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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.

Continue reading “NOAA: climate change unmistakable; CNN: time to interview skeptics” →

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: The Obama administration has put new offshore drilling projects on hold.

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.

Everything sooner or later is linked to climate change. It is not an unexpected tactic when the goal is to raise public awareness or alarm — depending on you position.

The malaria climate connection however raises important ethical questions. Malaria is too often framed as a “climate disease” by NGOs, regulatory agencies, media and some scientists. (See here and here.) This carefully constructed message implies the control of malaria requires that we control carbon dioxide emissions. This message is untrue, unethical and immoral.

Malaria is a preventable and treatable disease that we allow, by our inaction, to kill one million people and infect another 250 million to 350 million each year. (See this report from the World Health Organization.) These are not modeled deaths. Nor are they possible deaths related to some future carbon scenario. These dead had names, were loved, and are mourned. And nearly 80% of these dead are African children under the age of five.

We could eradicate malaria worldwide in less than two decades and drastically cut malaria’s death toll in less than one. But first malaria must stop being used as a weapon by ideological combatants on all sides of the climate change wars, as well as the much older pesticide wars.

Malaria is not a tropical disease. Ague and marsh fever, malaria’s older names, ravaged England in the 16th to 19th centuries. North America was not spared the plight of malaria either. In fact, 30% of Al Gore’s home state of Tennessee was infected by the disease in 1933.

Greenpeace and others have implied the mosquito vector (Anopheles) for malaria requires a mean winter temperature above 60 degrees F to survive. In reality, 10 million Russians were reported in a New York Times dispatch to be debilitated by the disease in 1920.

Continue reading “Guest post — Malaria not a climate issue” →

The Geological Society of America — one of the world’s leading earth science organizations, with a membership of 22,000 — has updated its position statement on climate change. Here it is:

Decades of scientific research have shown that climate can change from both natural and anthropogenic causes. The Geological Society of America (GSA) concurs with assessments by the National Academies of Science (2005), the National Research Council (2006), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) that global climate has warmed and that human activities (mainly greenhouse‐gas emissions) account for most of the warming since the middle 1900s. If current trends continue, the projected increase in global temperature by the end of the twentyfirst century will result in large impacts on humans and other species. Addressing the challenges posed by climate change will require a combination of adaptation to the changes that are likely to occur and global reductions of CO2 emissions from anthropogenic sources

Read the entire statement, which includes policy recommendations, here.

Judith Curry, a forthright climate scientist at Georgia Tech, has some interesting things to say about the Oxburgh investigations into the Climatic Research Unit email imbroglio. Every journalist who covers climate should consider what she has to say.

Curry had her say in comments to a posting by my colleague Roger Pielke, Jr., and Roger then highlighted them in a new post.

Our job as journalists is not simply to report the news — in this case what the Oxburgh report says — but also the story about the news. That means we should provide context, explain the meaning and significance of the news, and delve into the broader story. And in this case, the broader story is that the Oxburgh investigations may not be the final word on the integrity of climate science.

Here’s the essence of Curry’s critique:

The primary frustration with these investigations is that they are dancing around the principal issue that people care about: the IPCC and its implications for policy. Focusing only on CRU activities (which was the charge of the Oxbourgh panel) is of interest mainly to UEA and possibly the politics of UK research funding (it will be interesting to see if the U.S. DOE sends any more $$ to CRU). Given their selection of CRU research publications to investigate (see Bishop Hill), the Oxbourgh investigation has little credibility in my opinion. However, I still think it unlikely that actual scientific malfeasance is present in any of these papers: there is no malfeasance associated with sloppy record keeping, making shaky assumptions, and using inappropriate statistical methods in a published scientific journal article.

The corruptions of the IPCC process, and the question of corruption (or at least inappropriate torquing) of the actual science by the IPCC process, is the key issue. The assessment process should filter out erroneous papers and provide a broader assessment of uncertainty; instead, we have seen evidence of IPCC lead authors pushing their own research results and writing papers to support an established narrative. I don’t see much hope for improving the IPCC process under its current leadership.

“Corruption” is a mighty strong word, and Gavin Schmidt over at RealClimate has already criticized it. But just because he takes exception to it does not mean that journalists should ignore what Curry has to say.

In any case, to prepare yourself for what’s in store in coming days as climate scientists, climate skeptics, journalists, bloggers — in short, the gantse megillah on climate change — weigh in on this, you absolutely must read “Some Spicy Curry” by Keith Kloor.

As the map above shows, this past March was quite toasty, with the global average temperature of the land and ocean surfaces registering as the warmest on record, the National Climatic Data Center reported on Friday.

The temperature of the global land surface alone was the fourth warmest on record, according to the NCDC.

In some circles, the news was met with derision. Over at the National Review’s Planet Gore blog, for example, Chris Horner says he “doesn’t understand the furor.” I’m not sure what furor he’s referring to. But in any case, here’s the rest of his take:

I just read 2,000 Hansen e-mails lecturing us all (who were living through a third harsh winter in a row) about the fact that individual years don’t mean anything and only a fool would bother unscientifically drawing attention to such small climatic time-scales. Now we’re supposed to care about a month?

The whiplash continues.

Fair enough. One month actually does not mean much. Climate change is a decadal phenomenon. So what’s been happening to temperatures in March over a decadal time scale?

Continue reading “March 2010 was warmest on record” →

Today another inquiry has cleared the scientists of the U.K.’s Climatic  Research Unit of scientific malpractice in the episode that came to be called “Climategate.” It will no doubt consume bloggers climate activists of all stripes for days to come.

On the same day, a much more important report was published about humankind’s overall impact on the planet. But it will receive almost no coverage.

Here’s how the Guardian reported on the Climategate findings:

“The inquiry, the second of three set up in the wake of the controversy, found ‘absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever’, according to Lord Oxburgh, who led the investigation. Instead, Oxburgh said, many of the criticisms and assertions of scientific misconduct were likely made by people ‘who do not like the implications of some the conclusions’ reached by the climate experts.

The hacked emails raised questions about the integrity of scientific research on a matter of great public importance — questions that had to be answered. But in the last few months I’ve come to realize just how much of an unfortunate distraction this episode has been from the much bigger issue: humankind’s undeniable domination of the life support systems of spaceship Earth, and the fact that we’re basically driving the spaceship with blinders on. (Not to mention that we, as the crew, seem wholly oblivious to the fact that our numbers are doubling at a rather rapid clip, and our consumption of limited resources is growing even more rapidly.)

Our impact on the planet is now so profound that it is already leaving unambiguous traces in the geological record.
Continue reading “Humans as a geological force” →