An op-ed about (and hopefully debunking) the myth that global warming has plateaued.  From the Raleigh NC based News & Observer.  Thanks to KRT from the N&O for the great image above and to N&O op-ed editor Allen Torrey.

Warming is fact; denial is harmful

“The earth is cooling!”

Actually it isn’t, but we have all heard that so many times recently, we’re starting to wonder.

Globally, the last few years have indeed been cooler than 1998 and 2005. But this has no relevance for whether the planet’s climate is changing or whether people are the cause. The US civilian unemployment rate dipped this summer too, but would anybody credibly argue that was evidence that unemployment hadn’t risen during and as a result of this recession?

According to NASA, the hottest ten years since 1880 (when continuous instrument records begin) have occurred since 1996, and the planet’s temperature is still increasing. The only way to arrive at the conclusion that global warming has “plateaued” as George Will suggested last week in the N&O, is to begin your analysis in 1998; the warmest year on record.  In science, the technical term for choosing your data to make a point is “cherry picking”.

Like many climate change skeptics, Will is confusing weather with climate, which encompasses longer time periods; generally 30 years or more. The shorter-term fluctuations Will is fretting about are natural, have been happening for centuries, are well understood by climate scientists and are predicted by global climate models. It is the longer-term progressive warming that began over a century ago – and coincides with the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – that is cause for concern.

Climate change skeptics like Will are successfully making the public think the evidence of our impact on the earth’s climate is confusing and contradictory. The details are complicated, but the basic science is actually simple. Have you ever climbed into a closed car on a sunny August afternoon?  Pretty hot wasn’t it?  That is essentially what the growing layer of gases in the atmosphere does to the earth, trapping in the heat caused by the sun warming up the land, just like it warms up the dashboard in your car.

Here in the world’s wealthiest nation the impacts of climate change on most of our lives have been relatively minor. Elsewhere, crops are failing, temperature sensitive diseases like malaria and cholera are increasing, and coastal villages are preparing to move to higher ground. In the US, arguing about whether the earth is warming is political sport. Elsewhere, the argument has moved on to which new technologies might reverse climate change, how societies can adapt to it, and who should pay for the costs.

Elsewhere, though, climate change is a bread and butter issue. When a coral reef in Papua New Guinea is wiped out by warming oceans, local fisheries collapse and fisherman can’t afford to send their kids to school. When Arctic permafrost melts, the physical underpinning of entire Alaskan villages is endangered. Nearly 1 billion people, or 1 in 7 worldwide, live at low coastal elevations and are experiencing flooding, erosion, and other direct impacts of climate change.

We haven’t experienced impacts of that scale here in North Carolina, but we eventually could. As sea level continues to rise, coastal communities here, too, will be threatened, and economies based on tourism and agriculture will suffer. Some of our fisheries could be affected too. One of the many affects of increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is that the oceans are becoming more acidic. This will affect economically important marine life like shrimp, crabs and oysters by making their skeletons more brittle and energetically costly to grow.

Given the clarity and relative certainty of the science and the scale of the potential social and economic impacts, why do newspapers publish articles denying climate change is happening? Social commentators like George Will certainly have freedom of speech and a general license to express their opinions on the editorial page. But would newspaper editors publish essays denying other major threats to humanity? Imagine an editorial arguing that cancer, poverty, HIV-AIDS or genocide don’t exist and are merely the product of a well-orchestrated scientific hoax.

In some countries, you actually do see such lies in the media. To Americans, this seems crazy, which is what the rest of the world thinks when they read denials about global warming in our newspapers. To everybody else, climate change is something they are already experiencing and are trying to find solutions to, rather than just another talking point in a never-ending culture war.

October 6, 2009

John Bruno, Carol Arnosti and Mark Sorensen

John Bruno, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Carol Arnosti, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Mark Sorensen, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Mark Sorenson and I just published an op-ed in response to George Will’s misguided essay denying global warming.  Not anthropogenic global warming, but simply global warming.  He argued on Oct 4 in the WaPost (and countless other papers around the country) that the warming has plateaued.  Sadly, he is wrong.

Will picked up on an equally incorrect story, by the usually on target Andrew Revkin who runs the DotEarth blog.

Revkin said “temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade”…The plateau in temperatures has been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that the threat of global warming is overblown. And some climate experts worry that it could hamper treaty negotiations and slow the progress of legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.” (link)

But there is no “plateau”.  The global temperature has continued to increase even during the last decade.

We have been blogging about (and attempting to correct) this for over a year (here, here, and here) as have many other bloggers and environmental writers including the NASA climate scientists who run the Real Climate web site (here). Their most recent article very succinctly debunks the “plateau” argument.  They include the graphic below, based on the NASA GISS dataset of global land and sea surface temperatures:

Global temperature according to NASA GISS data since 1980. The red line shows annual data, the larger red square a preliminary value for 2009, based on January-August. The green line shows the 25-year linear trend (0.19 ºC per decade). The blue lines show the two most recent ten-year trends (0.18 ºC per decade for 1998-2007, 0.19 ºC per decade for 1999-2008) and illustrate that these recent decadal trends are entirely consistent with the long-term trend and IPCC predictions. Even the highly “cherry-picked” 11-year period starting with the warm 1998 and ending with the cold 2008 still shows a warming trend of 0.11 ºC per decade (which may surprise some lay people who tend to connect the end points, rather than include all ten data points into a proper trend calculation). - from www.realclimate.org

Where’s the recent cooling or plateau you ask?  Nowhere in fact.

Below is a graphic of global temperature trends from five databases between 1999 and 2009.  They are all positive, i.e., no cooling, no plateau.  Note the hadcrut data (the green line)(the HadCRUT3v  data are developed in part by the Hadley Centre of the Met Office which is the UK’s National Weather Service and by the CRU ) displays the shallowest slope, yet the slope is still positive.

There is an incorrect meme in the blogosphere that this widely used dataset, unlike the NASA data (the rss  line in the graph below), does show a decline or at least a plateau.  But in fact it doesn’t:

It is well known that the Hadley data tend to run cool due to missing observations from the Arctic, one of the places on earth that have warmed the most (i.e., the Hadley HadCRUT3v  data tend to underestimate global warming – read the full explanation on RealClimate here).

The Met Office has posted a seemingly clear statement titled Climate change fact 2; temperatures continue to rise, in an attempt to make it clear that their data do not indicate warming has stopped.

Take another look at the Hadley data plotted below. The red line is the monthly temperature anomaly (deviations from a baseline) and the green line is the fitted curve beginning in 1999 (an intense El Nino year and the warmest year on record).  Note, again, there is no cooling or plateau.

The people coming to the conclusion that the earth is warming based on the Hadley data are not doing any type of trend analysis (or listening to the Hadley Centers interpretation).  They are instead simply drawing a line from the peak in 1999 to the dip in late 2008.  This is bogus for three reasons: (1) it is cherry-picking (picking the data to make a point, i.e., biased), (2) not a legitimate way to do a trend analysis (you can’t just ignore what happened in between the beginning and end points), and (3) it is totally irrelevant anyway!  It just doesn’t matter what happened last year or what happens next year.  The issue at hand is the effect of humans on climate not on day-to-day or year-to-year weather.  It is the long-term trend (see the graph below), that began over a hundred years ago, that we are concerned about.  (Can you see now why this whole issue – over the simple fact of whether the earth is even cooling – is driving scientists bonkers!)

Finally, as we point out in our op-ed; “According to NASA, the hottest ten years since 1880 (when continuous instrument records begin) have occurred since 1996, and the planet’s temperature is still increasing.”  You can see the current ranking (for what it’s worth) here.

To recap, we can see the data don’t show a plateau or a cooling trend and the British government even says their Hadley data don’t show a plateau or a cooling trend.

George Will’s WaPost colleague Ezra Kline has a great article explaining all this (again) to Will and millions of other AGW skeptics:

Will, whether he knows it or not, is relying on temperature measurements out of the U.K. Met’s office. Will thinks they show a “plateau” in global warming. Here’s what the Met says: “The rise in global surface temperature has averaged more than 0.15 °C per decade since the mid-1970s. Warming has been unprecedented in at least the last 50 years, and the 17 warmest years have all occurred in the last 20 years. This does not mean that next year will necessarily be warmer than last year, but the long-term trend is for rising temperatures.”

Brad Johnson, a climate blogger who does spend his days immersed in this stuff, writes that Will’s thesis is “pinned on an ambiguity of the English language. Just as the Yankees are a winning team but did not win their last game, global warming is terribly real even if 2008, one of the hottest years in recorded history, was cooler than 2007.” As Johnson explains, global warming is not shorthand for “every day will be hotter than the next everywhere on the planet.” It is shorthand for the observation that an “anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is amplifying the natural radiative forcing of the troposphere’s temperature,” thus creating a general trend toward higher temperatures. The year-to-year variability that forms the basis of Will’s column is not a challenge to this theory. It is built into it.   [the Global Climate Models that have forecasted long-term warming over the next several centuries actually predict lots of year-to-year variability and even short-term declines, read about this here]

Is there a chance Will will issue a correction?  This is a matter of fact after all, not simply an opinion of political interpretation.  Will the WaPost Ombudsman suggest such a correction?  Or the editorial page editor?  This isn’t the first time Will has made demonstrably incorrect misstatements about global warming in his column  (see an account of his last run in with “facts”  here and a compilation of all the articles debunking his arguments here).  And in the past he and the WaPost editorial page editor haven’t been willing to make corrections or to even discuss the factual accuracy of his pieces rejecting that the earth is even warming.

Although I am more or less liberal and Will is a conservative (in the traditional, non-neo-conservative sense) I often find his arguments at least well-reasoned and sometimes insightful.  I even agree with him sometimes and he has more than once changed my mind.  But jeez, how can a guy who understands the Federal tax code and baseball get himself so confused about climate change?  I do not think he has ulterior motives or is in anyway corrupt.  I also don’t think he comes from this position out of ideology-he is usually, but not always, a skeptic, even of conservative ideology.  I suspect he is just getting bad information from the wrong places. Although, ironically, this time he was misled by the New York Times and moreover, by a highly respected enviro-journalist.

But I suspect Will has other sources.  As many have pointed out, the “the earth is cooling” and “global warming has plateaued” memes are taking over the blogosphere.  There are also passages in Will’s op-ed that are suspiciously similar to another recent op-ed by house member Joe Barton. Somebody is probably distributing briefings with talking points for climate change skeptics:

…to achieve the Waxman-Markey legislation’s 83 percent baseline reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2050, we will have to reduce the CO2 output in the United States to the level that we had back in 1910.  – Barton

The U.S. goal is an 80 percent reduction by 2050. But Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute says that would require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the 1910 level. – Will

The link to our op-ed in the Raleigh NC based News & Observer is here.  My co-author Dr. Mark Sorensen is a biological anthropologist at UNC.  We are co-teaching a class for non-majors on global change: From the Equator to the Poles: Case Studies in Global Environmental Change.  Dr. Carol Arnosti, a biogeochemist in my department assisted with the piece and is also an instructor in the class.

One question that keeps coming up in our class is why so few americans believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming (< 50% by some estimates).  The students have come up with a number of good explanations.  One is that the public – e.g., their parents – is so frequently misinformed, i.e., lied to, by widely respected authorities in the media such as Will. As Ezra Kline put it (link):

All this might be fine, if not for the credibility Will has by virtue of his column. But people who are reading Will’s column at their breakfast table and are not otherwise immersed in this debate might find Will’s thinking convincing, unaware that the points he’s raising have been continually and convincingly rebutted, and that his read of the evidence sharply differs from those of the scientists who are actually collecting and analyzing the evidence. That would be a shame.

We agree and essentially made the same point at the end of our op-ed:

Given the clarity and relative certainty of the science and the scale of the potential social and economic impacts, why do newspapers publish articles denying climate change is happening? Social commentators like George Will certainly have freedom of speech and a general license to express their opinions on the editorial page. But would newspaper editors publish essays denying other major threats to humanity? Imagine an editorial arguing that cancer, poverty, HIV-AIDS or genocide don’t exist and are merely the product of a well-orchestrated scientific hoax. In some countries, you actually do see such lies in the media. To Americans, this seems crazy, which is what the rest of the world thinks when they read denials about global warming in our newspapers. To everybody else, climate change is something they are already experiencing and are trying to find solutions to, rather than just another talking point in a never-ending culture war.

I have been meaning for some time to do a few profiles on the impressive gentlemen representing our great nation in the US House of Representatives.

So lets meet house member Joe Barton (R-Texas): Joe Barton was born on September 15, 1949 in Waco, Texas. An avid baseball player growing up, he earned a four-year Gifford-Hill Opportunity Award scholarship to Texas A&M University, where he was the outstanding industrial engineering student for the Class of 1972. After earning a Master’s of Science degree in Industrial Administration from Purdue University, he joined Ennis Business Forms, where he rose to the position of Assistant to the Vice President. In 1981, he was selected for the prestigious White House Fellows Program, and served as an aide to then-Energy Secretary James B. Edwards. He returned to Texas in 1982 as a natural gas decontrol consultant for Atlantic Richfield Oil and Gas Company before being elected to Congress.

“Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.” – Joe Barton, from a March 10 House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing (thanks to Matthew Delong at the Washington Independent)

“It’s just something to think about.”  – it is indeed

Rep. Joe Barton: Global Warming? No Problem — We’ll Adapt!

By AARON WIENER 3/26/09 1:42 PM

Remember Joe Barton (R-Texas)? The ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who admitted recently that he’s “probably below average in [his] ability to understand” the nuts and bolts of climate change legislation? Well, he just had some more invaluable insights into global warming. His basic message: No biggie — humans can adapt.

He opened his statement at a congressional hearing yesterday as follows: “Today’s hearing is about adaptation. Adapting is a common natural way for people to adapt to their environment.”

Can’t argue with that. More questionable is his assessment of global warming in the same hearing:

“I think that it’s inevitable that humanity will adapt to global warming. I also believe the longer we postpone finding ways to do it successfully, the more expensive and unpalatable the adjustment will become. Adaptation to shifts in temperature is not that difficult. What will be difficult is the adaptation to rampant unemployment — enormous, spontaneous and avoidable changes to our economy — if we adopt such a reckless policy as cap-and-tax or cap-and-trade.”

If that seems dubious to you, here’s his solid evidence that adaptation has worked in the past: “During the Little Ice Age, both the Vikings and the British adapted to the cold by changing. I suppose that one possible adaptation response of Viking retrenchment and British expansion is that we’re conducting the hearing today in English instead of Norwegian.”

Irrefutable logic. Remember, this guy used to be chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. The future of our planet was basically in his hands.

But I can’t do him justice. Watch the full clip below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2bM5_Pe-rw&w=425&h=344]

And below is Representative Barton’s recent op-ed on climate change and cap and trade in “The Hill”:

Op-Ed: Capping jobs, trading in misery — wrong answers to global warming

What’s wrong with Congress’s approach to global warming? Nearly everything

For starters, to achieve the Waxman-Markey legislation’s 83 percent baseline reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2050, we will have to reduce the CO2 output in the United States to the level that we had back in 1910. On a per capita basis, assuming the population is going to average about 1 percent growth a year, the legislation gets us to 1875.

Oddly, George Will said nearly the same thing in his silly WaPost op-ed Thursday: “The U.S. goal is an 80 percent reduction by 2050. But Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute says that would require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the 1910 level. On a per capita basis, it would mean emissions approximately equal to those in 1875.”

To make good on that back-to-the-future design, the Energy and Commerce Committee worked hard earlier this year. It took 37 hours over four days of methodically rejecting 56 separate Republican efforts to learn the full cost of the bill, to prevent scams in its trading system and even get the federal regulators out of hot tubs.

What the?!

In the end, the 946-page Waxman-Markey global warming bill that we produced was passed on a vote of 33-25. It now stands as the vehicle of choice for making good on the Speaker’s promise to tackle global warming.

I think Republicans have legitimate and serious concerns about this redirection of our energy policy in America, and we shouldn’t be alone. Energy is the bedrock of a free-market economy that has become the most productive and the largest in the world. A third of the world’s GDP is based on the United States economy, and that economy for more than 150 years has been based on a free-market allocation of resources in the energy sector.

The focus of our efforts is on carbon dioxide, however. It’s just .038 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere, and the man-made component is just .01 percent. Nor is CO2 a pollutant in any rational sense of the word. It is a naturally occurring, indispensable part of life, and it correlates directly to growth in jobs and economic opportunity for Americans. We’ve seen a nearly CO2-free society before, but Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge hardly seems like a model for world prosperity and individual happiness.

Now THAT is a low blow!

Secondly, the system of allowances on which the pending legislation relies is flawed right from its basic math to the way in which the allowances were given away to gain political support among the recipients.

For example, the transportation sector today is responsible for 35 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, yet transportation gets a grand total of 2.25 percent of the allowances. Come 2050, when CO2 emissions are supposed to be cut by 83 percent, it seems like the transportation sector will need to be cut drastically. Assuming we don’t develop some sort of emission-free power for airplanes, general aviation is going to have to use fossil fuel or planes won’t fly. It seems to me that it is simply a physical impossibility to get to that 83 percent reduction. On top of that, instead of auctioning the emissions permits, as President Barack Obama promised, we’ve given away 85 percent in order to generate industry support for the legislation.

Next, no matter how you cut it, costs are going up. The CEO of the utility that provides most of the electricity for Iowa says that in Iowa alone, costs are going to go up nearly $400 a year per residential customer.

Yes, approximately $1 a day.  Less than a Latte.

Also, the Energy Information Administration predicts price rises of between 35 cents and $1.28 per gallon for gasoline. If you take a conservative projection of, say, 50 cents a gallon, a family with two working parents could pay about $800 a year more for fuel.

Well, only assuming the family doesn’t change their behavior and use less fuel.

Then there’s the green jobs revolution. They’ve been trying that in Spain, and what their experience tells us is that for every green job created, two conventional jobs are lost. Moreover, the cost of green job creation in Spain is about $1.2 million per job in government subsidies.

Ahhhh, the Spanish paradigm.  Being one of the true technological powerhouses of the planet, if the Spanish can’t do it, nobody can.

Finally, evidence is mounting that the EPA’s pivotal endangerment finding was based on a process that suppressed countervailing opinion from career staff. In an e-mail from a supervisor, one longtime EPA staffer was told bluntly that “the administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision …” In fact, his doubts were hazardous to his office, the boss warned.

Nice try, but this “career staffer” whose name is Alan Carlin is an economist with the EPA and as John Broder at the NYT describes:  “Dr. Carlin’s highly skeptical views on global warming, which have been known for more than a decade within the small unit where he works, have been repeatedly challenged by scientists inside and outside the E.P.A.; that he holds a doctorate in economics, not in atmospheric science or climatology; that he has never been assigned to work on climate change; and that his comments on the endangerment finding were a product of rushed and at times shoddy scholarship, as he acknowledged Thursday in an interview.  Dr. Carlin admitted that his report had been poorly sourced and written. He blamed the tight deadline.”

Some say the clock is ticking, and we must act boldly and right now. At the same time, nobody’s quite sure what happens next with the Waxman-Markey bill because the longer it lies exposed to examination, the more it disappoints.

Whatever happens next, I hope Democrats and Republicans can find some way to apply common sense to what we’re doing. We don’t want the cost of energy to bankrupt working people; we want them to drive what they want to drive and go where they need to go, and we want them to keep their jobs. That doesn’t seem too much for the people who inhabit this world to expect of us.

From the NYT:

By JOHN M. BRODER

Published: September 30, 2009

WASHINGTON — Unwilling to wait for Congress to act, the Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it was moving forward on new rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from hundreds of power plants and large industrial facilities.

President Obama has said that he prefers a comprehensive legislative approach to regulating emissions and stemming global warming, not a piecemeal application of rules, and that he is deeply committed to passage of a climate bill this year.

But he has authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to begin moving toward regulation, which could goad lawmakers into reaching an agreement. It could also provide evidence of the United States’ seriousness as negotiators prepare for United Nations talks in Copenhagen in December intended to produce an international agreement to combat global warming.

“We are not going to continue with business as usual,” Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters. “We have the tools and the technology to move forward today, and we are using them.”

The proposed rules, which could take effect as early as 2011, would place the greatest burden on 400 power plants, new ones and those undergoing substantial renovation, by requiring them to prove that they have applied the best available technology to reduce emissions or face penalties.

Ms. Jackson described the proposal as a common-sense rule tailored to apply to only the largest facilities — those that emit at least 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year — which are responsible for nearly 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

The rule would not, as critics contend, cover “every cow and Dunkin’ Donuts,” Ms. Jackson said.

The move was timed to come on the same day that two Democratic senators, John F. Kerryof Massachusetts and Barbara Boxer of California, introduced global warming and energy legislation that faces a steep climb to passage this year.

The prospect of E.P.A. regulation of greenhouse gas emissions has generated fear and deep divisions within American industry. Some major utilities, oil companies and other heavy emitters are working closely with Congress to ensure that a climate bill would circumvent E.P.A. regulation by substituting a market-based cap-and-trade system. Others, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, have worked against legislation and threatened to sue if the E.P.A. tries to impose controls on emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Ms. Jackson said the proposed rule had been written to exempt small businesses, farms, large office buildings and other relatively small sources of carbon dioxide emissions. But under the rule proposed Wednesday, the E.P.A. would assume authority for the greenhouse gas emissions of 14,000 coal-burning power plants, refineries and big industrial complexes that produce most of the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution.

The proposal will go through several months of drafting and public comment and faces likely litigation from industry and perhaps from environmentalists or citizen groups.

A typical coal-burning power plant emits several million tons of carbon dioxide a year. The 25,000-ton limit is comparable to the emissions from burning 131 rail cars of coal or the annual energy use of about 2,200 homes, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and an opponent of global warming legislation, called the proposed rule “a backdoor energy tax” that circumvents Congress and violates the terms of the Clean Air Act.

Scott Segal, a utility lobbyist with the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani in Washington, said the rule should not be used to rush Congress into passing a poorly drafted bill.

But he also said that the proposal “strengthens the president’s negotiating hand in Copenhagen.”

“Even if the Senate does not act,” Mr. Segal said, “he can legitimately say to other nations, ‘We are taking action on a unilateral basis. What are you doing?’ ”

The proposal, long anticipated and highly controversial, is the government’s first step toward regulating greenhouse gases from stationary sources. The E.P.A. has already proposed an ambitious program to restrict such emissions from cars and trucks. The agency published the proposed vehicle emission rule this month; it is expected to take effect next spring.

Ms. Jackson’s proposal would require facilities emitting at least 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide and five other pollutants a year to obtain construction and operating permits. The other gases are methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride.

The threshold is 100 times higher than that required for other types of pollutants like sulfur dioxide that have more acute health and environmental effects.

Ms. Jackson said that while the proposed rule would affect about 14,000 large sources of carbon dioxide, most were already subject to clean-air permitting requirements because they emit other pollutants.

By raising the standard to 25,000 tons, the new rule exempts millions of smaller sources of carbon dioxide emissions like bakeries, soft drink bottlers, dry cleaners and hospitals.

Industry groups reacted quickly, challenging the E.P.A.’s authority to use the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases and questioning Ms. Jackson’s power to lower the threshold for regulation.

Charles T. Drevna, president of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association, said that the emission of greenhouse gases was a global problem and that it was pointless to regulate only some sources.

“This proposal incorrectly assumes that one industry’s greenhouse gas emissions are worse than another’s,” Mr. Drevna said. “E.P.A. lacks the legal authority to categorically exempt sources that exceed the Clean Air Act’s major source threshold from permitting requirements, and this creates a troubling precedent for any agency actions in the future.”

Supporters of the plan said that it was carefully written to affect only the biggest emitters.

“This is a common-sense step toward a cleaner, better world,” said Emily Figdor, federal global warming project director for Environment America.

A new report/analysis of three methods of  climate-engineering is available online from Copenhagen Consensus Center.

Climate engineering could offer an extremely cheap, fast solution to climate change, according to this comprehensive analysis of its costs and benefits.

An Analysis of Climate Engineering as a Response to Climate Change by Dr. Eric J Bickel and Lee Lane shows that we might be able to cancel out this century’s global warming by spending no more than $9 billion, and that climate engineering might be able to achieve as much for the planet as carbon cuts at a fraction of the cost.

Three methods of solar radiation management are explored in this research. Solar radiation management involves bouncing sunlight back into space, to avoid warming.

The authors look at stratospheric aerosol insertion (launching material like sulfur dioxide or soot into the stratosphere to mimic the effects of volcanoes, which create a hazy layer scattering and absorbing sunlight); marine cloud whitening (spraying seawater droplets into marine clouds to make them reflect more sunlight); and the deployment of a space-based sunshade (launching many tiny transparent screens into space that would focus a small amount of the sun’s light away from Earth).

Air capture focuses on capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and securing it in land or sea-based sinks. This technology, according to Dr. Bickel and Lane, is not as promising as solar radiation management from a technical or cost perspective. Dr. Bickel and Lane find that the cost of stratospheric aerosol insertion would be in the magnitude of $230 billion, with benefits fifteen-times higher.

Marine cloud whitening with a fleet of unmanned ships would be extremely cheap: for about $9 billion, all of the global warming for the century could be avoided, with benefits adding up to about $20 trillion.

Dr. Bickel and Lane conclude: “the results of this initial benefit-cost analysis place the burden of proof squarely on the shoulders of those who would prevent such research.”

I don’t know what to think about this idea.  I guess I am open to considering and exploring it.  But the skeptic in me wonders if this will actually work-could people really control something as complex as the earth’s climate without screwing it up even more?   And the purist in me wishes we could just not mess it all up in the first place.  John Tierney shares my skepticism.  And since Bjørn Lomborg seems to be supportive of the approach (and is also director of the institute that sponsored the report) I have to wonder… But his short letter about the report (you can read or download it here) seems to make sense.  Am I missing something?

John Tierney has a nice story about climate engineering in general and the report here.

Read the full report here and blogs about the report here and here.

From the Lomborg letter:

Global warming will mean that more people die from the heat. There will be a rise in sea levels, more malaria, starvation, and poverty. Concern has been great, but humanity has done very little that will actually prevent these outcomes. Carbon emissions have kept increasing, despite repeated promises of cuts.

We all have a stake in ensuring that climate change is stopped. We turned to climate scientists to inform us about the problem of global warming. Now we need to turn to climate economists to enlighten us about the benefits, costs, and possible outcomes from different responses to this challenge.

World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen this December to forge a new pact to tackle global warming. Should they continue with plans to make carbon-cutting promises that are unlikely to be fulfilled? Should they instead delay reductions for 20 years? What could be achieved by planting more trees, cutting methane, or reducing black soot emissions? Is it sensible to focus on a technological solution to warming? Or should we just adapt to a warmer world?

Much of the current policy debate remains focused on cutting carbon, but there are many ways to go about repairing the global climate. Our choices will result in different outcomes and different costs.

The optimal combination of solutions will create the biggest impact for the least money. A groundbreaking paper by economists Eric Bickel and Lee Lane is one of the first – and certainly the most comprehensive – study of the costs and benefits of climate engineering. Deliberately manipulating the earth’s climate seems like something from science fiction. But as President Barack Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, has said it has “got to be looked at,” and many prominent scientists agree.

Bickel and Lane offer compelling evidence that a tiny investment in climate engineering might be able to reduce as much of global warming’s effects as trillions of dollars spent on carbon emission reductions.

Climate engineering has the advantage of speed. There is a significant delay between carbon cuts and any temperature drop – even halving global emissions by mid-century would barely be measurable by the end of the century. Making green energy cheap and prevalent will also take a long time. Consider that electrification of the global economy is still incomplete after more than a century of effort.

Many methods of atmospheric engineering have been proposed. Solar radiation management appears to be one of the most hopeful. Atmospheric greenhouse gases allow sunlight to pass through but absorb heat and radiate some down to the earth’s surface. All else being equal, higher concentrations will warm the planet.

From yesterday’s NYT:

Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security

By JOHN M. BRODER

Published: August 8, 2009

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change. Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.

An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. “It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.

Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.

But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest. If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to address.

This argument could prove a fulcrum for debate in the Senate next month when it takes up climate and energy legislation passed in June by the House.

Lawmakers leading the debate before Congress are only now beginning to make the national security argument for approving the legislation.

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a leading advocate for the climate legislation, said he hoped to sway Senate skeptics by pressing that issue to pass a meaningful bill.

Mr. Kerry said he did not know whether he would succeed but had spoken with 30 undecided senators on the matter.

He did not identify those senators, but the list of undecided includes many from coal and manufacturing states and from the South and Southeast, which will face the sharpest energy price increases from any carbon emissions control program.

“I’ve been making this argument for a number of years,” Mr. Kerry said, “but it has not been a focus because a lot of people had not connected the dots.” He said he had urged President Obama to make the case, too.

Mr. Kerry said the continuing conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and displaced tens of thousands of people, is a result of drought and expansion of deserts in the north. “That is going to be repeated many times over and on a much larger scale,” he said.

The Department of Defense’s assessment of the security issue came about after prodding by Congress to include climate issues in its strategic plans — specifically, in 2008 budget authorizations by Hillary Rodham Clinton and John W. Warner, then senators. The department’s climate modeling is based on sophisticated Navy and Air Force weather programs and other government climate research programs at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Pentagon and the State Department have studied issues arising from dependence on foreign sources of energy for years but are only now considering the effects of global warming in their long-term planning documents. The Pentagon will include a climate section in the Quadrennial Defense Review, due in February; the State Department will address the issue in its new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.

“The sense that climate change poses security and geopolitical challenges is central to the thinking of the State Department and the climate office,” said Peter Ogden, chief of staff to Todd Stern, the State Department’s top climate negotiator.

Although military and intelligence planners have been aware of the challenge posed by climate changes for some years, the Obama administration has made it a central policy focus.

A changing climate presents a range of challenges for the military. Many of its critical installations are vulnerable to rising seas and storm surges. In Florida, Homestead Air Force Base was essentially destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and Hurricane Ivan badly damaged Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2004. Military planners are studying ways to protect the major naval stations in Norfolk, Va., and San Diego from climate-induced rising seas and severe storms.

Another vulnerable installation is Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that serves as a logistics hub for American and British forces in the Middle East and sits a few feet above sea level.

Read the full article here (you need a free NYT membership to log in)

There is a neat article (or “peer-reviewed letter”) in this months Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment about the carbon contribution of conservation ecologists’ airplane flights.  Their point is that we fly too much and are clearly part of the problem.  They also point out the obvious hypocrisy.

The unease about frequent flying should be particularly acute for the community of ecologists and conservation scientists – a group of professionals who commonly speak out against emissions, yet by virtue of their own behavior have individual carbon footprints that probably exceed the per capita footprints of most Americans.

We thirteen conservation scientists span a wide range of jobs (academic institutions and non-governmental organizations) and career stages (junior to senior scientists), and – although not a random sample – we are fairly representative of those in the conservation field. The results give pause: the emissions from our flights account for an astonishing two-thirds of our average carbon footprint. Thus, in spite of considerably lower-carbon lifestyle choices (eg diet, purchasing/driving a hybrid car, home energy conservation) that made our non-flying carbon footprint 16% smaller than the average American’s, our total emissions are double that of the American average and more than ten times the global average (Figure 1; WebPanel 1). The mismatch between individual behavior and conservation platitudes has already been noted (eg Bearzi 2009) and is a source of considerable embarrassment for the conservation community (Dowie 2008).

You too can calulate your carbon footprint:  using this carbon footprint calculator (which is the one Fox et al used) or several others which can be found online.  BTW, anybody know about the accuracy of these things, which one is “best”, etc.?

I have my Marine Ecology class do this every year when I give a general lecture about climate change.  Last time I did mine, I was curious how much I’d reduce my footprint if I downsized from a Hummer to a Prius (I don’t drive either-I have a Rav4 and ride my bike to work a lot); remarkably the savings barely equaled my annual carbon contribution from flying for work and I typically only fly ~20,000 per year!  Pretty amazing.  Also interesting is the importance of how MUCH you drive, which again, can wash out the benefits of driving a small car (if you drive a lot).  I have been trying to fly less.  I rarely go to conferences and only give one invited lecture a year.  But those decisions are partially because I prefer to save my travel time for field work.  It is a tough balance-just enough miles to achieve AA gold status but not so much that I melt the earth!

References

Helen E Fox, Peter Kareiva, Brian Silliman, Jessica Hitt, David A Lytle, Benjamin S Halpern, Christine V Hawkes, Joshua Lawler, Maile Neel, Julian D Olden, Martin A Schlaepfer, Katherine Smith, Heather Tallis (2009) Why do we fly? Ecologists’ sins of emission. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: Vol. 7, No. 6, pp. 294-296.

Bearzi G. 2009. When swordfish conservation biologists eat swordfish. Conserv Biol 23: 1–2.

Dowie M. 2008. The wrong path to conservation. The Nation. Sep 10. www.thenation.com/doc/20080929/dowie