The globally-averaged land and sea surface temperature for April 2009 was the fifth-warmest in the past 130 years, according to a NOAA report. This occurred as the El-Nino/Southern Oscillation phenomenon moved from a cold phase (La Nina) to a neutral phase. The second graph on the page I’ve linked to shows where the warmest anomalies were found: eastern Russia, Europe and southern South America. Those of us in the middle third of the U.S. (Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River valley) experienced cooler and wetter conditions than are normally found. In the Front Range of Colorado, a winter-long drought was eased by a pretty wet April.
The anomalies during April were +1.00°C (+1.80°F) for land only, +0.44°C (+0.79°F) for the ocean only and +0.59°C (+1.06°F) for land and ocean combined. These anomalously high temperatures occurred during the end of a La Nina, which tends to depress temperatures, as well as during the most extensive solar minimum in over 100 years. Many climate change deniers cite solar cycles as the most important contributor to climate variability. If the 5th warmest temperatures in recent history were recorded during the most intense solar minimum in recent history, what do folks think will happen when the solar cycle transfers towards its maximum? What will happen when the next El Nino occurs? Will temperatures somehow decrase globally? I don’t think so.
Wow – I did not see this report until today: Bolivia’s Chacaltaya glacier is gone. It resided at 17,388 feet above sea level for over 18,000 years. A team of researchers studying the glacier for the past 20 or so years predicted in 1999 that the glacier would survive until 2015. Just like so many other effects, this timeline was substantially moved up by still-increasing greenhouse forcing. Similar effects are likely to be felt across the rest of the Andes. Rainfall and snowfall have been decreasing for a while now. Unfortunately, millions of people depend upon the glacial melt as their water source.
20% lower emissions in 2020 than 2005 levels was a key point in the legislation. As of the 12th of May, the bill’s provision was for 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Then-candidate Obama campaigned on a 80% reduction of 1990 levels by 2050. Put simply, an 80% reduction by 2050 isn’t possible to achieve if 2020 levels are only set at 17% below 2005 levels. And we need to achieve the 80% of 1990 levels reduction. That was one big reason I supported Obama in the 2008 election. This slide occurred due to the inherent weakness of the levels proposed in the bill’s introduction, as I discussed in my 1st follow-up post.
A nationwide 25% renewable energy portfolio goal by 2025. This is imminently do-able – it’s well within our current technological capabilities, to say nothing of developments that will help achieve this goal to be developed in the next 10-15 years, especially with aggressive legislation pushing for it. After the May 12th “compromise”, conditions were set to 15% renewable and 5% efficiency gain (efficiency has the potential to really eat up a lot of slack in the energy system – far more than 5%, by the way). The current language would allow governors of states to adjust those numbers to 12% renewable and 8% efficiency. They shouldn’t have to be traded like this. Efficiency can easily be doubled to 10% while still attaining 25% renewable energy nationwide. That would put us much further down the path of needed action.
The worst “compromise” thus far has to be pollution allowances. President Obama wanted all of them auctioned and then use the money to assist lower- and middle-income consumers pay for efficiency and clean energy projects around their houses. Assistance for energy bills would also have been made available. That way, as the government mandated renewable energy come online in a massive way, any increased building and operating costs that utilities would have passed along to consumers would have been largely nullified. We all would have been using clean energy and our bills wouldn’t have increased (at least not by much). Instead, House Cons, who have no interest in voting for the bill anyway, managed to convince enough ConservaDems that the poor old energy industry shouldn’t be made to incur greater operating costs, despite all the greenhouse pollution they’re emitting because they’ve decided for decades to not invest in clean technologies (just cheap ones). So the pollution permits will be given away to polluting corporations – for free. They will be allowed to pollute for years to come because they’re spending millions of dollars on lobbyists to convince Representatives to give them a huge financial break. The return on that money will be large, indeed, as it usually is. In the meantime, greenhouse pollution won’t be effectively curtailed for a long time, ensuring that we lock in ever-increasing cliamte change effects for the next 1,000-10,000 years.
Perhaps the worst news of all is that these compromises giveaways to industry will only continue as this legislation continues to make its way through Congress. Enough could be done to the bill to make it as Orwellian in name as much of the legislation passed under the Con Congress of the early 2000′s. Case in point, I heard about the 450 Con amendments to this bill that could be introduced this week. Instead of working with Democrats in good faith, the Cons are putting forward amendments that would do the opposite of the language already in the bill and/or are geared towards making sure ConservaDems vote for the amendment so that they won’t be called names back in their home districts in the 2010 campaigns. Or so the theory goes – I’m willing to be they’ll still be called names, even if they do vote the way the Cons want them to. One amendment in particular is typical of Con posturing – if 1,000 jobs are lost in one state, the entire law’s provisions would be suspended. If Cons cared that much about employment, they would have offered similar solutions to other important pieces of legislation. They didn’t, which makes this hypocritical action all the more immoral.
The good news is slightly more attention is being paid to the issue of climate change in the media. The bad news is the dates being used don’t reflect the latest research to the degree they should. Since we have to take the bad with the good, I’m going to take a quick look at how the issue was handled recently. This Lifestyle article at MSN was about America post-2100. But since the overwhelming majority of climate change metrics are currently worse (as measured by observations) than they were forecasted to be for the 2007 IPCC Report, and since additional research since the Report was issued has moved up timelines for climate change effects, the article should relay to readers that the conditions within more accurately reflect post-2050 America than post-2100 America. But without further ado, let’s look at exactly what effects were discussed.
Pacific Northwest: Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: Heavier rains, dramatic warming over higher latitudes and sea-level rise. According to recent research, Alaska has already experienced a 3.6 degree Fahrenheit increase since 1951, much more than the rest of America. The Northwest will also be affected by the forecasted two to three feet (or as much as 3-7 feet, according to more recent research) of sea level rise.
Northeast: Virginia to Maine
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: More severe storms in the winter and summer, extreme sea level rise and flooding. Indeed, a couple of recent journal articles I’ve read point out that if the land-based West Antarctica ice sheets melt this century, sea levels won’t rise by the same amount all over the globe. Sea levels off the U.S. Northeast coast will rise a couple of meters more than other places. Unfortunately, that region is also one of the most densely populated by people.
Southeast: The Gulf Coast states, up to Carolina
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: Hurricanes, wind damage, storm surges, flooding, extra sea level rise. Lots of people, lots of infrastructure. That means lots of money to either protect everything and everybody or move them inland.
The Northern Plains, Midwest and Great Lakes
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: Stronger storms (i.e. tornadoes, heavy rain events) occurring throughout the year as well as warmer winters. More intense storm systems mean increased chances of flash flooding across the region.
By not choosing to pay to address these potential effects now, we choose to pay more for them later. Protection along the coasts, more flood defense systems, dropping water tables higher rates of disease associated with warmer conditions, among others, will all have an adverse financial effect. Larger clean-up and rescue efforts will cost more. Building insurance rates will skyrocket – forcing more and more people to go without or move inland whether the coasts are protected or not. What will loss of part of population centers mean for businesses and urban cores?
These changes will more likely occur sooner rather than later. More people in the U.S. need to understand that potential so that more realistic policies can be set.
I’ve read a number of articles and abstracts from research papers on climate change-related topics. I’m going to provide a quick overview for some of them in a couple of posts, starting with this one. What I’ve found indicates to me that the legislation now going through the House Energy and Commerce Committee is severely lacking in one arena it is supposed to address: reduction of near- and long-term greenhouse forcing, most notably by reducing carbon emissions. It is unfortunate that politicians are not only mostly unaware of this and other recent research, but too many are willfully ignorant of the state of the science as of May 2009.
The first is “Overshooting convection in tropical cyclones” by David Romps and Zhiming Zhang. They looked into the role that tropical cyclones play in injecting water vapor into the stratosphere via deep convective towers. Water vapor in the stratosphere has elsewhere been shown to raise surface temperatures slightly due to their interaction with sunlight. With forecasts of an increase in tropical storm number and activity as one result of anthropogenic climate forcing, a positive feedback could be established by the cyclones. The authors rightfully acknowledge that interpretation of their results isn’t without complications. They point out that the tropopause could be lifted by these intense tropical cyclones and that water vapor may not be injected into the stratosphere with every occurrence of a cyclone. Even if little of this makes sense, I highly recommend taking a short trip to Romps’ webpage where he has an animation of tropical activity for 2005 – a very active year in the Atlantic basin. Don’t overlook the activity in the western Pacific or Indian Oceans, however.
I read a story in yesterday’s Denver Post that brought an ironic smile to my mouth. During his time as Colorado’s Senator, I bristled at then-Sen. Ken Salazar’s consistent political maneuvering toward the mythical “moderate middle”. While he didn’t run as a progressive candidate (as plenty of other bloggers and activists I talked to pointed out), Sen. Salazar made what I considered to be a number of votes that I and many others characterized as very pro-corporate and anti-civil rights. We tried for his entire time as a Senator to vote the way a majority of Coloradans and Americans wanted – to no avail. He was more interested in playing political games in the footsteps of his Senatorial mentor, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.
Thus, in some ways it amuses me to read that now-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is fuming after he was handed a significant political defeat after the same people he spent his time in the Senate appeasing decided to pay him back by continuing to hold the nomination of the deputy secretary of the Interior back from a vote. What is pathetic is Sec. Salazar made a number of concessions to Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT) regarding a review of the decision to revoke 77 oil and gas leases near two national parks in southern Utah before he [Sen. Bennett] removes his hold on David Hayes. Yet even with those concessions, Sen. Bennett continued to ask his colleagues to hold the nomination.
This is exactly the kind of thing that I wrote about many times when Ken was a Senator. He can’t reach bipartisan agreement with the current political opposition – they have no interest in bipartisanship. It’s either their way or no way. There are no negotiations or concessions they are willing to offer on issues. Salazar failed to learn this valuable lesson as a Senator and now it’s holding the work of the Interior Department back. Sen. Bennett now has in his pocket all of the things Sec. Salazar told him he’d give him. In return, Sec. Salazar has nothing of what Sen. Bennett told him he’d give him. The oil and gas corporations rule Utah politics, as they do in too many instances across the country. Sec. Salazar now represents a direct threat to their assumed way of doing things – as he has reversed numerous Bush-era Interior Department decisions. Sec. Salazar had better figure out a method to get the things done he wants done – whether the oil and gas industry is pleased with those actions or not – whether Sen. Bennett and other Con obstructionists are pleased with those actions or not.
I’m not sure what Sec. Salazar hopes to accomplish by railing to the corporate media about this problem. The corporate media didn’t have a problem carrying Bush’s water when it came to incorrectly relating to the American people the process of confirming Bush’s nominees. A record number of nominees were approved by the Congress, even the Senate, which was ostensibly under Democratic control for a number of them. Keep in mind this happened after Senate Cons held up nearly 100 Clinton nominees – posts went unfilled for years due to Con obstructionism. Democrats tried playing the nice-guy role in return – and got blasted for it in the corporate media because they wouldn’t release their holds on fewer than 10 Bush nominees. Even this Post article doesn’t give readers a good idea of what’s really going on – it’s more “he-said, she-said” b.s. Why are newspapers failing? Gee, I just can’t figure it out. But now Sec. Salazar is getting a taste of Con obstructionism when it comes to something he really wants. I’d be sympathetic towards him, but Democratic activists didn’t get much sympathy when he was appeasing these obstructionists all those years. It would have been better for everybody if Salazar had seen them for what they really are back then.
An article in this weekend’s Denver Post examined a number of planned developments within Colorado that are going to be net-zero, or generate all of the electricity that they use. There are a number of good things about this news. One, it demonstrates that even in this harsh economic environment, developers aren’t throwing in the towel on the next generation of design. Two, as more of these kinds of communities are created and their properties sold to the public, word about their advantages will spread. Three, as more people hear about these technologies, more people will want them. That will cause one bad thing about the technology to change: the price of development and installation will come down and become more affordable for more people, which is the fourth good thing.
I’ll excerpt some of the article below:
• The 503-acre Horizon Uptown project calls for 3,800 houses and 8,000 residents, near the Interstate 70 and E-470 interchange, near Buckley Air Force Base. Australian development firm Lend Lease aspires for its $2 billion project to be a net-zero carbon, energy and waste community with multifamily and single-family homes beginning in the low $100,000s. The project is still going through the planning process with the city of Aurora, but developers hope to turn dirt this fall.
• The Fort Zed project in Fort Collins has reaped $13 million in federal and local grants to transform the city’s downtown core — including the Colorado State University campus — into one of the country’s first zero-energy districts. The surge in funding has prodded the project’s organizers to increase their initial plans for generating 5 megawatts of energy to 50 megawatts, enough to power more than 38,000 homes for a year.
• The 250-home Geos neighborhood in Arvada should begin construction work this summer or fall with homes starting around $220,000. It will feature airtight construction that reduces energy needs by 75 percent. A checkerboard layout maximizes each home’s passive solar collection, delivering 60 percent of the home’s winter heating needs through sunshine on windows. Norbert Klelbl, Geos’ developer, says he has whittled the cost of energy efficiency to a mere 10 percent to 12 percent increase over traditionally built homes.
I found it incredible that an Australian development firm has a $2 billion project in the works in Aurora. I am a huge fan of its plans to be net-zero carbon, energy and waste. That’s an audacious goal and any success met working toward that goal is laudable. I also really like the plans to make some of the houses start in the $100,000s. It’s going to be critical to push these technologies down the income demographics if they’re ever to penetrate the mainstream market effectively.
50MW of power in Fort Collins is no less significant, especially since it’s 10 times the original goal. It might be one of the first zero-energy districts (an enviable status, btw), but it certainly won’t be the last. This is exactly the kind of planned development that needs to take place as we transition to a cleaner economy and cleaner ways of living. In terms of competitiveness and attractiveness of residency and community, older, outdated houses and neighborhoods will eventually begin to suffer from lack of demand.
There is a growing sentiment in the corporate media that the economy is finding its bottom and we’ll see recovery the rest of the year. Their indication? Economic leading indicators aren’t as bad as they have been. “It’s only a matter of time”, they say. Which is about the only thing they’re getting correct. It is only a matter of time. But they’re paying way too much attention to trends in the stock market and not enough attention to fundamentals. Take the last two “recoveries” from the last two recessions. The recovery from the 1991 recession took 16 months before the unemployment rate started going down. 16 months after the official declaration of the end of the recession, the unemployment rate finally responded. The recovery from the last recession was even worse – exacerbated as it was by insane Con economic policies (giving away money to people who are already rich doesn’t benefit the economy or workers). For 21 months (nearly 2 years) after the 8-month recession ended, unemployment continued to rise. It took 47 months (4 years) for the same number of jobs to be reported as were held back in February 2001. Which sounds good except for the U.S. population grew during those 4 years – meaning the percentage of people employed in 2005 was still less than it was in 2001. And those two recessions weren’t nearly as bad as this recession is.
I don’t think the fundamental problems that helped cause the last two recessions were ever honestly dealt with by policy makers. That goes for Democrats as well as Republicans. The rich kept looking out for themselves while trying to screw the non-rich. Few in political power have tried to stop that effort. Instead, many of them have helped. There are reasons fewer people are employed today than there were in 2001 – reasons that remain unaddressed. So when the chattering heads get all excited about a small turnaround in the stock market – where the rich continue to make money while the non-rich continue to try to keep themselves afloat – I don’t get too worked up. American corporations are firing American workers and closing American workplaces while at the same time keeping operations going in foreign countries, employing foreign workers. Where is the outrage for that happening? I hear nothing from the “build-the-border-fence” xenophobes, which reinforces the true intent of their complaints. It was never about American jobs – they’re still being lost despite the efforts to crack down on immigration across our southwestern border. It was and remains about people with different colored skin than the current majority of Americans.
So the numbers continue to get worse – and they’ll stay there for an awfully long time until more people figure out how they’re being screwed by American corporations. Their profits will rebound while most Americans’ suffering continues. It’s up to workers and citizens to decide when enough is enough. Until then, news like ‘Retail sales fall‘, ‘Jobless claims remain high‘ and ‘wholesale prices fall while producer prices rise’ will continue to come out. There is no sane reason economists should be cheering jobless claims at a rate of over 600,000 per month, just because last week’s reading is 10,000 or so less than the maximum number in late March. 600,000 per month is still over double what it was one year ago. It’s not like 580,000 of them are finding jobs in a couple of weeks, let alone jobs that pay even as well as the job they lost. Tens of millions of Americans are underemployed to some extent. That is creating a huge weight on the economy, preventing it from being as strong as it should be if corporations were employing Americans instead of people in foreign countries.
Whatever bottom might be found in the next year or two won’t mean spit to those millions of Americans or the rest of us as we’re all held back by conditions that corporations and Chambers of Commerce fight for. Unless more workers begin to stand up for themselves and their neighbors, we will all continue to be exploited. Because you can bet any sum on corporations joining together to fight for their “right” to proiteer off of us. As far as announcing recoveries go, economists don’t like dealing with the real world – their theoretical framework does what they want it to. So don’t expect their prognosticating to make much sense when it comes to examining the real economy.
It couldn’t be because of their lack of understanding of topics or lack of empathy for their constituents. It couldn’t have been because of things like:
1. Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), on the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate carbon dioxide:
Barton says the average healthy adult exhales between four-tenths of a ton and seven-tenths of a ton of CO2 a year.
“So if you put 20,000 marathoners into a confined area, you could consider that a single source of pollution, and you could regulate it,” Barton says. “The key would be whether the EPA said that 20,000 people running the same route was one source or not.”
One indication that the EPA likely would consider 20,000 runners a single source of pollution is that the agency is trying to regulate waste-water runoff and emissions of drilling rigs in oil fields by attempting to define entire areas as a single source of pollution, Barton says.
Yeah, I totally see how 20,000 runners are the same thing as 20,000 drilling rigs. Rep. Barton’s analogy is ridiculous. The rest of America (the sane part) knows the difference.
Since it’s introduction last month, the Waxman-Markey climate change/energy bill has been in committee. To most people, the bill is being negotiated prior to vote by the Energy and Commerce Committee. To those who are closely following the bill’s progress, the process strikes us as less negotiation and more like watering down a few key details. Unfortunately, that was what I expected would happen after reading the bill’s summary. It didn’t start from what I consider the most appropriate positions (yearly emission levels, among others). Now it appears as though key provisions of the bill are suffering substantial hits in order to garner one additional vote here or there from House ConservaDems. Here are a few of the details:
Negotiations on the climate bill continue to focus on four key issues: the stringency and timetable of the cap-and-trade program’s emission limits, the use of offsets to ease industrial compliance costs, allocation of valuable allowances and the structure of a nationwide renewable electricity standard.
A deal is close to being made on the distribution of emission allowances that begins by giving away as much as 55% of the credits for free. That means industry would receive credits for free for 10-15 years before an auction system is fully brought online. Um, what’s the point then? If industry is allowed to continue polluting and using credits to count against that pollution for 10-15 years, it won’t matter how good that auction system would be – the climate system will likely have already passed several important tipping points. The worst effects of climate change would be locked into the system for hundreds to thousands of years – well beyond the insignificant time-frame that industry would be allowed to profit off of their polluting ways. Rep. Waxman is taking the role of good negotiator with the following:
While the final details remain to be worked out, Waxman acknowledged that he is comfortable with distributing credits for free as a way to help industries transition into a low-carbon economy and during the period when an international climate agreement takes shape.
As Joseph Romm points out at the post I linked to above, this might be alright if the allocations are required to sunset. I probably shouldn’t hold my breath expecting future Congresses not to tinker with that provision, however. Although, realistically, such a statement holds true for the legislation as a whole. Future Congresses can alter and update this legislation as they see fit.
More negotiation details:
Lawmakers are also narrowing in on a 2020 emissions limit, another central piece of a final agreement. Obama’s budget request suggested a 14 percent cut below 2005 levels by 2020, while Waxman had pressed for a 20 percent cut. Several of the Democratic moderates had initially suggested a 6 percent target for 2020, but Waxman balked at that proposal.
Butterfield [Rep. G.K. Butterfield, N.C.-01] said yesterday that he would be willing to accept Obama’s targets. “Let’s shoot for 14 percent,” he said. “I can live with 14 percent.”
This is an extremely poor decision, brought about by the initial weak proposal put forth by Reps. Waxman and Markey as well as the proposed number proposed by President Obama. 14% below 2005 levels almost gets us to 1990 GHG emission levels. Not concentrations, emission levels. Given the current state of climate research that I’ve read about in the past couple of months, this simply will not fix the crisis that is devleoping. We need at least 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. That might not be viewed as politically viable today, but when large portions of Rep. Butterfield’s district is covered by rising sea levels, perhaps he and other politicians will have a different opinion. The same goes for other Dems acting in the interests of the fossil fuel industry: when your districts bear the brunt of whatever changes you lock us into, will your constituents will be kind enough to thank you for looking out for industry and not them? The politics of the 20th century are not equipped to deal with the emerging crises of the 21st, that much is clear.
