The Disappearance of the Arctic Ice

Courtesy of NASA, via the Washington Post, a stunning look (without sound) at the shockingly rapid disappearance of ice at the North Pole between September 2005 and September 2007.

Note the tough lede on the accompanying story from Doug Struck:

For scientists, global warming is a disaster movie, its opening scenes
set at the poles of Earth. The epic already has started. And it’s not
fiction.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/player/wpniplayer_viral.swf?vid=101907-12v_title

Fire in the Sky (Weirdness Edition)

This is what it looked like in downtown Santa Paula yesterday afternoon about 2:30. You’d think we were halfway through the Book of Revelations, but in fact we were a good twenty-five miles (or more) from the Ranch Fire in Castaic. (The weird white spots I can’t identify: perhaps dust seen in the flash?)

But with the Santa Ana winds expected to blow strongly today, nearly anything can happen, as Malibu will attest. Let’s hope the VCFD can secure fire lines to the south and west — our direction.

Fire_in_the_sky_for_oct_22

The American Southwest: A Disaster in Ultra Slo-Mo

Desertification is a disaster in ultra slo-mo, which is why the drying up of the American Southwest has gotten perhaps 1/25th the coverage of Katrina.

The New York Times features the issue in the Sunday magazine, with a superb cover picture by Simon Norfolk. Writer Dan Gertner appears to have spent most of his time researching the long piece talking with water managers, which may explain his calm, even placid tone. Water managers by occupation are imperturbable: if Gertner had spent more time talking to scientists (such as one he mentions in passing, Martin Hoerling) I venture to say his tone would be more ominous, perhaps even apocalyptic.

But the writer does open the piece with an alarming point from Nobel Laureate Steven Chu, of the Lawrence Livermore lab:

Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second
half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the [Sierra Nevada] snowpack will
disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu
said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

In fact in speeches, Chu has said that at twice the historical percentage of CO2 (about 560 ppm) "soil moisture [nationally] will be down by a factor of 20-30%, which means serious desertification…and the agricultural capacity of the U.S. will be threatened." In another speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, which I can’t seem to locate, Chu mentioned the possibility of mass migrations.

When will this start to show up in real estate pricing? I guess that’s the next question. The likely place to watch: Las Vegas, which the Times story targets as the U.S. city most desperate for water.

Kansas to C02 Plant: Drop Dead

Back in l935, Variety startled Hollywood with one of the greatest ever of headlines: Sticks Nix Hick Pix. At the time it was a shocker, because movie executives assumed that folks out on the farm wanted to see rural Americana pictures, not swells in black tie. Wrong. They wanted distraction.

Well, times have changed, but today the Washington Post revealed that Kansas is killing the proposed construction of an enormous coal-fired power plant which was intended to supply not just Kansas, but eastern Colorado as well. Roderick Bremy, the secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and the Environment, declared:

"It would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the
contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate
change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do
nothing."

This is great news, and the cancellation comes with strong Republican support. Could this be the harbinger of other coal plant cancellations?  For the sake of the planet — yes. Please.

Killer Cows — No, Really

Must link to the latest in the Los Angeles Times excellent editorial series on global warming, which does what editorials are supposed to do but often don’t: Clarify, propose, and convince.

The editorial this week was about cow emissions. Hilarious? No. Sensible? Yes.

All told, livestock are responsible for 18% of greenhouse-gas emissions
worldwide, according to the U.N. — more than all the planes, trains
and automobiles on the planet. And it’s going to get a lot worse. As
living standards rise in the developing world, so does its fondness for
meat and dairy. Annual per-capita meat consumption in developing
countries doubled from 31 pounds in 1980 to 62 pounds in 2002,
according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, which expects
global meat production to more than double by 2050. That means the
environmental damage of ranching would have to be cut in half just to
keep emissions at their current, dangerous level.

Worse, the government for years has been advertising to further the destruction, when for the sake of the planet (and our bodies) it should be helping us cut back. A few more facts would help, but still:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture assesses ranchers, dairymen and
producers of other commodities to pay for marketing campaigns to
promote their products, raising millions of dollars a year and turning
such slogans as "Got Milk?" and "Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner" into
national catchphrases. This isn’t quite tantamount to a
government-mandated campaign to promote cigarette smoking, but it’s
close. The government should not only get out of the business of
promoting unhealthful and environmentally destructive foods, it should
be actively discouraging them.

Gore Derangement Syndrome

As many have noted, Paul Krugman posted one heck of a column today.

Once known an economist, Krugman has now become perhaps the foremost left-wing writer in the country today, not because he knows more facts than anyone else on most subjects, but because he puts them together so powerfully. To wit:

It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their
descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that
somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a
few generations Florida will be underwater.

The solution to such
conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide
individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case,
people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas
emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by
requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the
same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the
U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has
been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Climate change is,
however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the causes are
global. The sulfuric acid in America’s lakes mainly comes from coal
burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America’s air
comes from coal and oil burned around the planet — and a ton of coal
burned in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of
coal burned here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new
taxes or their equivalent; it also requires international negotiations
in which the United States will have to give as well as get.

Everything
I’ve just said should be uncontroversial — but imagine the reception a
Republican candidate for president would receive if he acknowledged
these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican means
believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means
believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with
them.

So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t
be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected,
and the scientists must be slimed.

A good example of Krugman’s ability to synthesize was seen on ABC’s This Week (via TP) if which George Stephanopoulos led with a line that Krugman used in his column: That the Nobel Prize awarded to Al Gore was "designed to drive you — George Will — crazy."

Will in response went on to slime the Nobel Prize, and then to deride the risks of global warming, by claiming that only one percent of the American people thought global warming was the most serious problem today. But veteran reporter Sam Donaldson fired right back, rightly linking Will’s denialism to far-right Senator Inhofe, and adding:

George, not long ago, the vast majority of the American people endorsed
the strike against Iraq too. You telling me now that people haven’t
gotten on to this problem, as they should, is not to say that the
problem does not exist.

Gee, could the American people be ignorant about something? Is that possible? I think so. Heck, a McClatchy reporter recently walked around Macon, Georgia with a world map and a video camera and asked 100 people to find the United States on a map.

25 percent could not. ‘Nuf said?