Climate Progress |
- NOAA: "El Niño is expected to strengthen and last through" winter — record temperatures are coming
- Energy and Global Warming News for August 6th: Arctic Ocean "could be a stagnant, polluted soup" by 2070 without sharp GHG cuts
- Coal industry flack says mountaintop removal solves 'lack of flat space' in Appalachia
- How the Senate can fix cost containment in the climate bill with 'price collar plus'
- Obama announces $2.4B in stimulus funds for U.S. batteries and EVs: "I don't want to just reduce our dependence on foreign oil and then end up being dependent on their foreign innovations."
- Unscientific America 2: Buy the book — and read it.
- Energy and Global Warming News for August 5th: Mexico working on plan to cut CO2 growth; Clean energy rises at old manufacturing sites
| NOAA: "El Niño is expected to strengthen and last through" winter — record temperatures are coming Posted: 06 Aug 2009 10:03 AM PDT NOAA's National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center released its monthly El Niño/Southern oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion:
This announcement is not surprising news — it mainly means the ENSO models are on track (see NOAA says "El Niño arrives; Expected to Persist through Winter 2009-10″ — and that means record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record). But this evolving story remains a big deal from the perspective of heating up global temperatures and cooling off denier talking points. After all, the La Niña conditions over the past 18 months helped temporarily mute the strong human-caused warming signal, allowing the global warming deniers to push their nonsensical global cooling meme with the help of the status quo media (see "Media enable denier spin 1: A (sort of) cold January [2008] doesn't mean climate stopped warming"). Remember, back in January, NASA had predicted: "Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance." So I will continue posting at least monthly updates. Regular readers can skip the rest of this post (though it does have some new figues).
It is the warming in the Nino 3.4 region of the Pacific that is typically used to define an El Niño. The region can be seen in this figure:
How are El Niño and La Niña defined?
You can read the basics about ENSO here. The following historical data are from NOAA's weekly ENSO update As the planet warms decade by decade thanks to human emissions of greenhouse gases, global temperature records tend to be set in El Niño years, like 2005, 1998, and 2007, whereas sustained La Niñas tend to cause relatively cooler years. Human-caused global warming is so strong, however, that as NASA explained, it took a serious La Niña, plus unusually sustained low levels of solar irradiance, to make 2008 as cool as it was. Yet, notwithstanding the global warming deniers and the status quo media, 2008 wasn't actually cool. Indeed, 2008 was almost 0.1°C warmer than the decade of the 1990s averaged as a whole. And not that there was any realistic chance global temperatures would collapse this year, but now it is quite safe to say that "this will be the hottest decade in recorded history by far." The 2000s are on track to be nearly 0.2°C warmer than the 1990s. And that temperature jump is especially worrisome since the 1990s were only 0.14°C warmer than the 1980s. If we have a moderate to strong El Niño, then, as NASA says, record global temperatures are all but inevitable. The NCDC already reported June was the second hottest on record with ocean temperatures the warmest on record — a full 0.11°F warmer than the 2005 record. It typically takes several months for ENSO to impact global temps. And this brings us back to NOAA's updated prediction. Here were the model forecasts from June: Figure 5. Forecasts of sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies for the Niño 3.4 region (5°N-5°S, 120°W-170°W). Figure courtesy of the International Research Institute (IRI) for Climate and Society. Figure updated 15 June 2009. Now here is the update as of July 16 [don't ask me why these are always 3 weeks old, ask NOAA]:
Note that the June models that predicted a strengthening were correct. Also, Nino 3.4 in July averaged more than +0.8°C, so again, we see the July models that had predicted strengthening seem to be more accurate. A hot summer and fall — how timely that would be for debating a climate bill? |
| Posted: 06 Aug 2009 09:03 AM PDT
Polluters See Green in Carbon Market
Limits on Speculative Trading Needed to Protect Energy Markets, U.S. Regulator Says
Group pushes 'clean coal' in ad blitz
Vestas sit-in six call on country to show support
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| Coal industry flack says mountaintop removal solves 'lack of flat space' in Appalachia Posted: 06 Aug 2009 05:32 AM PDT You can't make this stuff up — and you can't keep up with the staggering amount of fraud and falsehood coming out of industry. Brad Johnson reports on one of the most outrageous coal-industry statements made in recent years. ACCCE's Joe Lucas has just jumped to the front of the race for "Greenwasher of the Year." The coal industry front group embroiled in an Astroturf scandal is now arguing that mountaintop removal coal mining helps communities "hampered because of a lack of flat space." Joe Lucas, vice president of communications for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), told the Guardian that dynamiting the tops off of mountains — far from being the "rape of Appalachia" — is actually a boon to rural communities:
The concept of "responsible" mountain-top mining is laughable, as Mountain Justice explains:
ACCCE's Joe Lucas — who can't even admit that coal pollution contributes to global warming — is giving new meaning to the idea of the Flat Earth Society. Related Posts: |
| How the Senate can fix cost containment in the climate bill with 'price collar plus' Posted: 05 Aug 2009 05:20 PM PDT The climate and clean energy bill that narrowly passed the House has three problems related to cost containment (CC) that the Senate should — and I expect will — address:
I'm going to try to take the best of all the current CC proposals and propose an alternative that I think might actually be appealing to all sides, what I'm calling "price collar plus." Two weeks ago, the Brookings Institution — which I'd view as center-right on the energy and climate issue now that David Sandalow has left — proposed a traditional price collar in Politico, "Time for a price collar on carbon." To their credit, they did suggest this was a way to "rein in offsets" but offered no specifics on how to achieve that important end. The benefit of a price collar to Brookings:
The House climate bill already has a price floor for the auction, which starts at $10 a ton in 2012 and rises 5% plus inflation every year thereafter. I believe most everyone understands the need for a rising price floor — giving some certainty to businesses about investment decisions they make, say, in biomass cofiring or natural gas fuel switching. The floor in Waxman-Markey is, by almost every independent analysis, on the low side in the sense that the CBO and EPA and especially the EIA project the price for a CO2 allowance in 2020 will be above the floor — in EIA's estimation, double the floor price. The fossil fuel industry, of course, funds economic analyses that project incredibly high allowance prices to scare people into opposing the bill entirely. If their analyses were anywhere near accurate, the floor in the House bill would be utterly irrelevant. I'd love a higher floor, but since it has already passed the House, we're probably stuck with it. A price collar, of course, requires a ceiling to go with the floor. Brookings explains:
That kind of cap-busting safety valve is not good from an environmental perspective (see "Safety Valves Won't Make Us Safer"). That's why I have long opposed such safety valves (see "The history of the 'safety valve' debate"), especially when set at ridiculously low levels, such as $7 per metric ton of CO2-equivalent (and rising a tad above inflation annually), as the National Commission on Energy Policy proposed in 2004. NCEP's new report, "Managing Economic Risk in a Greenhouse Gas Cap-and-Trade Program," also endorses a safety-valve-type ceiling, but then wisely offers up this proposal:
Exactly. You don't want the government to sell an unlimited number of allowances that represent no emissions reduction whatsoever at the ceiling price. You want to borrow the best feature of the strategic reserve, which is that the allowances the government sells are, to start, skimmed off of the emissions caps from 2012 to 2050. In Waxman-Markey, a pool of allowances is made available for strategic reserve auctions consisting of
That was I think a good compromise by environmentalists. It acts a lot like a safety valve, but maintains environmental integrity (at least to start). The enviros (and whoever else signed off on this deal), however, made two mistakes. First, in the final House bill, they set an initial trigger price for the strategic reserve of $28 — which is the equivalent of the "ceiling" or "safety valve" price — but that price quickly shifts to 160% of the average auction price of allowances over the previous 36 months. Zzzzzzzzzz. Crickets chirp. Glaciers melt. That approach was dissatisfying to everybody — or rather it was confusing to everybody and dissatisfying to the few people who wasted time figuring out what it meant. For progressives who think there are an overabundance of domestic clean energy solutions available, and hence that the permit price will stay close to the floor for at least a decade (see here), it meant the reserve auction trigger price — aka the effective ceiling price for allowances — might be maybe only $22 a ton in CO2, a ridiculously low ceiling. And that meant if we turned out to be wrong about, say, the supply of moderate-cost natural gas, then even a tiny allowance price spike would trigger the reserve auction. But for moderates and conservatives, who tend to believe that the allowance price in 2020 will be much higher, even higher than EIA's $36 a ton, then the ceiling in 2020 might be $60 a ton or higher, which for them is no protection at all from speculators or from the technology optimists being wrong or from offset prices being much higher than they thought. The point is, the strategic reserve "ceiling" price in the House bill was designed in a manner to make everybody unhappy. For instance, NCEP — which I'd characterize as center right today (see here) — was worried the ceiling/safety-valve price in 2015 might be as high as $49 a ton [though I think they did their math a little wrong]. Now NCEP does say:
Me, too. A majority of House members voted for the reserve trigger price to rise 5 percent plus the rate of inflation for 2013 and 2014 until the complicated formula kicked in for 2015 on. Sp I'm going to propose what I think is the simplest and most obvious fix: The floor price for the regular allowance auction should start at $10 a ton in 2012, and the reserve trigger price (aka the effective allowance ceiling price) should start at $28 a ton in 2012 — and those collar prices should rise 5% plus inflation every year thereafter. NCEP elaborates on the benefits of a price collar:
But NCEP also explains the value of the reserve:
Price collar plus should be attractive to both sides Fence-sitting Senators and industries can legitimately see it as achieving stronger cost-containment protection than their analysis suggests the House bill now provides, including protection against speculators running the permit price up, while progressives can legitimately see it as achieving better environmental outcomes than their analysis suggests the House bill now provides. Win-win. TWO FINAL TWEAKS I would keep the W-M provision that "the annual limit on the number of emission allowances from the strategic reserve account that may be auctioned is an amount equal to 5 percent of the emission allowances established for that calendar year." It is hard to see how one would need more than 5% in any given year, especially when there are so many domestic and international offsets available for emitters to purchase — and of course so many strategies emitters can use to reduce their emissions and hence their need to purchase permits. BUT I would change how Waxman-Markey refills the reserve once the initial reserve is auctioned out. W-M fills the reserve with "international offset credits from reduced deforestation." Bad idea. Reduced deforestation should be utterly separate and additional. We have no hope whatsoever of averting catastrophic global warming if we don't sharply cut fossil fuel emissions here (and abroad) while simultaneously stopping deforestation [see "How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution"]. And one of the best things in the House bill is that it already devotes substantial funds generated from the allowances to stopping deforestation — achieving some 720 million tons of emissions reductions in 2020, equal to 10% of total current US greenhouse gases — all of which are additional to the domestic GHG reductions. The notion that deforestation tons should be separate and additional should be be an inviolate principle of U.S. action. No, I would fill the reserve with domestic offsets. I'm not really expecting the initial reserve to sell out until well past 2020. And I know the businesses who signed onto this deal wanted a large pool to refill the reserve — but at the likely trigger or ceiling price post-2020 (more than $40 a ton of CO2e), there would in fact be a lot of domestic offsets. And I have more confidence in our ability to ensure the quality of domestic offsets than I do of our ability to ensure the quality of international offsets (though I do expect the quality of the latter to get better). Moreover, if CBO is right, then half of the domestic offsets are going to be genuine emissions reductions in uncapped sectors. And the other half will be soil/forestry/agricultural sequestration, which should make certain politically powerful domestic groups happy. So this strikes me as both better environmentally and more attractive politically to US Senators. Finally, I'd like to re-offer my suggestion of how to "rein in offsets," as Brookings suggests. I consider all of the following cost containment measures a major concession by those who want the strongest possible environmental integrity for the bill:
So my final recommended change is one I have been proposing for a while –sunset the offsets. My more politically palatable version is to apply the same reduction to the offsets that you are applying to emissions in the bill:
I am aware that the domestic offsets are probably too popular to sunset — so the sunsetting could be applied simply to international offsets. The other advantage of that, as one economist told me, is that it would provide extra motivation to developing countries to engage in the process early, since they'd know that the U.S. wasn't going to keep purchasing international offsets forever. There it is — price collar plus. |
| Posted: 05 Aug 2009 01:14 PM PDT President Obama announced 48 new advanced battery and electric drive projects that will receive $2.4 billion in stimulus funds. You can read details here. The awards cover:
Obama is always at the leading edge of progressive messaging, so I'll excerpt the energy portion of his remarks in Wakarusa, Indiana today below:
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| Unscientific America 2: Buy the book — and read it. Posted: 05 Aug 2009 12:10 PM PDT
In short, the fate of perhaps the next 100 billion people to walk the Earth rests in the hands of scientists (and those who understand the science) trying to communicate the dire nature of the climate problem (and the myriad solutions available now) as well as the ability of the media, the public, opinion makers, and political leaders to understand and deal with that science. And so what could be more timely — and disquieting — than a book titled Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future? The book is by Chris Mooney, whose science blog was a major inspiration for me to pursue blogging, and scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum. While it notably and presciently disses former TV meteorologist Watts for his unscientific obsession with pushing weather data in the climate debate (see "Unscientific America, Part 1: From the moon-landing deniers to WattsUpWithThat"), climate-saturated CP readers will be happy to know that very little of the book actually focuses on global warming. Rather, this short, highly readable book is a survey of the sorry state of scientific understanding and communication in this country, ending with some proposals for improving the situation. Here are some of the interesting/depressing factoids from the book:
On the flip side, the book describes at length a problem I discuss here — Why scientists aren't more persuasive, Part 1. Scientists who are also great public communicators, like Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman, have grown scarcer as science has become increasingly specialized. Moreover, the media likes the glib and the dramatic, which is the style most scientists deliberately avoid. As Jared Diamond (author of Collapse) wrote in a must-read 1997 article on scientific messaging (or the lack thereof), "Scientists who do communicate effectively with the public often find their colleagues responding with scorn, and even punishing them in ways that affect their careers." After Carl Sagan became famous, he was rejected for membership in the National Academy of Sciences in a special vote. This became widely known, and, Diamond writes, "Every scientist is capable of recognizing the obvious implications for his or her self-interest. Scientists who have been outspoken about global warming have been repeatedly attacked as having a "political agenda." As one 2006 article explained, "For a scientist whose reputation is largely invested in peer-reviewed publications and the citations thereof, there is little professional payoff for getting involved in debates that mix science and politics." Mooney also lays out the "tribulations of the science pipeline" by quoting "a painfully eloquent recent blog commenter" on Science Progress:
If a projection Mooney quotes is right — "the chance of a PhD recipient under age 35 winning a tenure-track job has tumbled to only 7%" — then he offers a crucial suggestion:
The book ends with a quote from C. P. Snow's famous "two cultures" lecture, in which he "express the nature of change we need fixing fleet, yet powerfully":
Of course, that lecture was 50 years ago — and the divide seems as big as ever, so that isn't a cause for much optimism. I do think that every scientist-in-training today should be required to take a course in communication, a course in energy, and a course in climate science. The smart ones will specialize in some discipline related to sustainability because when the nation and the world get desperate about global warming in the next decade or two, the entire focus of society, of scientists and engineers, and of academia will be directed toward a WWII-scale effort to mitigate what we can and adapting to the myriad miseries that our mypopic dawdling has made inevitable. My one small problem with the book's analysis is that it portrays US popular culture, especially Hollywood, as anti-scientist, but that was really true before the rise of IT, the internet, and rich nerds. TV in particular is much more favorably disposed toward scientist characters than movies were, say, two or three decades ago. If I have time, I'll blog on that. Normally I half-jokingly tell people they only need to buy my books, not read them. I mean who reads non-fiction books cover to cover anymore? But this is one to buy and read in its entirety (which is only 132 pages of text). Kudos to Mooney and Kirshenbaum. You can read RealClimate's review here. |
| Posted: 05 Aug 2009 10:39 AM PDT Mexico Aims To Bring CO2 Cut Plan To Climate Talks
At Old Manufacturing Sites, Renewables Rise
Improved Air Quality During Beijing Olympics Could Inform Pollution-curbing Policies
Government unveils high-speed rail plan to ground short flights
A Different Take on the U.S.-India Climate Change "Spat"
'We Do Not Want to See The Blame Game'
Study: LEDs Most Efficient Over Lifetime
Officials: CA could face devastating fire season
Habitat for Humanity Gets Greener
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