Month: January 2013

This is the headline. This is the only news that counts.

The challenge has been stated in such a way there is no going back.

Get popcorn.

UPDATE:

Joe Romm responds at ClimateProgress:

We will soon see if these words have any meaning whatsoever — since approving the Keystone XL pipeline would utterly vitiate them.

UPDATE 2:

Andrew Sullivan:

Then the big surprise: climate change. I didn’t think he’d put such a strong emphasis on it so emphatically, when the carbon energy industry is thriving, and when the economy remains depressed. But I think he realizes, as we all do, that future generations may look back on us entirely through this prism of our collective failure to conserve the very planet we live on through a mass rush for global wealth whose consequences are unknowable and yet whose power continues to pummel the earth we once knew. I have no idea what this would mean – in my dreams, a carbon tax in tax reform? – but it was heartening to see Obama return to it.

A few reactions. Ontario is blessed with a large hydro capacity,which is a perfect match for variable resources coming on line.  A big reason for the change is the current low prices for gas generation, and there are large question marks as to what the real greenhouse contributions of the natureal gas infrastructure are.

Still, phasing out coal, which accounted for 25 percent of generation, is a real achievement, and was one of the goals of energy legislation that set up feed-in-tariffs to encourage renewable development in the province. Modeled after Germany, this is, to my knowledge, this is the most aggressive and successful program in North America.

Scientific American:

By the end of the year, Ontario will become the first jurisdiction in North America to shut down almost its entire coal fleet.

Yesterday, the province announced that its last two large coal units will close before 2014, making more than 99 percent of the province’s electricity generated from non-coal sources. It is a major shift for Ontario, which fired 25 percent of its grid from coal a decade ago.

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To prepare for the coal phaseout, McGuinty introduced an aggressive energy law in 2009 establishing energy efficiency programs and a feed-in tariff providing generous financial benefits to renewable developers. Those efficiency programs have helped make Ontario one of the few jurisdictions in the world where energy demand is declining, rather than increasing, Weis said.

“This shows it is possible to do this in a jurisdiction with big electricity consumption,” he said.

The 2009 law has not been without controversy — and was recently challenged before the World Trade Organization — but it has boosted the ability of renewable power to step in for coal, according to Weis.

Wind power has grown from 400 MW of provincial power six years ago to more than 2,000 MW now. By 2030, it is projected to provide roughly 10 percent of the province’s electricity supply, despite having been a non-player in 2003.

Additionally, new natural gas plants are supplying much of the power formerly provided from coal generation, Weis said.

According to the Pembina Institute, the greenhouse gas emissions from Ontario’s electricity sector have fallen from 40 million tons to 10 million tons over the past decade because of the coal plant closings.

Continue reading “Ontario Phasing Out Coal”

Gizmodo:

You probably have seen the extreme smog in Beijing, so bad that you can observe it from space. But this shot blew my mind just because it looks like a frame from Blade Runner. So awesome—if you don’t live there. [Twitter]

A little reminder. Pollution doesn’t get cleaned up because the powerful exercise their benificent magnanimity and support the common good.
It happens because people exert pressure on their leaders to change.  The darkness in this picture tells you as much about China’s human rights as its industrial growth.

Any guesses as to whether this creationist bozo is also a climate denier?

I posted this week on the recent discussions of why carbon legislation stalled in Obama’s first term.

The discussion was sparked by an analysis from Theda Skocpol, which blamed in large part strategic blunders by big Environmental groups. I’ll admit I have read only the summaries, not the 140 page document. Joe Romm differs with the conclusion, places blame on Obama, and says why in a lengthy blog post.

ClimateProgress:

A lengthy new study opinion piece aims to pin the blame for the failure of the climate bill on the environmental community. It has already resulted in head-exploding headlines like this one in the Guardian:

First, if we’re going to truly learn from this epic failure, let’s frame the issue fully, something Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol fails to do in her incredibly long, but oddly incomplete essay, “NAMING THE PROBLEM: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight against Global Warming.”

As readers know, I think the opponents of action — the fossil fuel companies, the disinformers, the right wing media, and the anti-science anti-science, pro-pollution ideologues in the Senate – deserve 60% of the blame.  The lame-stream media gets 30% for its generally enabling coverage — see “How the status quo media failed on climate change” and The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress.” Then the “Think Small” centrists and lukewarmers get 5% for helping to shrink the political space in the debate (see hereand here).

So we are divvying up the remaining 5% of blame between team Obama and environmental groups (along with Senate Democrats, scientists, progressives, and everyone else, including me, and the American public). I’m not sure how much can be learned from the climate bill failure if your main focus is the elite environmental community. Skocpol does spend a lot of time discussing the Tea Party driven extremism of the GOP, but, I think, drawing the wrong lessons.

Second, for that last 5% blame, the lion’s share has to go to Obama (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2“). He is the agenda shaper. He has the biggest megaphone by far. He made most of the decisive blunders (see below). But not according to Skocpol. She asserts:

To hold a “failure of leadership” by Obama responsible for the ultimate shortfall for cap and trade, we would have to imagine that, in the spring of 2010, the President could have done something better or different than the USCAP leaders or Senate bargainers to satisfy Rahm Emmanuel’s realistic demand to “get me some Republicans.” We have to picture Barack Obama being more persuasive with leading Republicans than, say, Environmental Defense Fund honcho Fred Krupp, who had successfully cajoled votes out of GOP Senators in the past. I do not find that plausible. Presidential arm-twisting and sweet-talking were not the issue. Developments in the two parties, especially among Republicans, were pivotal.

Now, if that rings true to you, you don’t have to keep reading this blog post. You can dive into Skocpol’s 142-page PDF.

But skip the PDF and keep reading if — like one senior Congressional staffer involved with the bill who I ran that quote by — you think it is absurd to claim that the head of a medium-sized environmental group is more persuasive, indeed a more important leader, than the most powerful person in the free world.

Note that such questionable assertions/opinions are not rare in Skocpol’s paper, but very common. It isn’t peer-reviewed nor do I think could pass peer review, for reasons that will become clear. It is kind of a mini-book — an oral history overlaid with a bunch of opinions. But the opinions are just that and not inherently more valid than yours or mine merely because they come from a well-regarded scholar.

Obama’s failure of leadership extends far beyond “arm-twisting” and “sweet-talking.” Here are the key failures, as I see them (feel free to add your own):

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Romm on Why Climate Legislation Stalled”

Watts Up With That (WUWT) is, of course, one of the internet’s largest manufacturers of whole-cloth bullshit in regard to climate change.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
And, hey, I’ll be the first to say, I owe  WUWT proprietor Anthony Watts a big debt – his creepy, paranoid attempt to block my video about his work did wonders for my circulation, and went a long way to put this video series on the radar.

I don’t write a lot about Anthony here, because I seriously try to avoid inside-baseball squabbles, and because they’re boring, and don’t really contribute to understanding on climate. But this story is just too effin rich to ignore.

The other day Watts posted a fairly typical, for him, “science” item about signs of extraterrestrial life on a meteorite. Hilarity ensued.

Greg Laden’s Blog:

You may know the blog What’s Up With That. It is Anthony Watt’s anti-science blog, dedicated to climate change denialism.

A current post reports the finding of life forms from another planet, in a meteorite.

This looks to be a huge story, the first evidence of extraterrestrial life, if it holds up….

This is from a recent meteorite find in December 2012. A large fire ball was seen by a large number of people in Sri Lanka on December 29th 2012, during that episode a large meteorite disintegrated and fell to Earth in the village of Araganwila which is few miles away from the city of Polonnaruwa.

Look at what the electron microscope shows of a sample purported to be from the meteorite:

Then he shows a picture of a rock with a bunch of contemporary Earth Based diatoms stuck to it.

It is very fun to read the comments. I provided a comment that will not be printed because Watts never prints my comments, but I’ve screen captured it for you (it is below).

Phil Plait has reviewed the Alien Life in the Meteor story here, and as I said, it is not alien life come to earth in a meteor. It is (I guess) a fragment of a meteorite with fresh water diatoms stuck to it. There are fresh water diatoms stuck to your shoe, your car tires, your dog, everywhere. The silica bodies of these tiny algae are part of the dust, not as numerous perhaps as skin cells or, certain times of the year, pollen, or the loess blowing off the melting glaciers and such, but common. This is why real scientists grind down the meteorite, cross sectioning it, before looking at the sample.

As Phil points out, this report is by a “scientist” who has made many outrageous and incorrect claims about aliens, reported in a journal that is famous for printing bogus and incorrect science, the methods are obviously bogus and anyone who knew anything about, say, climate studies (where fresh water diatoms are used all the time as proxyindicators) would at least be suspicious, and would know how to check for veracity of the claim.

Anthony Watts, the anti-science global warming denailist, was not equipped to recognize this bogus science as bogus. We are not surprised.

Bad Astronomy:

The paper was published online on a site called The Journal of Cosmology. I’ll get back to that august publication in just a moment. The lead author is N. C. Wickramasinghe, and as soon as I saw his name alarm bells exploded in my head. Wickramasinghe is a proponent of the idea of panspermia: the notion that life originated in space and was brought to Earth via meteorites. It’s an interesting idea and not without some merits.

However, Wickramasinghe is fervent proponent of it. Like, really fervent. So much so that he attributes everything to life in space. He’s said that the flu comes from space. He’s said SARS comes from space. He’s claimed living cells found in the stratosphere come from space. (There is no evidence at all they do, and it’s far more likely they are terrestrial.) He’s said a weird red rain in India was from space (when it’s been shown conclusively that it isn’t). The list goes on and on. Wickramasinghe jumps on everything, with little or no evidence, and says it’s from outer space, so I think there’s a case to be made for a bias on his part.

Now, you might accuse me of using an ad hominem, an argument that cast aspersions on the person making the claim, and not attacking the claim itself. I’ll get to the claim in a moment, but sometimes an ad hominem is warranted! If Sylvia Brown claims she can predict someone’s future, you would be right to doubt her based on her past, since she has continually failed in every attempt to do so. If Jenny McCarthy claimed botox cures autism, again, you might be forgiven for doubting it based on her previous anti-vaccine and other false claims. You still need to examine the claims on their own merits, of course, but: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

So, to be polite about it, Wickramasinghe is something of a fringe scientist. Who would publish a paper by him?

The story was reposted on ClimateProgress. Watts called the Waahm-bulance.

Continue reading “The Search for Intelligent Life at WUWT”

 Israellycool:

We’re starting up a new post for Thursday’s news of snow across Israel. It’s now covering almost all the high ground of Israel from the Golan in the north right down to reports of snow falling in places like Dimona and Mitzpe Ramon in the south.

Jerusalem, of course, is the star blanketed by one of the heaviest snow falls in decades.

Just so you know, the twitter hash tag: #shelegeddon is a combination of the Hebrew word for snow “sheleg” and Armageddon.

 

NYTimes:

Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace.

Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.

Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.

“Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva. “The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity.”

Such events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency, Mr. Baddour said, a sign that climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of all kinds.

Leo Hickman in the Guardian:

There is already much excitement in the arts, media and beyond about the potential of crowdfunding – via sites such as Kickstarter andIndieGoGo – to finance projects that might others have remained an unfulfilled dream. To date, though, few scientific expeditions have successfully utilised crowd-funding.

The Dark Snow Project hopes to change this. Jason Box, a climatologist based at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, is hoping to raise $150,000 over the coming months to pay for an expedition this summer up onto the “ice dome” of Greenland to gather samples of snow. The project’s website explains:

Dark Snow is a field and lab project to measure the impact of changing wildfire and industrial soot on snow and ice reflectivity. Soot darkens snow and ice, increasing solar energy absorption, hastening the melt of the “cryosphere”.

The climatic impact of “black carbon” and wildfire smoke is much in the news and yet remains little understood. Last year, Box presented satellite observations (pdf) showing how soot particles drifting from tundra wildfires spread across Greenland. The big as-yet-unanswered question is whether this soot contributed towards the region’s record melt during the summer of 2012. And, if so, by how much.

“We saw complete surface melting of the [Greenland] ice sheet for the first time in observation. Would that have happened without the wildfire soot of 2012?” Box told the Guardian in December. “We don’t know. We have got to get up there and make those measurements.”

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Box has also invited Peter Sinclair along as a team-member, who, as “Greenman3610“, is probably best known for his consistently excellent YouTube videos on climate change. (Sinclair produced the video above.) In the first instance, this will ensure that anyone who has made a donation will be kept up-to-date with the researchers’ progress. But it will also mean the wider world will gain a better insight into not just the science being conducted, but also the environmental implications of soot settling on the Arctic snow and ice.

Anyone wishing to make a donation can do so on the expedition’s “Give Now” webpage.

 

The big discussion topic this week has been Theda Skocpol’s analysis of why carbon legislation has so far failed.  The not-universally-accepted analysis is that big green groups got it wrong for a number of reasons, including too much dependence on political and financial insiders to craft a solution, and political spin to sell it.

The Washington Post interviewed Skocpol this week:

Brad Plumer: You spend a lot of time dissecting the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the big collaboration between greens and businesses to push for a cap-and-trade bill that could win support from Republicans. It wasn’t a crazy strategy—cap-and-trade had picked up a fair bit of bipartisan support between 2003 and 2007. So why did it ultimately fail?

Theda Skocpol: The whole USCAP strategy was based on this very reasonable idea that you’d get Republicans in Congress to go along with Democrats. But by the time we get to 2009, Republicans just weren’t going to be there. And I don’t think environmentalists were able to see the shifting ground at the time.

BP: But was there really that big a shift among Republicans? I mean, even in the 2008 campaign, John McCain was in favor of cap-and-trade.

TS: One of the things that really surprised me in my research came from pulling together scores from the [League of Conservation Voters]. And you see a clear pull on politicians from grassroots conservative opinion around 2006 and 2007. Climate-change denial had been an elite industry for a long time, but it finally penetrated down to conservative Republican identified voters around this time. That created new pressures on Republican officeholders and candidates. And I don’t think most people noticed that at the time.

Even John McCain. I have this figure that shows him moving up on LCV scores for most of the last decade [i.e., casting more pro-environmental votes] and then pulling back suddenly to the lowest level starting in 2007.

Dave Roberts of Grist has a take on it.

Grist:

For one thing, Dems no longer have 60 senators, and likely won’t any time soon, so Democratic unity is no longer enough to get past a filibuster. For another thing, Dem unity on carbon caps simply isn’t possible. Energy is a regional issue. There are Dems from big coal and oil states who will never agree to carbon caps.

So capping carbon requires some Republicans. But Republicans have gone full nihilist on environmental protections, so no Republican will vote for carbon caps. That’s the current state of affairs.

Continue reading “Dave Roberts: The Way Through Climate Politics”