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With 1998 either being the hottest or one of the hottest (dependent on which temperature record set one works with) years in recorded history, a constant refrain has been “there has been no warming since …” (or, for awhile, since 1998 was such a peak (aberration), ‘there has been cooling’).  That number has been extending such that “there has been no warming for 16 years” is now often heard.  The recent UK Met office release of revised modeling (Met Office discussion) that indicates that global temperatures might be at something like a plateau for the next five years has thrown meat out for the anti-science syndrome crowd.  They are crowing that the Hadley “model” runs seemingly support their diatribes against global warming science.

As Scott Mandia so eloquently put it

Contrarians: “Models suck! Wow, the MET Office models say warming is less than expected by 2017. We like those models. Trust those models.”

— Scott A Mandia (@AGW_Prof) January 10, 2013

Putting aside the hypocrisy of the very crowd that argues that attacks the Hadley Centre for bad global warming modeling seizing on that same institution’s modeling making grandiose claims, the reality is that they are not looking at/presenting  ‘the rest of the story’ nor are they entering into this conversation truthfully.

Some quite basic points:

• Even if global temperatures plateau through 2017, this will mean that temperatures will remain in the ‘record-breaking’ / high range throughout the period.
• With the “no global warming for 16 years”, the 2000s were hotter than the 1990s which were hotter than the 1980s which …
• If temperatures do plateau, then the 2010s will be warmer than the 2000s — replacing the 2000s as the hottest decade in recorded global temperatures.
• The crowing ‘no global warming crowd’, who are contrasting the plateaued temperature record with growth in CO2 (no connection), are ignoring ‘signal-to-noise’ in that humanity’s thumb (GHGs and otherwise) on the climate is still operating within the reality of natural variation and non-human impacts on weather/climate variation.  Climate and weather are variable — no one should expect a nice clean, pretty line considering the myriad of factors at place.

On that last point, which could be described as “winter will always be statistically colder than summer”, this video from Skeptical Science is quite telling.  While actually watching it is highly recommended, twelve words summarize it:

Take out natural variation and humanity’s impact on global temperatures is clear.

From Skeptical Science:

once the short-term warming and cooling influences of volcanic eruptions, solar activity, and El Niño and La Niña events are statistically removed from the temperature record, there is no evidence of a change in the rate of greenhouse warming.

The human contribution to global warming over the last 16 years is essentially the same as during the prior 16 years¹. Human-caused greenhouse warming, while partially hidden by natural variations, has continued in line with model projections². Unless greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control, we will see faster warming in the future³.

Implications:

• The 16-year temperature trend provides no evidence to suggest that human-caused greenhouse warming has slowed.

• The 16-year temperature trend provides no evidence to suggest that the consensus understanding of human-caused climate change is incorrect.

• The temperature record over the past 35 years is consistent with climate change being driven by human greenhouse gas emissions.

• Given that human greenhouse gas emissions are increasing, and that the natural influences do not show a trend on longer timescales, we must expect increasing global warming in the future.

This reality — that the scientific analysis tells us that “we must expect increasing global warming in the future” — is, of course, at odds with the climate science deniers’ efforts to distort and disdain science.

Thus, as Leo Hickman put it at EcoAudit,

The news has been seized upon by climate sceptics who were already arguing that global warming had “stopped” since the record breaking year of 1998 and that this new development further undermines both climate science itself as well as any policy response to rising temperatures. Climate scientists have responded saying that to draw such a conclusion is misleading.

For those interested in more, Leo’s post provides much useful material related to the new Met office modeling and graphics — quoting both science deniers and scientists, along with providing substantive discussion of this material.

UPDATE:  The Daily Mail has made a harsh accusation:  “The Met Office’s clumsy attempt to hush up an inconvenient truth was a crime against science and the public.” Not surprisingly, Daily Mail / Delingpole misrepresentations have again led the MET to issue a response. As Eli noted, beyond the strength of the MET Office statement, some of the comments are noteworthy such as:

Maybe you should ship Delingpole over to our side of the pond. He’d be a very small minnow in an ocean of American idiocy and would quickly be lost in the noise.

You Brits would enjoy a statistically significant reduction in idiocy over there, and we would suffer only a statistically insignificant (and unnoticeable) increase in idiocy over here.

UPDATE 2: Excellent piece by Fred Pearce Has Global Warming Ground to a Halt?

The UK’s Met Office has downgraded its forecast for warming at the Earth’s surface over the next five years. Headlines this week announced that global warming is “at a standstill”. Climate sceptics crowed. But the Met Office said the outlook for later in the century remains unchanged. New Scientist looks at the facts ….

What’s the outlook?
Scary. If oceanic cycles do what the Met Office and others expect, then global average air temperatures will stay fairly stable – though still hotter than they have been in the past – until later this decade. The cycles will then flip into a new phase and the oceans will probably start releasing heat instead of soaking it up. Combined with continued accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, that could mean that sometime round 2020, warming will start to race away again as the atmosphere makes up for lost time.

Update 3: Excellent (must read) discussion by Phil Plait, Debunking the Denial: “16 Years of No Global Warming”

The difficulties in debunking blatant antireality are legion. You can make up any old nonsense and state it in a few seconds, but it takes much longer to show why it’s wrong and how things really are.

This is coupled with how sticky bunk can be. Once uttered, it’s out there, bootstrapping its own reality, getting repeated by the usual suspects.

Case in point: The claim that there’s been no global warming for the past 16 years. This is blatantly untrue, a ridiculous and obviously false statement. But I see it over and again online, in Op Eds, and in comments to climate change posts.

Update 4:  See Carbon Brief’s “All the reasons why global hasn’t stopped.”

the argument that a slowdown in temperature rise in recent years shows global warming has “stopped” certainly isn’t new – and has been extensively picked apart, discussed, rebutted and critiqued many, many times online.

This guest post comes from Mokurai.

Buying a compact fluorescent light will not solve Global Warming by itself. Do it anyway. It is an essential component in the grand strategy by which we build ourselves into the foundations of a mass movement, constructed piece by piece, to the point where our opposition cannot resist us, and we can bring the Age of Carbon to its rightful end. One of the key sets of pieces is knowledge spread as widely as possible about how to do that, of which more below.

Mass movements are necessarily made up exclusively of individuals who would not be able to get what they want and need on their own. If you belong to a union, if you have the vote but are not a rich White male, if you benefit from Social Security and Medicare or plan on doing so, if you are part of a mixed-race couple or LGBT couple who got legal permission to marry, you didn’t build that on your own. Our ancestors and many of us today did, and we all have to keep doing that and more.

Our enemies are implacable, but diminishing in numbers, and becoming louder and much nastier as they do so, and as they purge themselves of their less extreme members. They have lots of special-interest money rallying them to the causes of selfishness: racism, bigotry, misogyny, Mammonism, rejection of science, and the like. But money can only go so far in motivating those disposed to support it. It can spread lies, but it cannot manufacture more support for those lies among those who have gotten a taste for truth, as the young increasingly have.

Saul Alinsky laid out the overall strategy and tactics for mass movements in Rules for Radicals. His work is so effective that Republicans hold their noses and use it to train their own operatives.

But we also need specifics on the Global Warming issue. What can be done? How much of it can I do? Follow below to learn more. [Read more →]

The Guardian is reporting that President Obama is “seriously considering” hosting a climate summit.

Barack Obama may intervene directly on climate change by hosting a summit at the White House early in his second term

If this is true, that the White House staff is prepping up a “broad-based and bipartisan summit to launch a national climate action strategy”, this would be a tangible step in the President’s declared intent to foster a national discussion about climate change.

With the facts in that 2012 was the hottest year in recorded US temperature records (by a full degree fahrenheit), with Governor Christie (and other politicians and suffering citizens from the Mid-Atlantic) calling for action for disaster relief for Sandy, and in the flickering shadow from the light of the fires burning up Australia amid the #BigAussieHeat, now — today — might be a good time to announce such a move.

Before we get too excited about the potential, a necessary note of cause. This story, reported by Suzanne Goldenbergn (the Guardian’s US environment correspondent), is highly dependent on the perspectives of environmental organizations and environmentally-focused donors. Thus, amid the reading of ‘tea leaves’ and ‘tarot cards’, one might wonder whether this is people taking hope from small signs and reading between the lines in comments. From another angle, perhaps the nominee for Secretary of State — John Kerry — is bringing his passionate concern for climate issues to the table, already even amid preparations for confirmation hearings, and is working to get the President to move forward with a ‘climate conversation’.
[Read more →]

The U.S. Climate Extremes Index was just released.  While it should surprise no one who lived through it and/or is somehow connected to reality, here is the NOAA (summary, full report) headline/conclusion:

2012 was warmest and second most extreme year on record for the contiguous U.S.

2012 was a historic year for extreme weather that included drought, wildfires, hurricanes and storms; however, tornado activity was below average

Thus, 2012 marked

• the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States
  • a record warm spring,
    • The season’s temperature was 5.2°F above average, making it easily the warmest spring on record, surpassing the previous record by 2.0°F.
  • second warmest summer,
    • The national-scale heat peaked in July with an average temperature of 76.9°F,
      • 3.6°F above average, making it
      • the hottest month ever observed for the contiguous United States.
    • The eighth warmest June, record hottest July, and a warmer-than-average August resulted in a summer average temperature of 73.8°F, the second hottest summer on record by only hundredths of a degree.
    • An estimated 99.1 million people experienced 10 or more days of summer temperatures greater than 100°F, nearly one-third of the nation’s population.
  • fourth warmest winter and a
  • warmer-than-average autumn.
• The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3°F
  • 3.2°F above the 20^th century average, and
  • 1.0°F above 1998, the previous warmest year.
• Every state in the contiguous U.S. had an above-average annual temperature for 2012.
  • Nineteen states had a record warm year, and
  • An additional 26 states had one of their 10 warmest.
• The  15^th driest year on record for the nation
  • At its peak in July, the drought of 2012 engulfed 61 percent of the nation
  • The dry conditions proved ideal for wildfires in the West,
    • charring 9.2 million acres—the third highest on record.
  • The nationally-averaged precipitation total of 26.57 inches was 2.57 inches below average and the 15^th driest year on record for the lower 48.
    • This was also the driest year for the nation since 1988 when 25.25 inches of precipitation was observed.
  • The driest conditions during 2012 occurred across the central United States.
    • Two states, Nebraska and Wyoming, had their driest years on record.
    • Eight additional states had annual precipitation totals ranking among the bottom ten.



• The U.S. Climate Extremes Index indicated that 2012 was the second most extreme year on record for the nation.
  • The index was nearly twice the average value and second only to 1998.
  • 2012 saw 11 disasters that have reached the $1 billion threshold in losses, to include Sandy, Isaac, and tornado outbreaks experienced in the Great Plains, Texas and Southeast/Ohio Valley.

And, with this in mind, our political system and “The Village” is dominated by Climate Silence and a conspiracy to focus on the Fiscal Cliff molehill rather than deal with the Climate Cliff fissure.

It is past time for action.

Related: MMfA: STUDY: Warmest Year On Record Received Cool Climate Coverage E.g., “The Village”‘s climate silence in data.

Some might say that those ‘Down Under’ have a competitive streak with Americans — great allies but truly ecstatic when an Aussie beats an American at the Olympics. At times, however, competition can go too far. And, such is the case with the #BigAussieHeat. After the United States set massive numbers of high temperature records in 2012, with a massive summer heat wave notable in the hottest year in recorded US history, it seems that Australia is on the path to top America’s nightmarish 2012 heat wave conditions with truly hellish environmental conditions.

Consider:

• For a week, the average daily national high temperature has topped 39C (for the metrically-illiterate among us, above 102 degrees F). Remember, this is not Kuwait we’re talking about but an entire continent.
• Never before in recorded history has Australia experienced 5 consecutive days of national-average maximum temperatures above 39C. Until 2013 …
• For context, the previous record of 4 days occurred once only (1973) and 3 days has occurred only twice (1972,2002).

The general description of conditions Down Under? Catastrophic.

HEATWAVE TIP:To save on your power bill, use hot water from the cold tap today.

— Chris Urquhart (@chrisurquhart) January 8, 2013

[PS — this, however, is somewhat a sad ‘joke’ — as ‘hot’ is relative and there are likely few ‘cold water’ taps that will produce a large flow of hot water … still, gallows humor often has an element of truth to it …]

Note: Came to my attention just after posting this, Jeff Master’s Historic heat wave brings Australia its hottest average temperature on record.

It’s been a summer like no other in the history of Australia, where a sprawling heat wave of historical proportions is entering its second week. The high temperature averaged over Australia was 105°F (40.3°C), eclipsing the previous record of 104°F (40.2°C) set on 21 December 1972. Never before in 103 years of record keeping has a heat wave this intense, wide-spread, and long-lasting affected Australia.

[Read more →]

The investment world is, well, truly a mess. To raise funds in the truly open market, companies have to have huge (HUGE) amounts of resources invested in lawyers, paperwork, and otherwise. This is important to reduce the chance for outright fraud (pyramid schemes) like in the 1000s of ‘make a million off this penny stock’ emails that populate my spam folder. In the interim, prior to that level of investment, businesses can raise funds from ‘accredited investors’ — essentially people with a net worth of at least $1 million — who should be able to afford a 100% loss in their investments. Those early investors, however, often can make 20, 30, 40+% per year on these early-stage investments. E.g., the rich have paths to get richer that simply aren’t available for the rest of society. And, honestly, these restrictions on investing can make it hard for decent businesses seeking triple bottom line results (good for people, good for planet, and with profits) to get money early at reasonable rates.

Today, a true triple bottom line company offers an opportunity that is available solely to accredited investors — that is, unless you live in California or New York. If you are a Californian or New Yorker, you can invest in solar electricity systems for as little as $25 a pop … Live in an apartment or a rented home or simply without the $10,000s required for a solar system on your roof, this is a path to become a solar power system owner as part of a larger community.

Solar Mosaic is, in short, offering crowd-sourcing opportunities for putting up solar systems in places like affordable housing complexes.

For example, a project in Salinas, CA,

Nestled among the mountains of Salinas, California, this affordable housing complex is home to over 120 low-income seniors. Rehabilitated from an antiquated motel into elegant, energy-efficient and affordable apartments, this community was designed with sustainability in mind from the very beginning. Located close to public transit, this community is a vibrant and eco-friendly home for Salinas’s rising population of low-income seniors. This solar project is estimated to produce the carbon equivalent of recycling 27 tons of waste instead of sending it to the landfill.

This project is, according to Solar Mosaic, going to return 4.5% per year to investors over a 96 month period at a time when few bank (savings) accounts are returning more than 0.5% and the 10-year Treasury Bond is at 1.90%.

TO BE CLEAR — while if find the Solar Mosaic model exciting, love the concept of crowd-sourcing solar (and other renewable energy and energy efficiency) projects, and find the projects that I’ve glanced at appealing, I have NOT closely examined the projects and I and NOT giving financial advice here. Please make sure to take a real look at the prospectus for these projects, especially if you are thinking about investing what you consider to be a significant amount of money which you cannot afford to lose.

The nation which sparked the Arab Spring is engaged in a national conversation as to what should be the basic legal rules and structure for the nation.  As part of this, the draft Tunisian constitution (pdf) is being discussed in a series of meetings across the country and, in that draft form, has many articles and elements presented with alternative versions that make clear this draft is not the finished product.  Noting that I am far from an expert in international constitutional law, glancing through this draft uncovers many intriguing elements.

Two clauses are of particular interest/relevance for the subject matter of this blog.

• Article 33 asserts “sustainable development” and makes “protection of [the] environment” a “responsbility of the state, institutions, and people.”
• Article 34 focuses on water, asserting that everyone has “the right to water” and making this a state responsibility to “protect water resources” and assure competent management of water resources and the fair distribution of water.

In part to put substance behind these, article 130 creates the “Authority of Sustainable Development and Rights of Future Generations”.  This authority “shall have cognisance over the general policies of the state,  at the  economic, social  and environmental levels, with a view to attaining sustainable development that can guarantee the rights of future generations.”  The Authority will have the responsibility to review all draft laws and government development plans.  As part of this, all of “the Authority’s opinions … shall be published” along with, if the Authority’s recommendations weren’t implemented, explanations as to why the Authority’s recommendations were not followed.

If these articles make it through to the actual constitution, Tunisia will join several other nations with such core constitutional protections for the envrionment.

In ecologically diverse Ecuador, which encompasses the Galapagos Islands as well as parts of the Amazon rainforest, rights for nature were added to its constitution in 2008. Just [in 20111], in Bolivia, eleven new rights for nature were added to the constitution, protecting it from pollution, massive development, and genetic alteration.

Kenya did so, as well, in 2011.

Every person has the right to a clean and healthy environment, which includes the right a) to have the environment protected for the benefit of present and future generations through legislative and other measures, particularly those contemplated in Article 69, and b) to have obligations relating to the environment fulfilled under Article 70.

While many countries (pdf) around the world have glowing words related to environmental protection in their Constitutions, oft-times these words are difficult to comport with reality. And, this is certainly true in sustainability arenas.  The South African constitution, for example, provides a right

‘to have the environment protected… through reasonable legislative and other measures that secure ecologically sustainable development and use of natural resources while promoting justifiable economic and social development’

Just the ‘smallest’ example: How does the South African government’s drive to build coal-fired power plants “secure ecologically sustainability development”?

Recognizing that Constitutional measures do not necessarily, in all nations, align with actual policies, these elements of the Tunisian draft constitution do provide some hope for that nation’s future governmental policy when it comes to energy, climate, water, and other environmental issues.

More broadly, many nations could benefit from the inclusion of such words into their Constitutions and basic governance.

[Read more →]

C4 (Catastrophic Climate Chaos Cliff) threatens our future prospects and our ability to create a positive future reality for ourselves and descendents.

George Herbert Walker Bush lies at the core of a driving motivation in my life.

President Bush was facing a reelection battle against Bill Clinton, and so advisers persuaded him to attend the world environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, possibly the most optiistic moment in recent history. Before he went, however, he told a press conference that “the American way of life is not up for negotiation.” If that’s true, if we can’t imagine living any differently, then all else is mere commentary.

One thing that unites the progressive blogosphere is the drive to imagine a different life, a different world, a better one, a better path forward … and we all, in our own ways, fight to achieve those visions.

Twenty years ago, the first President Bush stated that “the American Way of Life is not up for negotiation”, showing an inability to imagine catastrophe from non-negotiation and an inability to see something better. Without imagination to see a better future and the power to achieve it, we will not progress out of catastrophe to prosperous sustainability.

A New Year’s Resolution:

imagine that better path and fight to achieve it.

And, I imagine life differently and it energizes me to fight to Energize America.

[Read more →]

The Center for American Progress’ Think Progress website is home for one of the strongest and most widely read climate science / clean energy blogs.  Led by Joe Romm, Climate Progress forcefully enters into climate science discussions and provides excellent material about clean energy progress.  For anyone (especially Americans) concerned about fostering the conditions for a prosperous and secure climate-friendly future, Think Progress Climate is on a must read list.

UPDATE: With a welcome to WUWT acolytes (Anthony Watts‘ devotees), a reminder about another must read location for basic truth about climate science, Skeptical Science. The image below about distorting evidence seems particularly relevant. Or, perhaps to spend some time on 10 indicators of global warming. Or perhaps spend some time with hot graphics. Or, perhaps you will consider just a few of 2012’s major climate events/stories. Or, perhaps take a moment to acknowledge that the real consensus on climate change issues. Etc …

With that it mind, an end of year Think Progress post provided rather stunning reading — not due to its contents but due to what it didn’t contain. As the calendar year winds to a close and we look to a ‘fresh start’ into another year, ‘lists’ are on many minds and appear in many publications.

This morning, 31 December 2012, Think Progress provided 12 Progressive Resolutions for 2013.  From better drug policy to immigration reform to enacting gun safety laws, many interesting (if not outright good) items in this list.  Again, however, the telling thing is the absence of a critical set of issues.

Amid these 12, no (zero, nada, nilch) reference to climate change, the climate cliff, environment, clean energy, green jobs, energy efficiency, fossil fuel impacts on the political system, … Clearly, whoever put together this post doesn’t pay attention to Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

NOTE: Something like the following should have been in this post from the get-go …

“Considering that this is 31 December and most people are likely on a vacation, this “Think Progress” post is likely a list done by one staffer who should have signed it w/their name rather than asserting that this list represented the entire Think Progress team.”

Considering the year the United States had re climate change (heat waves, droughts, Derecho, wild fires, Hurricane Sandy, warmest year on record, …), the massive gap between the political parties on climate science and clean energy, the risks of the climate cliff (or, as Toles has it, the climate fissure), and the fact that unchecked climate disruption puts at risk every single element of a “progressive” agenda, the absence of climate and clean energy issues from (and total Climate Silence) a ‘top 12 Progressive Resolutions” seems beyond stunning.

NOTE:  Considering that he truly does seem to ‘get it’ on climate change and clean energy, it seems reasonable to wonder what the Chair of the Center for American Progress John Podesta, might have as a list of “12 Progressive Resolutions”.

• The Security Implications of Climate Change (pdf)
• Climate Change Deniers are the true Know Nothings of the generation

The “12 Resolutions” failure to have anything re climate / energy / environment is surprising because: it is far from just Romm and Podesta at the Center for American Progress who write/have written on and discuss(ed) these issues; energy & environment are among CAP‘s main arenas of work; CAP typically is one of the better US institutions at linking climate change / clean energy to other issues; and the Think Progress blog (and not just ThinkProgress Climate Progress) often has posts on climate / clean energy / environmental issues.  The climate silence in the “12 Resolutions” merited comment because it is so at odds with the overall nature of CAP work and Think Progress publishing.

The Washington Post’s Tom Toles well deserved the Pulitzer Prize that he won 22 years ago. And, since then, Toles has regularly demonstrated why he should be in the running for another one year after year … as per yesterday.

As with so many other of his cartoons, Toles demonstrates the power of an excellent political cartoonist, combining imagery with a few choice words to send a message with great clarity about a complex issue. This cartoon is one of those where the message is truly multi-layered.

• Toles is, of course, absolutely right that the “Fiscal Cliff” is a mere molehill in the face of C4: the Catastrophic Climate Chaos Cliff.
• And, if we take this imagery to heart (drawing an imaginary line from those facing the Fiscal Cliff molehill to the edge of the climate fissure), Toles well captures how a myopic focus on the Fiscal Molehill is inhibiting discussion of and focus on climate issues.
• Toles’ Climate Fissure is a menacing red (warming?) set of complex and, by implication, growing cracks that undermine the entire surface.  This imagery underlines how serious Climate Disruption actually is and how it threatens essentially everything about modern human civilization, in ways both predictable and uncertain in nature and timing, as an earthquake can shatter and devastate a city.
• “Just practicing” provides both hopeful message and devastating critique.  Hopeful in the sense that this suggests the political system will move on to dealing with climate change issues with the additional experience and capability built on dealing with the Fiscal Cliff. It is also devastating since the U.S. political system has demonstrated ineptness both in creating the conditions/scenario of the Fiscal Cliff and in its inability to foster a decent path through it without creating unnecessary trauma and drama.  Sadly, the ‘devastating’ seems a more appropriate take on the experience.
• Contemplate the corner comment “Whose Fault?”, which is a wonderful capturing of the reality that the “Climate Cliff” has multi-layers of ‘fault’. We cannot (should not) point our fingers at one thing and say ‘that is it’, there is no ‘single cause’ just as there is no single magical Silver Bullet solution.

Perhaps two elements of the Fiscal Molehill might have merited a slightly different approach.  First, perhaps the ‘molehill’ should have been in the other direction, since it is distracting attention away from far more serious, difficult, and menacing climate issues.  Secondly, perhaps the figures should have been shown tumbling (tripping) over the Fiscal Molehill since that would be a far more accurate representation of what has been and is going on in terms of dealing with the end of year deadline for ‘fixing’ the fiscal cliff.   And, having the molehill the other direction with the figures tripping over it would have added another valuable implication to the cartoon:  dealing with the “Fiscal Cliff” almost certainly will not help in addressing climate challenges since critical climate science, environmental, and clean energy programs are going to suffer fiscally — whether there is some form of bipartisan agreement to ‘solve’ the Fiscal Cliff or whether Republican intransigence pushes the nation over it.

NOTE: See Climate Bites for one collection of climate-related political cartoons. Another great climate cliff / fiscal cliff cartoon is this one from Matt Bors:

NOTE/UPDATE:  Leveraging the cartoons in this post, Joe Romm has an excellent post up What Does The Fiscal Cliff Debacle Say About Our Chances To Avoid The Far More Worrisome Climate Cliff?

The bottom line remains the same, though. We aren’t going to get serious action until we have our climate Churchill — and probably not until climate impacts get so bad that at least those in the persuadable middle start demanding action (see “What Are the Near-Term Climate Pearl Harbors? What Will Take Us from Procrastination To Action?“).

The fiscal cliff debacle primarily tells us that the recent election changed nothing for political leaders of either party. We’re stuck with the climate status quo and, unlike our various economic woes, that is a prescription for irreversible, civilization-destroying disaster: