Get Energy Smart! NOW!

As the world’s attention is absolutely not riveted on the international climate change talks underway in Doha, take a look to the right (full size table after the fold) for a simple reality:  the developed world has more than five times the resources going to financially-related dirty energy subsidies than it is spending in climate finance.  As Oil Change International suggests, look at these figures with this question in mind:

How serious is your country, really, about fighting climate change?

This comparison between fossil-foolish subsidies ($58 billion per year) and climate-finance pledges ($11 billion/year) is rather stark.

OECD analysis shows that fossil fuel subsidies in 2011 in Annex 2 countries were more than $58 billion. Climate finance pledges over the last three years averaged $11 billion annually.

While a 5.5 to 1 ratio might seem bad enough, we should recognize that this actually seriously understates the equation since ‘externalities’ are external to the OECD analysis.

For example, if we take a reasonable “Social Cost of Carbon” (SCC) of $80 per ton (even though some analysis puts this figure up to $1000 ton), each and every ton of coal burned for electricity production has an additional $228.80 additional subsidy as burning that ton of coal puts 2.86 tons of Co2 into the atmospheric mix (the 2.86 is one example, see this EIA report for discussion of the Co2 per ton based on type of coal). Even with the Obama Administration’s grossly understated $21 per ton SCC, this means $60.06 of externality subsidies for every ton of coal — without even considering the energy required to get the coal to electricity generation station and all the other ‘externality’ costs such as mountain-top removal damage on fragile eco-systems, increased asthma rates from particulates, and mercury’s impact on average IQ rates.

With that externality cost in mind, taking the SCC as a partial surrogate for those externalities, consider this:

CO₂ emissions from coal were down 18% to 387 million metric tons in the January-March 2012 period.

Great news, emissions down 18%.  A true success story in the United States due to very low natural gas prices (and the prospects for continued low gas prices), limited government action to begin to bring ‘grandfathered’ (and grandfather) 50 year-old coal plants into the Clean Air Act, and public pressure from efforts like the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.  

However, consider the figure: 387 million tons.  At the anemic Obama Administration $21 SCC, this represents a ‘hidden’ subsidy of nearly $8 billion just for the first three months of the year or, in quick estimate, a fossil foolish externality subsidy of over $35 billion.  With that somewhat more reasonable $80 figure, the absence of a social cost of carbon from burning coal represents an additional $140 billion annual subsidy for fossil fuel usage in the developed countries — counting only carbon pollution only from burning coal only in the United States of America.

Apply a reasonable estimate as to the full figure by placing fossil fuels’ true subsidies outside the financial equation means that the figure to the right represents only the smallest tip of the iceberg in terms of the imbalance between developed countries’ fossil foolish subsidies and their commitment to finance climate mitigation and climate adaptation efforts in the developing world.

While we are not at the stage where the world community (outside some areas, such as the EU and California) is going to put into place a global warming impact fee (e.g., a carbon tax), openly discussing the true subsidies for fossil fuels should help the drive to eliminate the (much smaller) direct financial subsidies for fossil foolish energy usage.
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Several days ago, my email burned with a weather notice from a Republican that I do pay serious attention to: Republican meteorologist Paul Douglas. This email was a weather alert:

Midday Update. The major storm we’ve been tracking for northern California and Oregon is still on track, several waves of very heavy rain (and mountain snow) impacting the west coast from tonight into the middle of next week. Significant flooding is still expected in the San Francisco Bay area and Sacramento, …

72 Hour Precipitation Forecast. Keep in mind this is in inches of rain. For the Sierra Nevada range just east of Chicago, 16-20” of liquid translates into 150-200” of snow, over a 3-4 day period, meaning impassable roads and a severe avalanche threat. For the valleys on either side of I-5 north of Sacramento it means a very significant risk of flash flooding and river flooding. I’m most concerned about facilities in far northern California and Oregon, especially near Medford.

Again, the San Francisco Bay area and Sacramento may see serious flooding from this storm, but the worst conditions will be just north, Marin County – Santa Rosa to Redding and Chico, where flooding may close roads and strand some smaller towns in the area.

My reaction to Paul:

Sort of, ‘Oh sh–!!!!!’

Do you know anything about climate change impacts on this storm?

Minor item, “Sierra Nevada range just east of Chicago”? Not sure that is what you mean (you aren’t referring to Port Chicago …) Am I missing something?

Okay, “Oh, sh–!!!!” reigns as I have concern — yet again — for serious weather impacts on fellow Americans and hope that the damage will not be too serious.

I had a LOL as the reaction, “Ugh. Chico. Chicago. Hey, I was within 1,500 miles!”

And, well, the response on climate change impacts came not from Paul but Scientific American which rushed into public access Megastorms Could Drown Massive Portions of California

Huge flows of vapor in the atmosphere, dubbed “atmospheric rivers,” have unleashed massive floods every 200 years, and climate change could bring more of them

This article laid out a massive 1861-62 flood event in California that, in my historical studies, was overshadowed by a minor little series of events associated with Fort Sumter, Bull Run, and …

intense rainstorms sweeping in from the Pacific Ocean began to pound central California on Christmas Eve in 1861 and continued virtually unabated for 43 days. The deluges quickly transformed rivers running down from the Sierra Nevada mountains along the state’s eastern border into raging torrents that swept away entire communities and mining settlements.

This storm killed 1000s of people and 100,000s of cattle. The article lays out that such a storm, nowadays, could put millions of lives at risk and $10s of billions of infrastructure.
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This post comes from a scientist who finds himself to be a Fish Out Of Water.  In a related story, see When it comes to SLR, conservatism is (unrealistic) optimism

Hurricane Sandy and a series of noreasters have combined with an apparently unprecedented one year jump in sea level to cause a wave of destruction on the U.S. east coast. The one year change of the average sea level of the North Atlantic ocean from fall 2011 to fall 2012 is about 32mm which absolutely dwarfs the computed trend of 1.7 mm/year since 1992. The approximately 32mm jump is the largest in the satellite altimetry record which began in 1992. 32mm is 1 1/4 inches, not a huge absolute rise, but an unprecedented rise in just one year. These data have not yet been verified and published, they are “live” internet data from NOAA, but the numbers are consistent with other data I have reviewed including big jumps in measured sea levels from tide gauge data (which are highly variable depending on wind speed and direction). I read the numbers off the high resolution graph, so the 32mm value is not precise or verified, but I think it’s in the ballpark.

attribution: NOAA http://ibis.grdl.noaa.gov/SAT/SeaLevelRise/slr/slr_sla_na_keep_txj1j2.png

Sea level of the north Atlantic jumped from 2011 to 2012 at an apparently unprecedented rate.

Sea surface height anomaly maps determined by satellite altimetry show that there was  a large positive sea level height anomaly off of the east coast on October 26, 2012 before hurricane Sandy hit. Note that this figure is consistent with reports that the U.S. east coast is a hotspot of sea level rise. The northward expansion of the Atlantic warm pool, pushing the Gulf Stream towards Long Island and southern New England, is apparent in the large anomalies offshore, south of New England. These hot spot anomalies of greater than 25 cm ( about 10 inches ) are what made sea level rise a significant factor in the damage to the east coast. The anomalies off of the mid-Atlantic states are about 8 times larger than the average sea level rise of the north Atlantic.

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“There must be something I can do … to help our children, to help my grandchildren…. I thought it [global warming] was bullshit … and that is because I listened, I believed Bill O’Reilly … and I saw this movie and now I will apologize to anyone I ever talked into not believing in global warming.”

A NOTE from me – @justin_kanew – the guy who shot it:

People have been asking me if this video is set up. I promise it isn’t. I was at the theater helping with the release of the movie all weekend, mostly managing the guest list. Many people came out of the movie emotional, but none as emotional as this lady. She started talking to me in a very real way, with tears in her eyes, essentially apologizing to me for her previous position on the subject and letting me know she was a Fox/O’Reilly watcher who just had her mind changed by the movie. It occurred to me that that was a pretty powerful moment, and one you don’t see every day, so i asked her if she would mind telling me that on video. She said she wouldn’t, so I pulled out my camera, and what you see here happened.

I’m a supporter of the project, and the subject, but I would not call myself a climate change activist… however I do know a powerful moment when I see one, and this was that. There’s no editing here, and this woman is not an actress. I would swear to it on the Bible, the constitution, or anything else you put in front of me.

Privately, a quite prominent climate activist — who has written excellent books and gotten himself arrested and … — sent a group of us a note that I am certain he wouldn’t mind my sharing:

Last night, at the E Street Theater in DC, I finally got the chance to see the much-talked about, very beautiful, very terrifying, deeply moving film called Chasing Ice. It’s the story of photographer James Balog’s effort to capture the astonishing retreat of the world’s great glaciers due to rapid global warming. Finally, someone has managed to put into images the greatest crisis modern humans have ever faced. You absolutely must see this film.

I’m regret that I haven’t seen it yet … but clearly I need to change that.

People ask what President Obama can do about climate change in the face of a House run by extreme cases of Anti-Science Syndrome Haters Of a Livable Environmental System. Many have proposed using the Bully Pulpit. And, within that Pulpit, include invitations to the White House (remembering that even Bachman went to the White House to have a photo with the President).

How about inviting members of Congress for popcorn and a film … Chasing Ice.

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JamesS had an interesting turn of phrase amid a discussion of the need for a national smart grid with significant change to management of our electrical system.

Patch work is great for quilts and old jeans — not so great for a 21st century Electric Utility system.

This caught my attention, the word paints a strong imagery that does reflect the patch work nature of the nation’s electrical grid.

However, the analogy is off in some ways when we consider ‘resiliency’ and smart grid elements.

We want a mix of patchwork that is strongly stitched together — but which provides value when the patch is cut off from the rest.

We should have connected islanding — on national, regional, and local levels.

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For some reason (hint: Sandy), The New York Times has become a powerful voice in the traditional U.S. media scene when it comes to climate change issues. Worthwhile opinion pieces, over this past weekend, included Rising Seas, Vanishing Coastlines and Is this the end? Associated with these articles is a powerful graphical tool that shows, for key American coastal areas, the impact of sea-level rise.  Entitled What could disappear, this interactive tool always us to assess rapidly the impact of varying amounts of sea-level rise in the Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, Houston, Jacksonsville, Los Angeles, Long Island, Mobile, New Jersey, New Orleans, New York, … areas.  The list is daunting to consider.  This tool allows one to peg the sea level rise anywhere between 0 and 25 feet.

Looking at what this map projects for what would happen in 100 to 300 years, a 5 foot sea-level rise, it is rather sobering to see how much land — how much high-value urban infrastructure — ‘disappears’ beneath the waves.  Take a look at, for example, New Orleans to the right.  With a five-foot rise, New Orleans will be “88% flooded”.  That’s New Orleans, of course we know that it as risk.  Looking elsewhere, Atlantic City will be 62% flooded, Huntington Beach (CA) will be 27% flooded, Galveston (TX) 68% flooded, Cambridge (MA) will be 26% flooded, and so on. That, of course, is only a 5 foot rise.  Want a truly shocking image, look to the future of America’s coastal areas in face of a 25 foot rise which is “the potential level in coming centuries, based on historical climate data.” Taking the moment to ‘play’ with What could disappear provides a depressing projection on the challenges ahead when it comes to managing coastal areas in the face of climate-change driven sea-level rise.

That ‘depression’, however, derives from what is actually a rather conservative projection that — due to its conservatism — actually represents a rather optimistic scenario.

What are some (potential) issues with these representations?

1. A five-foot rise is listed as the “probable level in 100-300 years”. If, as projected from current business-as-usual practices, there is a seven degree (or so) increase in global temperatures by the end of the century, a five-foot rise seems likely by 2100 (or within the 100 year window).  The worst-case scenarios might have a 12 degree rise by 2200 which seems likely to be accompanied by a sea-level rise much more significant than 5 feet, perhaps approaching the 12 feet that the New York Times projects for 2300 (in a scenario where nations do only “moderate pollution cuts”).
2. This does not seem to include many complexities, such as land subsidence in, for example, the Chesapeake Bay area that are interacting with rising seas to hasten the impact on land areas.
3. It seems to apply solely the global average sea-level rise around land levels rather than accounting for regional variations in sea-level rise. This matters, significantly, for the New York Times subscriber base as the East Coast of the United States is seeing and will see a larger sea-level rise than that global average.
4. This does not address ‘underground’ issues, such as saltwater intrusion on acquifers (which create serious problems for Eastern Shore agriculture well before land goes under the ocean) or the threat to infrastructure like sewer systems in port areas.
5. There isn’t any representation of how storm surge impacts change with rising seas (re Norfolk, VA, area). These graphics demonstrate what will be covered but not necessarily what will become exposed to storm surges.  (The NYT OPED cited above, Rising Seas, Vanishing Coastlines, discusses this very sort of issue.)
6. And …

Greg Laden provided me an example of another ‘and’.  What could disappear shows us what gets covered by rising seas but doesn’t deal with how rising seas will erode land that theoretically would remain above the new sea level.  When it comes to transgression, consider the Boston map.  From about Cambridge north, the inundation depicted is pretty close to what will likely happen given the because the land has hard hard basement rock near the surface. South of Boston, however, the substrate is glacial till at depth. Rising seas almost certainly would erode away at this and thus rising sea levels would likely mean fewer and far smaller islands than shown with these interactive maps. The many little islands shown as still sticking above the sea would all be sea mounts except in the occasional spot where a core of bedrock would be still visible, to produce islands much smaller than shown.  Long Island is an even more striking example. With the 25 foot sea level rise, the Long Island map shows 21% flooded (to the right).  However, the only thing that would be left of Long Island is its rocky core.  The moraine would eventually turn into cobbles and rocks in situ and mostly be shifted to sea as a sand sheet.   The highest elevations on Long Island are ca 120 meters as based on the topo map. The thickness of quaternary sediments in those areas is between 90 and 105 meters in those areas.  Those small patches would be islands if the ocean had its way with Long Island. Long Island will, in a few thousand years, become a large clam flat surrounded by some nice fishing grounds without sea level rise. With sea level rise, currently unaffected by the sea land faces would become exposed to strand line erosion. Looking back at the topo map, most of the area that is about 20-40 meters above sea level (blue to dark green would be eroded very quickly with just a few meters of sea level rise.

There is another issue here — the timing challenge and getting attention from citizens, organizations, politicians.  In an environment where ‘long term strategic planning’, especially for the business community, rarely goes past 5-10 years, speaking about impacts three centuries from now has a hard time eliciting a yawn from most.  With an economics profession ready to apply ‘discount rates’, a Starbucks coffee (okay, a Starbucks specialty drink) today might have a greater ‘net present value’ than a 25 foot sea level rise in the year 2500.  The reality is, as per the increased impact (reach) of Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge and the regular full moon high tide floods in Miami, we are already seeing real impacts from climate-change driven sea-level rise and those impacts will continue to grow — our societal choice is how bad we are willing to allow these impacts to become because we value that specialty drink today more than climate impacts tomorrow.

The New York Times‘ increased focus on climate change issues, sadly sparked by Hurricane Sandy’s damage to the New York area, could prove a valued contribution to fostering a better national discussion about and, hopefully, more serious national action when it comes to climate change issues.  As part of climate change impacts and risks, What could disappear is a useful tool for understanding sea-level rise.  When using it, however, we should remember that its conservative representation is almost certainly an optimistic look at what will happen in coming decades and centuries.

This guest post from Veritas Curat provides a valuable look at how the science of economics drives answers that undermine humanity’s prospects.

Bangor’s longest running news team — on a combination ABC and FOX affiliate — quit their jobs to the surprise of colleagues and viewers.

Cindy Michaels and Tony Consiglio have been anchors at ABC affiliate WVII and Fox affiliate WFVX in Bangor for six years, but claimed that the owners and managers had been increasingly intervening in their newscasts over the last four

The two quit on the air, without prior announcement to the staff, because they wanted a chance to say goodbye to their viewers.

As for why they gave up a job that they evidently loved?

“I just wanted to know that I was doing the best job I could and was being honest and ethical as a journalist, and I thought there were times when I wasn’t able to do that,” said Consiglio …

Michaels said there were numerous things that contributed to their decisions.

“It’s a culmination of ongoing occurrences that took place the last several years and basically involved upper management practices that we both strongly disagreed with,” she explained. “It’s a little complicated, but we were expected to do somewhat unbalanced news, politically, in general.”

While this is simply an affiliate and, therefore, seemingly without editorial control from News Corp, hard to not think of this within the context of Faux News. And, when it comes to something affiliated with Faux News, a direction to do “unbalanced news, politically” seems so shocking and out-of-context that, well, sacre bleu!

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This guest post comes from Matt Wasson at Appalachian Voices.

During a campaign season in which climate change featured most prominently as alaugh line at the Republican National Convention, the low point was when CNN’s Candy Crowley addressed “all you climate people” in her explanation of why climate didn’t come up during the presidential debates. Who knew that human disruption of the global climate had become such a narrow, provincial concern?

But there’s important information in the fact that a senior reporter for a major network could dismiss climate change as essentially a special interest issue. It’s evidence, if more were needed, that “all us climate people” got our butts kicked in the battle for the narrative in the 2012 election.

And like the Republican Party, which is now undergoing the usual soul searching that follows a big electoral defeat, those of us who believe that inaction on climate is the greatest threat facing our civilization (never mind the economy) have some serious soul searching to do about our own defeat, which occurred long before any votes were counted.

Crowley’s explanation was consistent with the conventional wisdom on why the president didn’t make climate an issue. Because it was an “Economy election” and everyone in the DC press must accept that government action on climate change could do serious harm to the economy (because “it’s become part of the culture,” even if it’s not true), any discussion of climate policy by the president would have been off-message and worked against his chances for re-election.

The unconventional wisdom, popular among “climate people,” is that the Obama campaign failed to recognize the high level of popular support for action on climate change and missed a golden opportunity to seize a winning wedge issue when they chose the more politically expedient route of ignoring it.

There’s probably some truth to both of these explanations, but here’s a third one that is particularly useful in the context of a presidential election: the campaigns avoided talking about climate policy because they believed that raising the issue would be harmful in a few swingy areas of key swing states that would likely decide the election.

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“Climate change: its even worse than we think” (than we thought) is an increasingly common conclusion from the scientific experts.

Often decried modeling is, as climate denying anti-science syndrome sufferers like Jim Inhofe like to state, truly proving to have been wrong. Inhofe/et al are simply getting the error bar wrong, the situation looks to be far worse than what the global scientific community has been saying about climate change. Consistently, the situation is worsening faster than the ‘consensus’ modeling predicted 20, 10, or even just 5 years ago.  And, with an increasing understanding that events are moving faster in the real world than what modeling foresaw, this is creating an increased urgency to warn policy-makers about the consequences of blind continuation with business as usual policy.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) just came out with a report documenting that greenhouse gas emissions set a record in 2011 and that we should expect worse in 2012.

The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new record high in 2011, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Between 1990 and 2011 there was a 30% increase in radiative forcing – the warming effect on our climate – because of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other heat-trapping long-lived gases.

We, across the planet, are nowhere closer to reversing the tide on emissions.

Just last week, the radical World Bank came out with a searing report about the consequences of a 4 degree centigrade global temperature rise (see here, here, and …).  It paints a devastating picture of where we are heading, before the next century (at a minimum), if we do not do some major course corrections. As the President of the World Bank put it in the forward,

most importantly, a 4°C world is so different from the current one that it comes with high uncertainty and new risks that threaten our ability to anticipate and plan for future adaptation needs.

Let’s be clear: we are on a path to a 4C temperature increase and preventing hitting that 4 degree increase is a rather minimalist target.  The world community has committed, at least in paper terms, to avoiding a 2 degree increaseWe are already serious climate disruption impacts, measured in agricultural prices, disappearing glacier and Arctic ice, species going extinct, human deaths, and … And, this is just with a 1 degree C increase in temperatures.  Thus, even a 2 degree C increase has massively painful and disruptive impacts. From this report, a key sentence:

It is clear that large regional as well as global scale damages and risks are very likely to occur well before this level of warming [4C] is reached.

Substitute “[2C]” and that sentence is still true. In other words, the risks are not being overstated and the urgency of moving to serious action is not being overstated.

Thus, the New Scientist article “climate change: it’s worse than we think” is yet another straw being thrown on the camel of climate policy inaction and waffling by too many policy-makers around the world. The introduction:

Five years ago, the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change painted a gloomy picture of our planet’s future. As climate scientists gather evidence for the next report, due in 2014, Michael Le Page gives seven reasons why things are looking even grimmer.

After the fold, a look at those seven reasons.
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