New U.S. Climate Service

In a much-needed step in the 21st century, the Obama administration announced earlier this week that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a new climate service.  It’s modeled after the National Weather Service.  The difference will be the kinds and lengths of forecasts issued to different kinds of consumers and the relationships the Climate Service will develop with those consumers.

The Climate Service has its own web portal: www.climate.gov.

Among other things this new service must learn to do quickly is disseminate information to a woefully under-educated public regarding the current state of climate science.  Indeed, the service faces massive headwinds that are coming from some of the richest and largest corporations the world has ever seen, who have an interest (immoral as it may be) in bashing real science in pursuit of their record profits.

Take a trip over to the new site.  They’ve got easy-to-read snapshots of climate components like temperature, carbon dioxide, arctic sea ice and more.  They’ve got articles, images, and access to data and services.  Which takes me to a point I want to make.  Most climate change deniers complain that data records aren’t accessible, which as you can plainly see, isn’t true.  The public pays for the data through taxes (investments) and thus access to the data is wide open to that public.

Want More Proof Bipartisanship Can’t Happen, Dems?

Democrats need to crack open some dictionaries and look up definitions for partisanship and bipartisanship. They then need to get in front of every camera and reporter they can find, day after day, and demand the Republicans learn the definitions as well.

From an MSNBC article:

In the first major move to jump-start his health care agenda after his party’s loss of a filibuster-proof Senate majority, Obama on Sunday invited GOP and Democratic leaders to discuss possible compromises in a half-day, televised gathering on Feb. 25.

It comes amid widespread complaints that Democrats’ efforts so far have been too partisan and secretive.

Do you see, Sens. Bennet and Udall, what happens when you extend your hands, your fig leaves, your whatevers, over and over and over to Republicans? Do you see how your efforts to be bipartisan, because you’re afraid of being called partisan, are responded? Do you fully understand the folly of spending months chasing down just one Republican Senator, supposedly the most “moderate” of that corrupt, ideologically driven party?

You get that bipartisanship pushed back in your face. You get called partisan, no matter what you do. You don’t get that one magical, imaginary moderate Republican to ever show up and vote with you.

No matter what you do to get the cowardly Republicans to the discussion table, they will not reciprocate. They will continue to spit in your face and stab you in your back and still call you names in the press in D.C. and back home.

Senators, you were supposedly elected and appointed to office to actually get things done for Coloradans; to look out for our interests.

Sending out press releases proclaiming how super-bipartisanshipy you are while President Obama’s chief domestic policy languishes and you stay silent isn’t acting for Coloradans and their interests.

Sen. Bennet – you will lose your election bid this year if you remain silent. I don’t particularly care one way or the other if Romanoff beats you or if Norton beats you. Your silence will earn you your well-deserved beating sometime this year. All the corporate money in the world won’t convince the rank-and-file Democrats and ever-wishy-washy Unaffiliateds to vote for you in sufficient numbers to keep your pandering butt in that seat.  We the people don’t need more proof that bipartisanship can’t and won’t happen with this generation of extremists in the Republican Party.  We can’t afford Senators that seem to need endless amounts of proof, either.

Fight for us, Senators, or we will fight against you as hard as we fight against the Cons.

Cross-posted at SquareState.

CO Oil/Gas Output Up in 2009

The amount of oil and natural gas drilled out of the ground in Colorado increased in 2009 from 2008. This occurred in the face of the Great Recession. This occurred despite new rules that Republicans wanted to convince voters would “kill jobs”.

If the Cons want to blame something for the loss of jobs, maybe they should look to the oil and gas corporations instead of the Democrat in the Governor’s seat. If production was up in 2009 (to record levels for natural gas and near-record levels for oil) and workers were laid off, then aren’t the corporations at fault?

In fact, 1,773 new wells were placed in 2009. While that is a decrease from 2008, the number of wells drilled in CO exceeded the number in Wyoming and New Mexico. According to the fear-mongering Republicans, however, the oil and gas industry was going to leave CO for our neighboring states because of the new rules implemented by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. That obviously didn’t happen, just as a couple of us here at SquareState accurately predicted.

Are the rules delaying the permit approval process, another claim the Republicans made time and time again in 2009? No. The average time to approve a drilling permit fell from 96 to 25 days, a huge improvement demonstrating that government works!

To recap: Republicans were flat wrong about drillers leaving the state. Republicans were flat wrong about the oil and gas industry suffering under responsible, common-sense rules that went into effect last year. Republicans were flat wrong about permits taking longer due to too much government interference.

Cross-posted at SquareState.

State Farm Cancels Thousands of Florida Policies As Potential For Damaging Hurricanes Increases

I saw this interesting article today.  State Farm is sending notice to 125,000 Floridian policyholders of their intent to cancel their house insurance in six months time.  Why?  Because State Farm couldn’t get a 47% rate increase approved by Florida regulators.  Why the desire to increase rates that much?  Because of events in the past and potential events in the future.

Three hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 caused $38 Billion in losses.  As a result, State Farm hasn’t issued a new policy in the hurricane-prone area in over a year now.  Climate change denialists would make for terrible insurance companies.  The power of each potential future landfalling hurricane is expected to increase as a result of climate change.  While the denialists certainly don’t care, insurance companies like State Farm obviously do.  Their business model isn’t prepared to deal with more powerful hurricanes that strike Florida.  This is interesting considering the past two years have been relatively quiet in terms of landfalling tropical systems in the Atlantic basin.  As El Nino fades away, I would expect the next couple of years to look more like the 2005/2008 seasons.

This also comes on the heel of a decision in North Carolina not to insure properties on the Outer Banks for much the same reason.  Increasing chances of more severe hurricanes means insurers can’t make a profit in the face of a riskier environment.

I expect to see more stories like this as time goes on and insurers are faced with crippling claims from millions of people affected by climate change effects, which are also forecasted to increase in number and severity.  It would behoove State Farm and other insurance companies to lobby the Senate to get a climate bill passed as soon as possible.  The sooner our greenhouse gas pollutants are reduced, the sooner our maximum climate forcing will happen, the sooner it will make sense to continue to insure people for their belongings and properties.  How they approach legislation will go a long way in signaling how seriously they take this issue.

Energy-Related Items In Obama’s 2011 Budget

I wanted to know a little more about President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget as it related to energy items.  I’m wondering what priorities his administration has, for instance.  I can’t say that after taking a brief look around I’m totally pleased with what I found.  There is too much of a budget boost to legacy energy systems and not enough emphasis, in my opinion, to the energy systems of the future.  Those future systems are what I think the government should be funding.  Without a doubt, the subsidies to the dirty energy industry need to be cut off completely.  They’re mature to the point of being nearly monopolistic, which means they can stand or fall on their own merits now.  With that in mind, here is some of what I’ve found.

SEC Now Requires Companies To Disclose Climate Risks To Investors

In a move that has been way too long in coming, the SEC last week voted 3-2 to approve guidelines to require companies to consider climate change effects, and laws/regulations/international accords designed to reduce climate change forcing when disclosing risks to investors.

This regulatory hurdle will provide additional information to investors, who petitioned the SEC in 2007, 2008 and 2009 stating they didn’t have the information they needed to make well-researched decisions.  Read that again: investors asked the SEC to develop these guidelines so they could make better decisions.  Not part-time investors from home; investors managing over $1 Trillion in assets.  These folks are very serious about what they do.  They have delivered a message to the extremists running today’s Republican Party: your refusal to deal with this issue honestly has hurt our ability to do our jobs effectively.

American businesses have been left unprepared for the damages inflicted by climate change that has already occurred, as well as the effects yet to be felt.  Not only that, Republicans have forced American businesses to become less competitive than their international counterparts.  How very patriotic of them.

This is one more necessary step on the path toward fleshing out the 21st century clean energy economy.  Kudos to the three realists on the SEC commission who voted in favor of America.

Example of Scientific Peer-Review Working

In the past few years, a TV weatherman, Anthony Watts, has attacked organizations such as NOAA of “fraud” and “acting in bad faith” with regard to long-term surface temperature records in the U.S., among other things.  He runs a propagandist website where he says whatever his backers want him to say.  He uses his designation as TV weatherman to pull the wool over climate change denialists’ eyes – since he’s a weatherman and he doesn’t “believe in” climate change, any work he does to disprove it should count for more than the work of thousands of climate scientists worldwide.  It’s disingenuous and disgusting, but unfortunately not shocking.

I’m going to share a bit of history about some of his propaganda efforts to set the stage for a new study to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research which expanded on one of Watts’ efforts and which resulted in exactly the opposite result as the one Watts came up with.  The whole affair can be summarized by saying that peer-review is the accepted path to publishing scientific information for a very good reason.  Propaganda doesn’t make its way through the process.  Just good, hard science.