Month: March 2016

As the coal industry slides into whatever dark bin of history is reserved for slavers, child labor, injun hunters, witch burners and pogromists – we’re  finding the tracks of coal’s monstrous little errand boys.

Including my old buddy Chris Horner. (I gave Chris an epic ass-kicking in a debate some years ago) Above, you can see classic Horner at work flacking climate denial on Fox News. Particularly relevant segment because it illustrates the “we’re just about to head into an ice age” climate crock – a few years before the planet began its current temperature rocket ride.

The video peels back the curtain so you can see how the black magic is done, and shows one of the foremost practitioners in action.  Horner perfected the fake tan long before Donald Trump.

PRWatch:

Chris Horner, a DC-based lawyer, climate change denier and Fox News regular, is also being paid as a “Regulatory Counsel” for the coal company, Alpha Natural Resources, according to bankruptcy filings reviewed by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Horner’s repeated filing of lawsuits against leading U.S. climate scientists has been described as “harassment.”

Alpha funding for Horner was first reported by Lee Fang, writing for the Intercept in August 2015 from earlier bankruptcy filings, although his role as Counsel was unknown until now.

Horner’s role as Regulatory Counsel for Alpha is described in a declaration that he signed, and which was filed with the bankruptcy court on January 11, 2016. Another document shows that funding from Alpha to Horner has continued through to at least the end of January, 2016, which is the most recent reporting period.

As the Wall Street Journal has reported, Horner was paid a total of $18,600 by Alpha for the months of May, June and July 2015. More recent filings reviewed by CMD show that he has subsequently been paid at least $12,000 more since then, taking the total amount to at least $30,600 for the nine month period between May 2015 and Jan 2016.

With the U.S. coal industry increasingly collapsing, coal company bankruptcy filings are now revealing what has long been suspected but not proven: that leading climate change deniers and many of the biggest defenders of coal, are funded by the industry that they are working to protect.

Continue reading “Whore on Coal: Chris Horner is Coal’s Monstrous Errand Boy”

New interest in the video from last year, in light of Jim Hansen’s hotly discussed new paper.

Phil Plait in Slate:

On Twitter the other day, climatologist Michael Mann mentioned a denier trying to debunk global warming by saying that Iceland was having a record cold wave.

Mind you, in general this is trivial to debunk. There are two words in the phrase “global warming,” and one of them is global. Averaged over the entire planet, temperatures are going up. But there will always be some places, over some period of time, which will get colder. Even get record cold snaps!

But that area near Iceland is special.

The map above shows global temperature anomalies for 2015, deviations from the average (where the average is calculated over the baseline of 1951–1980). As you can see, most of the Earth was much warmer than average, but there’s a cold blob off Iceland and Greenland.

It turns out this blob is not just some random fluctuation. In fact, counterintuitively, global warming predicts this cold spot! Peter Sinclair, who makes very well thought-out and simple climate change videos, made an excellent one last year explaining this pretty clearly:

 

The bombshell paper that James Hansen first released pre-publication last summer has now made it thru review to publication, in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.(free online here)

The paper is significant for readers of this blog, because a year ago, I produced a video describing observations in the North Atlantic that are consistent with one of the main premises of the paper, a slowdown of Atlantic Overturning circulation – with scientists Stefan Rahmstorf, Michael Mann, and Jason Box. I’ve posted that video at the bottom.
Dr. Mann is quoted in the Washingon Post, (below) expressing some reservations about the new study, so room for a follow up there.

Above, in my December interview, Hansen gives a quick thumbnail. Below, his new video has a more detailed, illustrated description.

PBS Nova:

The world’s oceans could rise catastrophically as soon as 50 years from now, according to a new paper published this morning in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

The researchers behind the paper—Dr. James Hansen and 18 coauthors—looked back to 120,000 years ago, the last time the Earth warmed by the about the same amount it has today. (Global temperatures are now 1˚ C, or 1.8˚ F, above preindustrial levels.) Back then, natural warming unleashed nearly all of the water locked in polar ice sheets, sending sea levels surging 20-30 feet higher.

Washington Post:

An influential group of scientists led by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist often credited with having drawn the first major attention to climate change in 1988 congressional testimony, has published a dire climate study that suggests the impact of global warming will be quicker and more catastrophic than generally envisioned.

The research invokes collapsing ice sheets, violent megastorms and even the hurling of boulders by giant waves in its quest to suggest that even 2 degrees Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial levels would be far too much. Hansen has called it the most important work he has ever done.

The sweeping paper, 52 pages in length and with 19 authors, draws on evidence from ancient climate change or “paleo-climatology,” as well as climate experiments using computer models and some modern observations. Calling it a “paper” really isn’t quite right — it’s actually a synthesis of a wide range of old, and new, evidence.

“I think almost everybody who’s really familiar with both paleo and modern is now very concerned that we are approaching, if we have not passed, the points at which we have locked in really big changes for young people and future generations,” Hansen said in an interview.

The research, appearing Tuesday in the open-access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, has had a long and controversial path to life, having first appeared as a “discussion paper” in the same journal, subject to live, online peer review — a novel but increasingly influential form of scientific publishing. Hansen first told the press about the research last summer, before this process was completed, leading to criticism from some journalists and also fellow scientists that he might be jumping the gun.

Continue reading “All Star Science Panel Drops Bombshell Climate Paper”

55 minutes.

I usually prefer to stay off camera, but they did a good job here.

One big goof on my part, I mistated Michigan’s renewable portfolio standard
as 15 percent, it’s ten.
Otherwise not a bad synopsis.
Most of it globally applicable, some discussion of impacts in upper midwest.

Covers what Exxon knew, the disinformation society, key impacts, the China question,  and solutions.

One of the best snapshots of where we are climate-wise. Well done @PeterWSinclair @ec_minister @gmbutts @Glen4ONT https://t.co/cr1vV7gQ2u

— FreshSand (@Trimtabber) March 23, 2016

Ok, I know they mispelled “English” in the thumbnail, but this is actually not too bad, if only for the nifty energy storage tech described at 2:50.

We can’t build a future that we can’t imagine. Images are food.  One of the greatest values of the German Energiewende, and the reason the Fox News crowd is disinformed about it at every opportunity – is that it serves as an example of what can be done. For example of outrageous anti-renewable disinfo, see the video here, starting 2:45:

Below, wind guru Paul Gipe discusses distributed energy.

and under the fold, my very popular take on the solar revolution.

Continue reading “Imagine a New Energy System”

Joe Romm at ClimateProgress:

Last year saw the biggest jump in global CO2 levels ever measured, as NOAA reported on March 9. Yet in 2015 the world economy grew while energy-related CO2 emissions were flat — for the second year in a row — according to the International Energy Agency, as ClimateProgress reported last week.

This puzzled more than one reader. One emailed me the following: “the IEA is saying that emissions have gone flat, while, at the same time, NOAA is announcing that we just had the largest-ever jump in CO2 [levels]. Logic would seem to dictate that someone has their figures wrong. Flat emissions should not translate into record CO2 jumps.”

What’s going on? Two things:

• Annual CO2 emissions are very different from global CO2 levels.
• CO2 levels tend to have big jumps in El Niño years.

Let’s go through those two, especially since this discussion gets to the heart of what I call “the biggest source of confusion in the public climate discussion” in my recent book, “Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know.” It also goes to the heart of why delaying action is so dangerous and costly. Continue reading “Say What? CO2 Emissions Down. Atmospheric CO2 Up.”

Description:

Myths of “Baseload power” are blown away by real world experience.

Midwest Energy News:

What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?

That’s a question that wind power skeptics or critics frequently ask. While coal, nuclear and gas plants theoretically run uninterrupted whenever they are called upon, humans have no control over when wind turbines stop and start spinning. Some utility and power company officials say this is a reason that “reliable,” baseload power should be valued more than wind.

But in a report released Thursday and an accompanying webinar, experts with the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) explained how wind can actually be seen as a more reliable source than conventional power plants — one that contributes to rather than inhibits the stability of the grid as a whole.

This is good news given that wind is considered a lynchpin of meeting the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon reduction goals in the Clean Power Plan. No one disputes that wind is a zero-carbon and low-cost source of energy, but AWEA’s report underscores that it is also a reliable way to “keep the lights on.”

Overwrought concerns about wind’s reliability often center on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the grid works, the report indicates. Since its inception more than a century ago, the grid has inherently handled a constant flux of supply and demand. All power sources involve some level of variability, and demand can vary greatly minute by minute. For example, AWEA points to energy demand during a 1990 World Cup game between England and Germany when demand spiked sharply during breaks, presumably as people quickly turned on appliances or electronics then turned them off once the game resumed.

Continue reading “Wind More Reliable than Fossil Fuel Power”

Dana Nuccitelli in the Guardian:

“Stunning,” “wow,” “shocker,” “bombshell,” “astronomical,” “insane,” “unprecedented”– these are some of the words climate scientists have used to describe the record-shattering global surface temperatures in February 2016.

It’s difficult to see any ‘pause’ or slowdown in the global warming over the past 50 years.

To put the current temperatures into context, prior to last October, monthly global surface temperatures had not been more than 0.96°C hotter than the 1951–1980 average, according to Nasa. The past 5 months have been 1.06°C, 1.03°C, 1.10°C, 1.14°C, and 1.35°C hotter than that average, absolutely destroying previous records. Estimates from Noaa are in broad agreement with those from Nasa.

Right now, the Earth’s average surface temperature is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years; potentially even longer.

How much of a role is El Nino Playing?

We’re currently at the peak of a very strong El Niño event, which has brought warm water up to the ocean surface. That’s certainly played a major role in the current record-breaking temperatures. The hottest years are almost invariably years with El Niño events, although 2014 was the first year in decades to set a temperature record without an El Niño.

For comparison, the current El Niño event is very similar to a previous one in 1997–1998. That event made 1998 by far the hottest year on record at the time, and it’s why contrarians often cherry pick temperatures over the past 18 years – the abnormally hot 1998 was 18 years ago.

However, the past 6 months have been 0.43°C hotter than the corresponding months in 1997–1998. So clearly, while El Niño is a big contributor to the current record-shattering temperatures, human-caused global warming is playing a major role as well. Climate scientist Michael Mann attributed the record to approximately 50% human influences, and 50% a combination of El Niño and natural weather fluctuations.

Continue reading “Scientists Running Out of Words for New Temp Record”

“The departures are what we would consider astronomical,” Blunden said. “It’s on land. It’s in the oceans. It’s in the upper atmosphere. It’s in the lower atmosphere. The Arctic had record low sea ice.”

“Everything everywhere is a record this month, except Antarctica,” Blunden said. “It’s insane.” – NOAA Climatologist Jessica Blunden, February 2016

Al Gore in the New York Times, March 19, 1989:

Just as a drug addict needs increasing doses to produce the same effect, our global appetite for the earth’s abundance grows each year. We transform the resources of the past into the pollution of the future, telescoping time for self-indulgence in the present.

In 1987, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere began to surge with record annual increases. Global temperatures are also climbing: 1987 was the second hottest year on record; 1988 was the hottest. Scientists now predect our current course will raise world temperatures five degrees Celsius in our lifetimes. The last time there was such a shift, it was five degrees colder; New York City was under one kilometer of ice. If five degrees colder over thousands of years produces an ice age, what could five degrees warmer produce in a lifetime? In a classic experiment, a frog dropped in boiling water jumps out. The same frog, put in the water before it is slowly boiled, remains in the pot. Our environment is at the boiling point. Will we react?

The 1990’s are the decade of decision. Profound changes are required. We must create a new global compact for sustainable development -for example, trading debts for shared environmental stewardship. Our agenda must include the following:

Continue reading “It’s Not Like Nobody Told Us..”