A 224-page report released yesterday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration documents in great scientific detail how specific, climate-related indicators all point in the same direction: toward an increasingly warmer world.

In its online story about the report, which was based on the work of more than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries, CNN devoted more than half the space to — SURPRISE! — a response from climate skeptics.

Well, no, not a surprise really, given CNN’s recent history of false balance when it comes to climate change coverage.

First, though, the report…

From increasing temperatures in the atmosphere and oceans to rising humidity and melting of the Earth’s cryosphere, 10 major variables — illustrated in the chart above from NOAA — show that the Earth is indeed heating up, according to the report. These factors all point in the same direction and cannot be easily explained away.

In a NOAA video, Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center summed up the significance of the changes:

“From the poles to the equator, from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean — all are telling us that things are getting warmer. That’s really persuasive evidence.”

From the report itself:

If the land surface records were systematically flawed and the globe had not really warmed, then it would be almost impossible to explain the concurrent changes in this wide range of indicators produced by many independent groups.

Year to year, purely natural variations in the climate make it difficult if not impossible to identify true long-term trends. In other words, one or two really hot or really cool years say nothing conclusive about global warming. But when climate is examined decade to decade, a clear global warming trend stands out: Each of the last three decades has been warmer than the one before it, with the 2000s 0.6 degrees C warmer than the 1960s and 1970s.

Sea surface temperatures have been rising as well, with 1998, 2003, 2005 being the three warmest years since 1950, and 2009 following not far behind. The amount of heat stored in the oceans has risen too, especially since 1990. Concurrently, sea level has risen — 2 to 3 millimeters a year since 2003.

While the extent of sea ice around Antarctica has increased slightly (by about 1 percent), in the Arctic region sea ice has shrunk by about 4 percent a year and also thinned dramatically. (Differences in geography and other factors help explain why Antarctic sea ice has not been affected by warming temperatures the way Arctic sea ice has. For more information, check out the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s “Arctic vs Antarctic” page.)

According to the report, 2008 marked the 18th consecutive year that more ice was lost by the world’s alpine glaciers than gained. Meanwhile, in Greenland the 34 widest glaciers that terminate in the ocean lost 100 square kilometers in 2009. Between 2000 and 2009, the loss of ice (measured at the end of summer) totaled almost 1,000 square kilometers. That’s an area equivalent to 11 Manhattan islands.

What was CNN’s response to all of this? Why, reprint a story from Financial Times of course — presumably because there is no one left at at the network who actually knows anything about science and the environment. And it turns out that at least half of that story is devoted to criticisms from four climate skeptics. (The analysis from The Ways Things Break puts the percentage of space devoted to false balance at more than half. Check it out for the nifty color-coded graphic!)

So more than 200 pages of well-documented science compiled by more than 300 scientists is evenly balanced with comments like this one, from Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

“It’s clear that the scientific case for global alarmism is weak. The scientific case for [many of the claims] is unsound and we are finding out all the time how unsound it is.”

Of course, we then have the requisite comeback by NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco, just for the sake of balance I guess.

That’s CNN’s coverage on the Web. But I really can’t wait to hear how Eliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker will handle stories like this on the air.

You didn’t know that CNN had hired New York’s former governor (that’s right, the one who patronized prostitutes) to go head-to-head with the syndicated conservative columnist in a new shoutfest program that will take over the network’s 8 p.m. slot? Or even better, how Piers Morgan will handle research about the fate of the planet. Not sure who he is? Here’s how the New Yorker describes Morgan in an excellent analysis of CNN’s depressing slide:

“. . . the British celebrity interviewer, talent-competition judge, and former editor of the British tabloids the News of the World and the Daily Mirror, from which he was fired in 2004 for refusing to acknowledge the paper’s mistake in publishing photographs purporting to show British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners—photos that were quickly exposed as fakes.”

With this crew, false balance will probably be the least of our problems . . .

Half of all the organic matter on our planet is produced by microscopic plants living near the surface of the world’s oceans. And if a new study published Thursday in Nature is right, these phytoplankton are in significant decline as a result of climate change.

The tiny plants play a critical role in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, adding oxygen to the atmosphere and removing carbon dioxide. In fact, every day, photosynthesis by phytoplankton removes more than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the ocean. They are also the base of the marine food chain, providing food for zooplankton, which are in turn eaten by fish.

In other words, mess with phytoplankton and you really are messing with a vital component of Earth’s life support systems. We obviously do so at our peril.

The new study shows that as sea surface temperatures have been heating up, the mass of phytoplankton in the surface waters of the world’s oceans has declined at a rate of about 1 percent per year since 1899. The researchers from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada also found that since 1950, about 40 percent of the word’s marine phytoplankton have disappeared.

“This is a definite wake-up call that our oceans are becoming increasingly stressed and this is another indicator of that,” said lead author Daniel Boyce, a marine ecologist and doctoral student at Dalhousie. Quoted in an article in the Globe and Mail, he said, “It’s quite shocking to think that there’s been a 40-per-cent decline at the base of the food chain over the past 50 years. I think it’s absolutely cause for concern.”

Jeff Masters at Weather Underground reports:

“A heat wave of unprecedented intensity has brought the world’s largest country its hottest temperature in history. On July 11, the ongoing Russian heat wave sent the mercury to 44.0°C (111.2°F) in Yashkul, Kalmykia Republic, in the European portion of Russia near the Kazakhstan border. The previous hottest temperature in Russia (not including the former Soviet republics) was the 43.8°C (110.8°F) reading measured at Alexander Gaj, Kalmykia Republic, on August 6, 1940. The remarkable heat in Russia this year has not been limited just to the European portion of the country–the Asian portion of Russia also recorded its hottest temperature in history this year, a 42.3°C (108.1°F) reading at Belogorsk,near the Amur River border with China. The previous record for the Asian portion of Russia was 41.7°C (107.1°F) at nearby Aksha on July 21, 2004.

Moscow is suffering badly and is “on track to set the record for its warmest July in history,” Masters writes. And there’s no let up in sight, with the Wunderground.com forecast for Moscow showing high temperatures up to 100 degrees F for the next week. I’ve never been to Moscow, but I doubt that air conditioning is very common there.

The extraordinary heat wave has not been limited to Russia:

. . . six nations in Asia and Africa set new all-time hottest temperature marks in June. Two nations, Myanmar and Pakistan, set all-time hottest temperature marks in May, including Asia’s hottest temperature ever, the astonishing 53.5°C (128.3°F) mark set on May 26 in Pakistan. Last week’s record in Russia makes nine countries this year that have recorded their hottest temperature in history, making 2010 the year with the most national extreme heat records.”

One hundred and twenty eight degrees. Astonishing.

Meanwhile, here in the United States it’s plenty hot in many places too. Click on the image below for more details:

So now it’s official. As the New York Times put it in their lead editorial today:

On Thursday, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, abandoned the fight for meaningful energy and climate legislation. The Republicans — surprise — had been fiercely obstructionist.

In its editorial, the Times argues that energy and climate legislation must, at a minimum, include a “cap on power plant emissions,” among a list of policy prescriptions.

Too bad the editorial board doesn’t seem to have paid any heed to the wisdom of Stephen Schneider, the renowned climate scientist who died this week. Schneider argued that we should be pursuing “no regrets” policies first — ones with “paybacks comparable to or better than normal return on investments.” We should start with these “win wins” and build “to more difficult steps such as establishing a shadow price for carbon.”

We’ve known about the risks of climate change for 30 years. The world has been trying for 20 years to craft a global solution based on capping emissions. And here we are again, with yet another editorial railing against the latest failure to enact such a cap. Once again, the New York Times seems to be saying that a comprehensive, top-down approach with some variant of cap and trade at its core is the only possible path forward.

But if you’ve been banging your head against the wall for 20 years in an attempt to break it down and get to the other side, might it be a good idea to stop for a minute to mop up the blood and ask yourself whether a different approach would make more sense? At a certain point, wouldn’t it be prudent to start pursuing alternatives to cap-and-trade?

As Andrew Revkin reported back in June, across the board, Americans “are, at best, neutral on the value of a cap-and-trade approach to restricting greenhouse gas emissions, but neutral to extremely enthusiastic about initiatives offering incentives to move to efficient or non-polluting energy choices.” Revkin cited the findings from the ‘Six Americas’ study of opinions on climate change.

In that report, even cap-and-trade garnered significant support — but only if the government also offered rebates or tax “bonuses” to offset the higher energy costs created by the policy. With a $180 bonus per household, for example, fully 66 percent of those surveyed said they would either “strongly” or “somewhat” support a cap-and-trade system.

Of course, public opinion isn’t the only factor determining whether legislation will pass, and in the case of cap-and-trade, it can be argued that powerful business, political and regional interests were equally if not mostly to blame.

Those interests are the wall, and maybe now we should stop banging our head against it and try to find a way simply to get around it.

Steven Schneider: 1945-2010

Stephen Schneider, a giant of climate research, is dead. He died of an apparent heart attack today while landing in London after a flight from Stockholm. He was 65 years old.

See Andy Revkin’s post about Steve, and NPR’s interview of John Holdren, science advisor to President Obama and a friend and colleague of Schneider’s.

I probably would not be writing and teaching on the subject were it not for Steve. For 25 years, starting when I was a nobody, aspiring science writer, he never hesitated to help me understand the science and its significance. And I know for a fact that I’m not the only one he helped.

I’m really going to miss him.

In case you mised it, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies announced on May 17 that the first quarter four months of 2010 was were the warmest such period globally in 131 years. The upper left map above shows how different part of the world fared. Warming was most significant in the far north, with some regions experiencing temperatures more than 5 degrees C warmer than the long-term mean.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that the extent of Arctic sea ice is now running significantly below the long-term mean, as is evidence from this graph from the National Snow and Ice Data Center:

As the former editor of an earth science magazine (Earth, RIP), I appreciate the power of imagery to cut through the fog of complexity and ambiguity. So here, in two simple images, is the case for a national energy policy that would set us on a path toward a goal that the overwhelming majority of Americans could support: getting off fossil fuels and on to renewable energy.

On the left is an image taken by NASA’s Terra satellite on May 17 of the oil slick spreading from BP’s gusher at the bottom of the Gulf. The slick, which appears as a comma-shaped gray stain on the water’s surface, curls south and east from the Mississippi Delta.  At the bottom of the image, it almost intersects the Loop Current, which could entrain some of the oil and carry it many hundreds of miles away, possibly up the east coast of North America.

On the right is a map from the National Climate Data Center showing how global temperatures varied from the long-term mean during the month of April. Although it speaks for itself, a little additional context drives the point home:

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for April 2010 was the warmest on record at 14.5° C (58.1°F), which is 0.76°C (1.37°F) above the 2oth century average of 13.7°C (56.7°F). This was also the 34th consecutive April with global land and ocean temperatures above the 20th century average.

Anthony Watts at “Watts Up With That?” has posted some incredible photographs taken from the scene of the Gulf of Mexico oil rig that exploded, touching off the ongoing environmental crisis. This is just one of a series. For more, go here.

Update #2: Check out Ben Hale’s post.

The massive oil slick spreading through the Gulf of Mexico extended a gooey finger toward the Mississippi Delta today, as these images taken by NASA’s Terra satellite show. And by late in the day Thursday, oil was “lapping the Louisiana shoreline in long, thin lines,” the Associated Press reported.

From the AP story:

“It is of grave concern,” David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press. “I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling.”

And this:

Government officials said the blown-out well 40 miles offshore is spewing five times as much oil into the water as originally estimated — about 5,000 barrels, or 200,000 gallons, a day.

At that rate, the spill could eclipse the worst oil spill in U.S. history — the 11 million gallons that leaked from the grounded tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989 — in the three months it could take to drill a relief well and plug the gushing well 5,000 feet underwater on the sea floor.

Ultimately, the spill could grow much larger than the Valdez because Gulf of Mexico wells tap deposits that hold many times more oil than a single tanker.