Report: Global Warming Issue From 2 Or 3 Years Ago May Still Be Problem

Climate change – something that is possibly worth some consideration?

WASHINGTON—According to a report released this week by the Center for Global Development, climate change, the popular mid-2000s issue that raised awareness of the fact that the earth’s continuous rise in temperature will have catastrophic ecological effects, has apparently not been resolved, and may still be a problem.

While several years have passed since global warming was considered the most pressing issue facing mankind, recent studies from the Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and basically any scientific report available on the issue confirmed that it is not only still happening, but might also be worth stopping.

“Global warming, if you remember correctly, was the single greatest problem of our lifetime back in 2007 and the early part of 2008,” CGD president Nancy Birdsall said. “But then the debates over Social Security reform and the World Trade Center mosque came up, and the government had to shift its focus away from the dramatic rise in sea levels, the rapid spread of deadly infectious diseases, and the imminent destruction of our entire planet.”

“Last year’s federal budget included more than $200 million in funding for the Office of Personnel Management,” Birdsall said. “Since nobody really knows what that is, we suggest that money perhaps be spent making sure the oceans don’t turn into acid.”

I’ll let you read the rest of the article over the Onion (of course).

EPA Issues Guidance on New Emissions Rules

From the NYT:

Seeking to reassure major power plant and factory owners that impending regulation of climate-altering gases will not be too burdensome, the Environmental Protection Agency emphasized on Wednesday that future permitting decisions would take cost and technical feasibility into account.

Under the Obama administration, the E.P.A. declared that gases that contribute to global warming are a danger to human health and the environment and thus must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The agency is starting with the largest sources of such emissions — coal-burning power plants, cement factories, steel mills and oil refineries — and then will extend the regulations to smaller facilities.

Utilities, manufacturers and oil companies have challenged the new rules, saying that the E.P.A. arbitrarily chose the plants it will regulate and that the Clean Air Act never envisioned limitations on carbon dioxide, a ubiquitous substance that is not in itself toxic or hazardous to health. The State of Texas has said it will not abide by the greenhouse gas regulations no matter how the E.P.A. decides to define or enforce them.

Gina McCarthy, the head of the E.P.A. office of air and radiation, said on Wednesday that the agency was simply following the law by beginning the process of regulating greenhouse gases, and that the facilities that will need to obtain permits starting in January were already complying with clean air rules for other pollutants.

She said the agency was taking a moderate approach to the regulation, allowing states and other bodies that grant air pollution permits to consider cost and available technology as factors to be considered when requiring modifications of plant operations.

Industry groups have argued that meeting the new requirements will be so costly and time-consuming that they constitute a de facto moratorium on construction of new plants or major expansions of existing ones.

Ms. McCarthy said that such fears were overblown.

“We are fully prepared to issue permits,” she said at a news conference. “Make no mistake about it: this does not present an opportunity for any construction moratorium. E.P.A. and the states are fully prepared to take this on.”

She also stressed that today’s guidance was not a new regulation, but merely a set of steps that regulators will take in deciding how and when to grant new permits. She said that many facilities would be able to meet the law by adopting more efficient means of producing energy, thus reducing overall emissions. Many such modifications will pay for themselves, she said.

The new guidance allows for the substitution of biomass — wood waste, switchgrass or other agricultural products — for fossil fuels as a way to meet the new air quality rules. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that would generate new income opportunities for American farmers and forestry companies while reducing global warming emissions.

Environmental advocates generally praised the new guidance because it allows companies and states flexibility in meeting the new greenhouse gas standards.

“Energy efficiency is one of the best ways to reduce pollution and save money, particularly in the manufacturing sector,” said Mark MacLeod, director of special projects at Environmental Defense Fund. “Today’s guidance will prepare companies for the permitting process and help them find ways to cut pollution while saving money for themselves and their customers.”

William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, a collection of state air pollution regulators, said in a statement: “E.P.A.’s guidance will provide industry greater certainty, quicker permitting decisions and a smoother path toward greenhouse gas implementation. This should put to rest the exaggerated claims of some stakeholders that greenhouse gas permitting will have disastrous economic consequences.”

If you hate big government, try global warming on for size

Awesome new op-ed in the WaPost on climate change and political conservatism:

By Bracken Hendricks

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Don’t believe in global warming? That’s not very conservative.

Few causes unite the conservatives of the newly elected 112th Congress as unanimously as their opposition to government action on climate change.

In September, the Center for American Progress Action Fund surveyed Republican candidates in congressional and gubernatorial races and found that nearly all disputed the scientific consensus on global warming, and none supported measures to mitigate it. For example, Robert Hurt, who won Tom Perriello’s House seat in Virginia, says clean-energy legislation would fail to “do anything except harm people.” The tea party’s “Contract From America” calls proposed climate policies “costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation’s global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.” Even conservatives who once argued for action on climate change, such as as Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and Rep. Mark Kirk (Ill.), have run for cover.

But it’s conservatives who should fear climate change the most. To put it simply, if you hate big government, try global warming on for size.

Many conservatives say they oppose clean-energy policies because they want to keep government off our backs. But they have it exactly backward. Doing nothing will set our country on a course toward narrower choices for businesses and individuals, along with an expanded role for government. When catastrophe strikes – and yes, the science is quite solid that it will – it will be the feds who are left conducting triage.

My economic views are progressive, and I think government has an important role in tackling big problems. But I admire many cherished conservative values, from personal responsibility to thrift to accountability, and I worry that conservatives’ lock-step posture on climate change is seriously out of step with their professed priorities. A strong defense of our national interests, rigorous cost-benefit analysis, fiscal discipline and the ability to avoid unnecessary intrusions into personal liberty will all be seriously compromised in a world marked by climate change.

In fact, far from being conservative, the Republican stance on global warming shows a stunning appetite for risk. When faced with uncertainty and the possibility of costly outcomes, smart businessmen buy insurance, reduce their downside exposure and protect their assets. When confronted with a disease outbreak of unknown proportions, front-line public health workers get busy producing vaccines, pre-positioning supplies and tracking pathogens. And when military planners assess an enemy, they get ready for a worst-case encounter.

When it comes to climate change, conservatives are doing none of this. Instead, they are recklessly betting the farm on a single, best-case scenario: That the scientific consensus about global warming will turn out to be wrong. This is bad risk management and an irresponsible way to run anything, whether a business, an economy or a planet.

The great irony is that, should their high-stakes bet prove wrong, adapting to a destabilized climate would mean a far bigger, more intrusive government than would most of the “big government” solutions to our energy problems that have been discussed so far.

Let’s start with costs. The investment needed to slow carbon pollution might total from 1 to 2 percent of global GDP each year for several decades, according to a 2006 study by the British government. This spending would pay for advanced technology, better land use and modern infrastructure. The same study put the cost of inaction – including economic harm from property damage and lost crops – at 5 to 20 percent of global GDP, lasting in perpetuity, with the risk of vastly higher catastrophic damage. You tell me which option is more fiscally responsible.

But it’s not this cost-benefit arithmetic that should most concern conservatives. Their real worry should be what it will take to manage the effects of climate change as they are felt across the economy over the course of our lifetimes.

The best science available suggests that without taking action to fundamentally change how we produce and use energy, we could see temperatures rise 9 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States by 2090. These estimates have sometimes been called high-end predictions, but the corresponding low-end forecasts assume we will rally as a country to shift course. That hasn’t happened, so the worst case must become our best guess.

With temperature increases in this range, studies predict a permanent drought throughout the Southwest, much like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, but this time stretching from Kansas to California. If you hate bailouts or want to end farm subsidies, this is a problem. Rising ocean acidity, meanwhile, will bring collapsing fisheries, catch restrictions – and unemployment checks. And rising sea levels will mean big bills as cash-strapped cities set about rebuilding infrastructure and repairing storm damage. With Americans in pain, the government will have to respond. And who will shoulder these new burdens? Future taxpayers.

This is just the beginning. If conservatives’ rosy hopes prove wrong, who but the federal government will undertake the massive infrastructure projects necessary to protect high-priced real estate in Miami and Lower Manhattan from rising oceans? And what about smaller coastal cities, such as Galveston and Corpus Christi in Texas? Will it fall to FEMA or some other part of the federal government to decide who will move and when and under what circumstances? Elsewhere, with declining river flows, how will the Bureau of Reclamation go about repowering the dams of the Pacific Northwest?

And while we’re busy at home, who will help Pakistan or Bangladesh in its next flood? What will the government do to secure food supplies when Russia freezes wheat exports? Without glaciers, what will become of Lima, Peru, a city dependent on melting ice for drinking water? Will we let waves of “climate refugees” cross our borders?

As the physicist and White House science director John Holdren has said: “We basically have three choices: mitigation [cutting emissions], adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be.”

Today’s conservatives would do well to start thinking more like military planners, reexamining the risks inherent in their strategy. If, instead, newly elected Republicans do nothing, they will doom us all to bigger government interventions and a large dose of suffering – a reckless choice that’s anything but conservative.

Bracken Hendricks is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a co-author, with Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), of “Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy.”


Naomi Oreskes and the Merchants of Doubt

Naomi Oreskes will be in Brisbane next Tuesday the 16th November at the University of Queensland to give a free public lecture about her new book, ‘Merchants of Doubt – How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming’

Here’s the official blurb:

Famous for her research on the historical development and understanding scientific knowledge and dissent, Naomi Oreskes will  roll back the rug on the dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.

The renowned professor from the University of California San Diego will discuss her latest book “Merchants of Doubt”, which tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.

Make sure to RSVP to ensure your seat.

First evidence of BP oil spill damage to corals

From the NYT: A survey of the sea floor near BP’s blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico has turned up dead and dying coral reefs that were probably damaged by the oil spill, scientists said on Friday.

The coral sites lie seven miles southwest of the well, at a depth of about 4,500 feet, in an area where large plumes of dispersed oil were discovered drifting through the deep ocean last spring in the early weeks after the spill.

The large swaths of darkened coral and other damaged marine organisms were almost certainly dying from exposure to toxins, scientists said.

The corals were discovered on Tuesday by scientists aboard a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel, using a submersible robot equipped with still and video cameras and sampling tools.

The documented presence of oil plumes in the area, the close proximity of BP’s well and the recent nature of the die-off make it highly likely that the spill was responsible, said Charles Fisher, a marine biologist from Penn State University who is the chief scientist on the gulf expedition, which was financed by the federal government.

‘I think that we have a smoking gun,” he said. “The circumstantial evidence is very strong that it’s linked to the spill.”

read the full story here