his claims. In 2003, a Danish government committee comprised of scientists found him guilty of “scientific dishonesty,” concluding that his one-sided choice of data shows him to have “clearly acted at variance with good scientific practice.” Author and media critic Howard Friel, who fact-checked the arguments Lomborg makes in his books The Skeptical Environmenalist and Cool It, went even further, calling Lomborg “a performance artist disguised as an academic.”

The Australian Climate Consensus Center won’t be the first time that Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, whose record on climate change includes and neglecting to include climate change on this year’s G20 agenda, has worked with Lomborg. In late March, Abbott invited Lomborg to address Australian diplomats and government staff during the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s development innovation hub, an event aimed at finding better ways to provide aid to poor countries. “While climate change is definitely an issue,” Lomborg reportedly told officials at the event, “it is certainly not one of the biggest challenges faced by the Pacific Islands, when you ask the citizens themselves.” A 2013 Pew Research Center study on global views and attitudes found that 52 percent of Australians felt that climate change was a major threat to their country.

As Buzzfeed notes, the prime minister also quoted Lomborg in his book Battlelines. “It doesn’t make sense, though,” Abott wrote, “to impose certain and substantial costs on the economy now in order to avoid unknown and perhaps even benign changes in the future. As Bjorn Lomborg has said: ‘Natural science has undeniably shown us that global warming is man made and real. But just as undeniable is the economic science which makes it clear that a narrow focus on reducing carbon emissions could leave future generations with major costs, without major cuts to temperatures.'” Abbott, who has denied links between extreme weather and climate change, has previously called climate science “absolute crap.”

In September of 2013, Abbott dismantled the Australian Climate Commission, an independent but government-funded panel of scientists meant to study potential impacts of climate change on the country. Australia’s environmental minister Greg Hunt said that cutting the commission would avoid duplicating governmental work, saving the government some $580,000 in 2013-14 and up to $1.6 million in future years, according to the Guardian.

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Interior Secretary Defends Government’s New Rules For Fracking On Public Lands

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U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell responds to a question concerning her announcement that the federal government is offering up to $50 million for drought relief in western states during a news conference with Gov. Jerry Brown at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., Friday, Feb. 6, 2015.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

Department of Interior Secretary Sally Jewell hit back against criticism to her department’s recently announced rules on hydraulic fracturing on public lands Thursday, saying that the rules were a needed update to the former set of regulations.

Speaking to press after an event at the Center for American Progress, Jewell said that the rules’ treatment of wastewater disposal and chemical disclosure in fracking projects on public lands are important for public safety.

“It’s been four or five years in the making,” she said, adding that the department had made adjustments to the regulations based on the 1.7 million comments they got on the proposed rules. “It’s really important that the public be reassured that groundwater is protected, that frack fluids are disclosed in terms of whats in them, and their disposed of properly.”

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management announced its final rules for fracking on public lands in March, regulations that will require oil and gas companies to disclose the chemicals they use when fracking on protected lands and prohibit the companies from storing wastewater in open pits on these lands. Some environmental groups had wanted to rules to go further in protecting public lands from oil and gas development, however — a group of five large groups called the regulations “toothless.”

Jewell also said Thursday that though it’s her agency’s job to ensure that the regulations put in place protect the public, the oil and gas industry also has a role to play in educating the public about their practices.

“If the public is concerned, it is the job of industry to reassure the public,” she said. “Industry should be talking about their practices and how they can reassure the public so that there aren’t ongoing concerns. I believe there is a lot of misinformation — again it’s industry’s job to express that. We do understand it and we we’ve come out with regulations that we think strike the right balance.”

During her panel at CAP, which focused on the jobs and revenue that national parks and other protected lands bring to the U.S., Jewell also clarified why fracking and drilling on public lands is something the Interior Department allows, even as it supports administration efforts to combat climate change.

“How many of you burned no fossil fuels today? Nobody of course…the reality is we are an economy that is dependent on fossil fuels, and the federal state is an important source of resources for us,” she said. “We could easily argue that we’d rather produce those resources domestically than produce them overseas.”

Fracking, drilling, and coal leasing on public lands have been the topic of environmental scrutiny in recent years. According to a CAP and Wilderness Society report from last month, gas, oil, and coal taken from federal lands and waters account for more than one-fifth of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

“The DOI has yet to develop a plan to accurately account for, manage, and mitigate the GHG pollution that results from the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels from public lands and waters,” the report states, adding that emissions from public lands have been “explicitly left out” from government reports on greenhouse gas emissions in the past.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s rules on methane emissions from the oil and gas industry are expected this summer — rules that have already been criticized by environmentalists for not going far enough — and the Bureau of Land Management is also working to draft rules on flaring from oil and gas operations on public lands.

Jewell said Thursday that the U.S. has a long way to go to slow or stop the development of fossil fuels.

“Until people stop burning fossil fuels, we’re not going to be able to get away from using them,” she said. “And I think we can facilitate smarter development, lower footprint, more efficiency, but it’s going to take a major effort and continued incentives to drive us toward more renewables and away from fossil fuels.”

Jewell, who comes from an oil and gas industry and business background, has stressed before the need to balance energy development — even on public lands — with addressing climate change. In a speech last month, Jewell said that her department should do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and said that new energy development on public land should be balanced with new land and water protection.

“My responsibility to my grandchildren’s generation is at the top of my mind with every decision we make,” she said. “[T]hat is why we must — we must — do more to cut greenhouse gas pollution that is warming our planet.”

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How To Tell If The Article About Climate You Are Reading Is B.S., In Four Easy Steps

Humanity’s choice (via IPCC): Aggressive climate action ASAP (left figure) minimizes future warming and costs a mere 0.06% of annual growth. Continued inaction (right figure) results in catastrophic warming, 9°F over much of U.S. If an article doesn’t explain how to start aggressive action ASAP and stay far away from catastrophe, it’s wasting your time.

This may turn out to be one of the most important years in world history. The leading nations of the world are finally making serious pledges to address the greatest preventable threat to health and well-being of humanity, leading up to the Paris climate talks in December.

The success or failure of those talks may well determine the course of the next thousand years of human history. Whatever changes we are too greedy or myopic to stop from happening in the first place are “irreversible” on that timescale, as the world’s leading scientists and governments explained in November.

So, for the next 9 months (and beyond) you are going to be bombarded with countless articles, op-eds, studies, and manifestos on this most vital of topics. A few will be important, but 95% will be a waste of your time or, worse, actually leave you less well-informed than you were before.

In this article I will share with you some secret tricks used to quickly identify the time-wasters. In the last few days we have had some classic examples of time-wasting climate pieces, ones that foil such standard strategies as “Are they published in credible places?” After all, the biggest time waster was Jonathan Franzen’s piece in the New Yorker.

Other time wasters include the latest George Will Washington Post column, “‘Sustainability’ gone mad on college campuses” and a rare double time-waster in the New York Times business section, “A call to look past sustainable development.”

The Times piece is a double time waster because not only is the piece itself anti-informative but one of its goals is to get you to read an even longer, even more anti-informative essay, “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” which is “A MANIFESTO TO USE HUMANITY’S EXTRAORDINARY POWERS IN SERVICE OF CREATING A GOOD ANTHROPOCENE.” Not!

In the interest of time, let’s cut directly to the second most important thing you’ll read on climate change this year, the time-saving secrets:

Skip climate articles by people who think the problem is hopeless or intractable — because it most certainly is not.
Skip articles written by George Will and his ilk.
Skip articles — especially longer climate essays — by authors who don’t explicitly tell you what temperature target or CO2 concentration target they embrace and how they’d go about attaining it.
Skip articles embracing Orwellian terms like “good Anthropocene.”

What is the most important thing you’ll read this year? Any climate article that makes it through all those filters.

Will you miss some worthwhile pieces this way? Probably not. To see why, let’s dive into those in a little more detail.

1) Skip climate articles by people who think the problem is hopeless or intractable — because it most certainly is not. That was the premise of the Franzen New Yorker article, which inaccurately asserted “The Earth as we now know it resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy.”

In no way does the Earth resemble a patient with terminal cancer where treatment is worse than essentially doing nothing unless it’s some some morphine and a pat on the back. The Earth more resembles a patient with large, especially obstructive kidney stones (aka “staghorn calculi”). As the American Urological Association explains, “Prior to the development of modern urologic techniques for treatment, mortality from untreated staghorn calculi was 27%. Currently mortality from stone disease is rare….”

We know how to deal with climate change. We know it won’t be “easy” but the economic and scientific literature make clear it will be straightforward and super cheap — and infinitely superior to the catastrophic “do nothing” approach. Also, unlike terminal cancer, untreated climate change can get worse and worse. Certainly, 4°C (7°F) warming would be a catastrophe. But 6°C (11°F) warming would be beyond imagining.

2) Skip articles written by George Will and his ilk. Okay, that’s not really a secret. But the principle extends to Wall Street Journal op-eds, pretty much any Rupert Murdoch outlet, and generally anything by a climate science denier. We are way past that point.

Suppose a CT scan showed you had a large kidney stone that might try to (unsuccessfully) squeeze out of your urinary tract any time now — or, worse, you had one of those staghorn calculi. Would you waste time with doctors who simply denied the existence of kidney stones or who said you didn’t need to worry about them because they “won’t hurt a bit”? No.

Maybe you’re thinking you should read the deniers to see what their latest arguments are. Here’s another secret: Their latest arguments are pretty much the same ones they have been using for the last decade. It is certainly worthwhile to understand what those arguments are, why they are wrong, and how to quickly rebut them. But the best and fastest way to learn all that is simply to periodically visit the website SkepticalScience.com, one of the biggest timesavers on the web.

P.S. — George Will’s article is his case for why the fossil fuel divestment movement on campus is a bad idea. Reminds one of his July 1986 piece opposing economic actions against South Africa (including divestment), “Sanctions Will Hurt The Blacks….“!! The “latest arguments” truly never change.

3) Skip articles — especially longer climate essays — by authors who don’t explicitly tell you what temperature target or emissions concentration target they embrace and how they’d go about attaining it. The best and latest science says we must stabilize total global warming as close as possible to 2°C and preferably below it. We know that is super cheap. Anything else risks multiple catastrophes that will make billions of people suffer through the accelerating destruction of a livable climate, with much of the habited and arable land on the planet Dust-Bowlified for centuries.

Again, imagine you’ve got that large kidney stone. Would you waste time with doctors who talked and talked and talked about a variety of health-related subjects but never discussed what the desired outcome should be for you in this case? Would you waste time with doctors who never recommended a specific course of immediate treatment, but instead spent much of their time criticizing those doctors who do recommend the “standard of care” treatment.

Lots of writers want the freedom to criticize those who defend the 2°C target and the very aggressive deployment of carbon-free power that such a target entails. But they know that if they actually put their own target on the table, they would be conceding humanity’s self-destruction, disputing the scientific literature or requiring the very aggressive deployment of carbon-free power they criticize.

A classic example of such an essay is the “Ecomodernist Manifesto” featured in the NY Times this week. Errors aside, this 31-page tome is a waste of time because it doesn’t tell you what the authors think should be our goal with climate action. They offer no temperature target, no CO2 concentration target, not even a broad one. The first and last mention of any target is on page 20 when the authors explain that while “Nations have also been slowly decarbonizing — that is, reducing the carbon intensity of their economies … they have not been doing so at a rate consistent with keeping cumulative carbon emissions low enough to reliably stay below the international target of less than 2 degrees Centigrade of global warming.” True.

Then the authors immediately say, “Significant climate mitigation, therefore, will require that humans rapidly accelerate existing processes of decarbonization.” Also true. Then they say, “There remains much confusion, however, as to how this might be accomplished.” No, not true at all — certainly not for the 2°C target. And not even for a 3°C target. These sentences are apparently a clever rhetorical bait-and-switch to make you think that the authors endorse the 2°C target, which they never do, while all the time they are recommending a course of action that can’t possibly hit 2°C or even 3°C.

Many independent and highly credible groups have explained in great detail what needs to be done to achieve 2°C. The International Energy Agency (IEA) is a good place to start. Basically you need a serious and rising carbon dioxide price and you have to start aggressively deploying pretty much every commercial and near commercial carbon free technology you can put your hands on.

And the 2°C target means, according to the IEA again, that you have the stop investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure by 2017!

But the eco-modernists want to keep building new fossil fuel plants. They are in no hurry whatsoever, writing things like “In the long run, next-generation solar, advanced nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion represent the most plausible pathways toward the joint goals of climate stabilization and radical decoupling of humans from nature.” Seriously? Nuclear fusion?

Addendum to time-saving secrets: Skip any article that lists nuclear fusion as one of the “most plausible” answers to climate stabilization. How is a technology for which there is no evidence commercial viability will occur in a timescale that matters to humanity one of “the most plausible pathways”?

Why don’t the eco-modernists mention wind power, one of the most important carbon-reducing technologies throughout the scientific and economic literature? Because they aren’t really modernists and don’t know what they’re talking about, as this article explains in detail.

The entire essay will do little more than spread confusion. As evidence, I present the New York Times article on the essay, which contains some of the most ridiculous lines ever to grace the pages of the Gray Lady, starting with:

Of far greater consequence is the way the West’s environmental agenda undermines the very goals it professes to achieve and threatens to advance devastating climate change rather than retard it.

The Times never offers a shred of evidence that this ridiculous statement is true.

Inspired by the eco-modernists, the Times writes, “Windmills or biofuels would put large swaths of the earth’s surface in the service of energy production, so they have only limited usefulness.” Again, the statement is simply untrue about windmills. It is in fact a well-debunked canard most often pushed by those who oppose serious climate action. One of the reasons farmers like wind turbines is that their footprints are so small they can keep farming on the same land! And of course there is offshore wind power.

As for biofuels, it has been known for a long time that virtually all first-generation biofuels (generally crop-based) are of limited usefulness and many are just a terrible idea. Lots of people are working on next-generation biofuels that don’t require unsustainable amounts of arable land or potable water. It is entirely possible they will not succeed, but they have a much better chance of succeeding at those goals than next-generation nuclear power has at succeeding in its goal of being both safe and affordable — and the next-gen biofuels researchers have an infinitely better chance of succeeding in the next couple of decades than fusion power.

4) Skip articles embracing Orwellian terms like “good Anthropocene.”

“Anthropocene,” means “an informal geologic chronological term that marks the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.”

“Good Anthropocene” is an oxymoron — especially the way it is used by the few proponents of the term, which is why it has been widely criticized. Elizabeth Kolbert, one of the most thoughtful climate journalists, explained to me:

“I don’t see the value in the ‘good Anthropocene’ as a rhetorical construct, even if it’s well-intentioned. What we are doing to the planet, which is of course the reason geologists are considering renaming the epoch in which we live, is in no way good.”

She further added, “A few years ago, Paul Crutzen told me that he hoped the word Anthropocene would serve as ‘a warning to the world.’ I think part of the power of the term is that it resists modification.”

Australian author, climate expert and Professor of Public Ethics Clive Hamilton wrote, “those who argue for the ‘good Anthropocene’ are unscientific and live in a fantasy world of their own construction.”

The Ecomodernists actually talk about the possibility of “a good, or even great, Anthropocene” — yet they never tell us specifically how to get there or even what degree of warming would qualify as “great.” They do spend a lot of time criticizing the strategies needed to avoid a catastrophic Anthropocene.

Since they don’t define their terms in their largely hand-waving essay (which shares much in common with Franzen’s essay), let me. For the term “good Anthropocene” to have any meaning whatsoever, it should mean warming of 2°C or less (with CO2 levels at or below 450 parts per million), and more scientifically should be labeled “hopefully not catastrophic Anthropocene.” For the term “great Anthropocene” to have any meaning whatsoever, it should mean warming of 1.5°C or less (CO2 levels of 350 ppm, below current levels!), and more scientifically should be labeled “possibly tolerable Anthropocene.”

As Clive Hamilton emailed me Thursday, “In the face of all of the evidence of the harm that climate change will cause this century, some of which is now locked in, talk of a ‘good Anthropocene’ was delusional. But looking forward to a ‘great Anthropocene’ verges on the obscene.”

The eco-modernists and other advocates of the phrase “good Anthropocene,” however, use it to advance policies that, if followed, would insure future generations live in the “definitely catastrophic Anthropocene.”

***

There are many other oxymorons and torturous constructions that allow one to realize a climate article is an anti-informative time-waster. I will discuss some of those in later posts. But the “Ecomodernist Manifesto,” which is self-described as “A MANIFESTO TO USE HUMANITY’S EXTRAORDINARY POWERS IN SERVICE OF CREATING A GOOD ANTHROPOCENE,” is filled with such constructions. It contains this amazingly torturous sentence, for instance:

Urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination are all processes with a demonstrated potential to reduce human demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species.

Really? We have been doing most of those things for a long time (especially the first three) and yet there seems to be less and less room for all species, including us. All available science says we have already overshot the Earth’s biocapacity — and the overshoot gets worse every year.

The post How To Tell If The Article About Climate You Are Reading Is B.S., In Four Easy Steps appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Federal Judge On Stopping EPA Rule: ‘Why Would We Do That?’

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Coal emissions would be regulated under the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which coal-producing states are challenging in federal court.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

A coal mining company, West Virginia, and 15 other states argued Thursday that a federal court should stop the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s proposed Clean Power Plan rule, but the three presiding judges did not seem convinced.

If the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia finds in favor of the petitioners, it would be a first for the rule-making process. The court has never issued a writ against a rule that has not been finalized.

“Do you know of any case when we have stopped rule-making? Why would we do that?” Judge Thomas Griffith asked Elbert Lin, an attorney for West Virginia, at the outset of the proceedings.

The Clean Power Plan would require states to limit carbon emissions from the utility sector — currently the source of more than 30 percent of the U.S.’s carbon emissions. More than three-quarters of the emissions are from coal, the largest non-transportation contributor to human-caused climate change. The rule was proposed in June 2012, when through a lengthy, scrutinized public review and comment period, and is expected to be finalized this summer, at which time it could be challenged.

The petitioners, which also include Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming, are arguing that the EPA does not have the authority to regulate any additional emissions from power plants, as they are already covered under a separate statute. They also claim that even though the rule is not final, it is clear what the EPA intends to issue.

Justice Griffith was skeptical that the petitioners could accurately predict what the EPA rule will look like. “Is your argument that the comment period is a complete sham?” Griffith asked.

Attorneys for the petitioners also said the proposed rule was already causing “significant, immediate, ongoing harm,” another reason not to wait for the final rule.

Jeffrey Barnes, who represented Murray Energy Corporation, a West Virginia-based coal company, said that the rule was like the sword of Damocles, “which doesn’t have to be dropped to have an effect.”

The one argument that seemed to sway the judges — even being called a “good point” by Judge Brett Kavanaugh — was from constitutional scholar, headline-maker, and Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, who argued that under any interpretation, the EPA does not have the constitutional authority to regulate coal emissions under the particular statute, 111(d), they have proposed. This argument suggests that no matter what the final rule, it will be invalid. “The EPA is attempted to color outside the lines,” Tribe told the judges. “It’s incorrect to say you can’t tell yet.”

The case is being seen as the first test of a key part of the Obama Administration’s ambitious plan to address climate change. It will be difficult for the United States to meet expected goals from the U.N. Climate Change Convention in Paris this fall without curbing emissions from the power sector.

Lawyers for the EPA argued that the EPA should have the freedom to develop the rule under its interpretation of the law.

“We can’t have a meaningful conversation about [the interpretation of the law] until we have a final ruling,” said attorney Amanda Berman.

Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson seemed less incredulous than other judges, saying that the only thing that would change the EPA’s mind about the legality of the rule would be a court, not the comment period. She also remarked that the court does have jurisdiction to making a ruling on the Clean Power Plan before it is finalized, if the court finds in favor of the petitioners.

Last fall a U.S. District judge passed on the opportunity to be the first to get involved in the process of rule-making and found against the state of Nebraska in a similar case.

“The State of Nebraska’s attempt to short-circuit the administrative rulemaking process runs contrary to basic, well-understood administrative law,” U.S. District Judge John Gerrard wrote in his decision.

The post Federal Judge On Stopping EPA Rule: ‘Why Would We Do That?’ appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Did The Senate Just Say Yes To Action On Climate Change?

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The sun rises over the U.S. Capitol, where lawmakers approved language saying climate change should be tackled in the 2016 federal budget.

CREDIT: AP

It’s not a bill, it’s non-binding, and there’s no guarantee anything will actually come of it. But either way, the Republican-led Senate apparently thinks climate change should be tackled in the final federal budget for fiscal year 2016.

On Thursday evening, the Senate approved a motion to instruct budget negotiators to “insist” that the final spending bill include measures to address human-caused climate change. Specifically, it calls for funding that “respond[s] to the causes and impacts of climate change, including the economic and national security threats posed by human-induced climate change.” Via the motion, budget negotiators were also instructed to provide funds for the Department of Defense to bolster resilience of critical military infrastructure to the impacts of climate change.

This, of course, does not mean that the final budget will definitely include funding to respond to the threats of human-caused warming. All it means is that the Senate has officially stated that the budget should include that type of allocation. The lawmakers participating in the budget conference committee are under no official obligation to do so, however.

Still, the motion’s passage is notable if only because of the Senate’s historically lukewarm position toward the reality of climate science. According to a Center for American Progress analysis, a whopping 70 percent of Senate Republicans do not accept the science that states greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming.

That denial has manifested itself in Senate policy so far this session — in the first 100 days of the 2015 session, 44 percent of Senate roll call votes were cast on energy or environment-related legislation, much of which was focused on promoting fossil fuel development. And the Senate’s current majority leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), has aggressively pledged to stop the Obama administration’s efforts to fight climate change.

So, if the Senate has overall been so against climate action, then how did this motion pass?

The first and most likely reason is that the motion was part of what’s been called a “mini vote-a-rama,” which in this case was a series of back-to-back votes on non-binding measures. The measures were all procedural, basically just telling their colleagues who are negotiating the budget which issues they should focus on.

Thursday’s mini vote-a-rama took three hours, and most of the procedural votes were on issues that had already passed in the Senate’s budget resolution. The motion to prioritize climate efforts was one of those issues that had already passed.

In other words, the vote was pretty inconsequential. The Senators probably just wanted to get out of there. So the motion to prioritize climate funding for the Department of Defense passed. Big whoop. And anyway, Republicans in general love the Department of Defense — and the DOD wants money to fight the impacts of climate change.

Another possible reason the motion passed, though, is that it was done by voice vote — meaning there was no roll call taken. So if a Republican Senator wanted to vote for the measure to include climate funding in the budget, no one would know. No one would be held politically responsible for voting for or against it.

That argument is applicable to all measures passed last night, including one telling budget negotiators to require funding for legally married same-sex couples to get Social Security and the Veterans Affairs Department benefits. But it’s particularly interesting for the climate measure, given recent reporting that showed many Republicans actually do understand the threat of climate change — they just don’t like to say it publicly. That reporting was done in the New Republic by Rebecca Leber, who spoke with climate scientists who have met with prominent Republican lawmakers in “off-the-record, sometimes unplanned, and in some strange settings” to talk about the current state of global warming.

Her conclusion from those talks? “Republicans talk to the experts face-to-face, but still find it more politically expedient to ignore reality, in order to protect themselves.”

That becomes even more interesting when you consider that several other Democrat-sponsored, similarly inconsequential motions were rejected via voice vote on Thursday evening. Specifically, as the Hill points out, four Democratic proposals were blocked, including an equal pay motion from Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and a motion from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on student loan reform.

At the very least, it’s fascinating to consider. Maybe there are, in some dark corners of the Senate, more Republicans who actually think greenhouse gases cause harmful climate change. Maybe, deep down, Senate Republicans really do want climate action in the federal budget. Either way, until it becomes politically expedient for Republicans to do something about climate, then they will likely continue to brush it under the rug. At least until the next voice vote comes around.

The post Did The Senate Just Say Yes To Action On Climate Change? appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Florida Secretary Of Environmental Protection: There Is No Rule Against Discussing Climate Change

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A flooded South Beach after Hurricane Sandy.

During a confirmation hearing Wednesday, a top official for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection disputed claims that the department banned employees from discussing climate change.

“Climate change. Climate change. Climate change,” Jonathan Steverson, who Governor Rick Scott (R) appointed in December to head up the DEP as secretary, reportedly said when asked about the ban. “There I said it three times. There is absolutely no policy against discussing climate change at the department. In fact, we have multiple programs related to climate change.”

Steverson’s denial of a department ban runs counter to a story published in early March by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, which reported that multiple officials from the DEP had been told to avoid using terms like “climate change,” “global warming,” or “sustainability” when discussing their work. The DEP is the state’s leading environmental management agency, charged with protecting Florida’s “air, water, and land.”

DEP press secretary Tiffany Cowie refuted the report, saying that the department has no policy banning mention of climate change. An e-mail exchange obtained and released yesterday by Greenpeace, however, shows a DEP communications officer instructing a scientist to avoid mentioning the cause of sea-level rise during a documentary interview.

“I know the drill,” the scientist wrote in response.

After the FCIR report was published, Scott’s chief of emergency management Brian Koon testified before the Florida Senate’s budget subcommittee, where he was asked about a federal program that would block funding for states that refused to implement hazard-mitigation plans for global warming. Koon acknowledged that Florida’s future mitigation plans would be “required to have language discussing that issue,” but refused to explicitly name that issue as “climate change” when further pressed, to the visible amusement of the subcommittee.

Florida, which has been called “ground-zero” for sea-level rise, is already dealing with the effects of climate change, especially in southern parts of the state where floods have become increasingly common. Globally, sea-level has risen eight inches since 1880, and along the United States’ East Coast, sea levels are rising at a rate four to five times faster than the global average.

The most recent National Climate Assessment singled out Miami as one of the cities most vulnerable to sea level rise, and warned that Southeast Florida’s storm water drainage systems could be impaired by “just inches of sea level rise.”

In front of the Senate Environmental Preservation and Conservation Committee, Steverson joked that, as a resident of Northwest Florida, he was less concerned about sea-level rise. “That means I’m that much closer to redfish fishing,” he said. But Steverson did contend that sea-level rise was a problem for the southern parts of the state, claiming that officials are aware of its potential impact on the state’s infrastructure.

“Climate change is always happening. It’s always changing,” Steverson said. “And we know sea-level rise is real and we are working, not only with the water management districts, but the Department of Economic Opportunity and with [the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission] to address those concerns.”

Steverson did not specify whether he thought climate change was driven by human activities, nor did he explicitly name climate change as a cause of sea-level rise. The DEP did not respond to a ThinkProgress request for clarification on Steverson’s views.

Following his testimony, the committee unanimously backed Steverson for confirmation.

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