RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Bruce Melton on Global Warming and Climate Change Denial

Environmental activist Bruce Melton at the studios of KOOP radio in Austin, Texas, September 20, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Environmental researcher and
climate change activist Bruce Melton

Austin environmentalist and Rag Blog contributor talks about global warming, climate change denial, and Austin's 'Dry Lake Blues.'

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / October 2, 2013

Environmental researcher and climate change activist Bruce Melton was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 20, 2013.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download the podcast of our September 20 interview with Bruce Melton here:


Melton, an Austin-based civil engineer and a student of climate science, discussed global warming, climate change denial, the Texas drought, and Austin's "Dry Lake Blues" on Rag Radio.

Bruce Melton is an environmental researcher and activist, a green builder, an environmental filmmaker, an author, and front man for the band, Climate Change. Bruce is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and Truthout on issues of climate change and global warming. He is the author of Climate Discovery Chronicles and his new book is Dry Lake Blues. He blogs at ClimateDiscovery.com .

Bruce Melton was one of eight Austinites named as a "Hero of Climate Change" by Good Life Magazine. He has been translating and interpreting scholarly science publications for two decades. His Climate Change Now initiative has applied for nonprofit 501(c)(3) status. This is his fourth time to appear on Rag Radio. The Rag Blog's Roger Baker also participated in the discussion.

Listen to the podcasts of Bruce Melton's earlier appearances on Rag Radio and read Bruce's articles at The Rag Blog.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is now also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, October 4, 2013: Novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross, set in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Friday, October 11, 2013: Medical and Cultural Anthropologist Seth Holmes, author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Rag Radio : Bruce Melton on the Real-World Effects of Climate Change

Climate change activist Bruce Melton, left, with Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, in the KOOP studios in Austin, Texas, Friday, Dec. 30, 2011. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio.

Environmental activist Bruce Melton discusses
the real-world effects of climate change on Rag Radio
with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here:

Tom Hayden, progressive political activist and SDS founder, will be Thorne Dreyer's guest in a New Years' Special on Rag Radio, Friday, January 6, 2012, from 2-3 p.m. CST on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live to the world.

Bruce Melton was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, December 30, 2011.

Melton is an Austin-based professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, writer, green builder, and front man for the band, Climate Change. His main mission is filming and reporting on the impacts of climate change happening now. Bruce Melton’s new book is Climate Discovery Chronicles. He is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and his Rag Blog articles about climate change can be found here.

This is Bruce Melton’s second visit to Rag Radio. (Listen to our first interview, on December 3, 2010, here.) On the show we discuss the current real-world effects of climate change and global warming, including events like the great Texas drought, wildfires, and tree kill of 2011; the North American Pine Beetle Pandemic; the Arctic "icequakes"; and the effect of global warming on the Amazon Rain Forest.

The program includes recorded music by Bruce Melton's band, Climate Change.

Ah, irony! In an AP story run in the Houston Chronicle, climate change activist Bruce Melton is shown wetting down the roof of his house during wildfires in Central Texas earlier this year. CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.
Rag Radio -- hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer -- is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. KOOP is an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Rag Radio, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Coming up on Rag Radio:

• Jan. 6, 2012: New Years Special with progressive political activist and SDS founder Tom Hayden.
  
• Jan. 13, 2012: UT-Austin government professor David Edwards on transformative trends in international relations.
• Feb. 3, 2012: Historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Bruce Melton : Climate Change and Global Economic Dysfunction

Smokestack blues. Image from Planet Green.
Smokestack blues:
Confronting dangerous climate change

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / November 28, 2010

Bruce Melton will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, Dec. 3, 2010, 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. To stream Rag Radio live on the internet, go here. To find out more about Rag Radio, and for links to earlier shows on our archives, go here.

How do we curb emissions with the way our society has evolved? Really. I mean serious curbing; enough to prevent dangerous climate change?

Do you realize that ocean primary productivity has declined 40% since 1950? Or that, this year's coral bleaching was worse than during the super El Nino of '98? Or that, the Arctic was declared functionally ice free last summer for the first time in 14 million years?

Or that, the ultra high CO2 levels in prehistory were really only half as high as we thought, meaning we are a lot closer to the extreme paleohothouse environment than we thought? Or that, the dead trees from the pine beetle pandemic in Yellowstone are visible on Google and that the pandemic has begun its transition to the boreal forest in Alberta?

Or that, October 2010 was the 308th consecutive month with an average temperature above the 20th century average?

Unless we quickly find the ability to develop the magic sequestration machine, we are indeed relegated to experience dangerous climate change at least in our children's lifetimes. By dangerous climate change, I mean the traditional scientific definition. Not, apparently, what 80 percent of Americans think.

What I mean is this: a climate change that creates global economic dysfunction. I mean what the scientists mean when they talk about dangerous climate change, A shift of our functional climate that results in significant sea level rise -- dislocating hundreds of millions, maybe billions. This is the standard scientific definition of dangerous climate change that results in global ecoregime change that kills hundreds of millions with famine.

It doesn't take long to change a grassland to a sea of sand -- meaning that dry land agriculture can dry up in a megadrought in a few years. The extremeness of megadroughts, that have happened repeatedly in the ancient past, being 100 to 300 years in duration with only half of the rainfall that we received in the Dust Bowl.

Dangerous climate change changes Earth's environment beyond the evolutionary niches of keystone species like primary productivity. When primary productivity takes a hit, not only does the most important part of Earth's natural sequestration machine lose efficiency, but significant reduction in the efficiency of Earth's oxygen generation machine takes place as well.

I don't think the cost of prevention will be any more than Lord Sterns estimates at one to two percent GDP. I am also certain that any number of sequestration technologies are entirely feasible including clean coal... If, we act really soon.

How do I know that some 80% percent of Americans do not understand the definition of dangerous climate change? I don't, but I do know that the recent Scientific American poll, a dataset that should reveal a higher level of education than most, reveals that these survey respondents would fail their Climate Change 101 class miserably. Only an eight-question survey, the telling question was #8. How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change? The response was 79.6 percent for "nothing."

Curiously, Scientific American has removed the link to this poll from their site. Survey Monkey, however, still has the data up, unidentified. I looked at Scientific American to confirm this a couple of weeks ago when one of my oldest friends, who has gone over to the dark side, verbally accosted me with this news (once again) of the death of the AGW Conspiracy. The other seven questions in the poll are just as telling as to the profound depth of the success of the propaganda and misinformation campaign of the vested interests as the last question.

Expect an expanded version of this article, with Bruce's usual academic references, soon on The Rag Blog.

[When Bruce Melton, P.E., isn't practicing civil engineering, he's studying climate change and writing about it. Melton was one of eight Austinites named in the "Heroes of Climate Change" article published in The Good Life magazine in July 2007. To read more of his work on climate change, visit his website, Melton Engineering Services Austin.]

• Also see "The Price of Change," an op-ed by James Hansen on the potential of Chinese leadership to save the planet.
• And see other articles on climate science by Bruce Melton in The Rag Blog.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Bruce Melton : Welcome to Climate Change in Texas

Tree Kill in Central Texas, drought of 2011. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
Drought and wildfires:
Welcome to climate change in Texas

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / December 29, 2011

Environmental researcher and climate change activist Bruce Melton will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, Dec. 30, from 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live on the web. (The show is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. [Eastern] on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.) Also, listen to our Dec. 12, 2010, interview with Bruce Melton at the Internet Archive, and read more articles by Bruce Melton about global warming on The Rag Blog.

[This is the first in a three-part series.]

AUSTIN -- If this is not climate change, then this is exactly what climate change will be in as little as a decade. What has been happening in Texas, with these unprecedented (in time frames that matter) droughts and wildfires, is exactly what the climate scientists have been warning us about for over 20 years. We have been building up to this point since about the turn of the century, and now ecosystems have tipped over the edge. Climate feedbacks have kicked in hard.

The Texas Forest Services tells us that a half billion trees have died. Many more will die in the next five to 10 years from disease and insect infestation allowed by the damage that has already been done. These are the trees that have died in the drought, not the fires.

The first of this series of drought in 2005/6 was just classified as extreme. The last two have been one category worse than extreme -- the exceptional category. The last 12 months were drier than the worst 12 months of the great drought of the 1950s. This has been a $10 billion drought, with another $1 billion in damages from the fires.

Worse, it’s hotter now. This summer was 4.9 degrees warmer than average. This may not seem like a lot, but think how sick you have been in the past if you have ever had a 102.9 degree temperature. The reason that increased heat makes such a big difference is that extra heat greatly increases evaporation intensifying the effects of drought. In other words, the same drought is much worse if it is only a little hotter.

Trees started dying from the drought in 2005/6. The die-off became really bad in 2009 when broad swaths of the countryside west and east of Austin turned brown and failed to turn green again in the spring. Trees damaged from just one of these droughts can remain weak and susceptible to disease or dieback for a decade or more after the drought. The little root hairs on tree roots that soak up water take a long time to grow back.

West of Fredricksburg for 100 miles to the edge of the forest the desert has arrived. Fully half of the trees in that region are defoliated from drought (only a small amount is from oak wilt). The fate of many of these trees is sealed, but there is hope that rain will return fast enough to make a difference for some.

The total number of fires in Texas since November 2010 (through September 20, 2011) is 22,790, totaling 3,759,331 acres. This exceeds the previous record of 2.1 million acres, set in just 2005/6, by 80 percent. We almost doubled the last record, set just five years ago.

Thirty-three percent of U.S. wildland fires this year have been in Texas. The number of Texas fires this year is 61 percent greater (so far) than the 10-year national average for the entire United States. Six of the 10 largest wildfires in Texas history have occurred in 2011.

Sure, there have been bigger droughts and bigger fires in the early 1900s or the 1800s or the 1,300 hundreds or 3,000 year BC, but our complicated society did not evolve back then. We do not have the water to support our region today. This is why we have water use restriction in effect now, and last summer and every summer since the turn of the 21st century.

Do those bigger droughts in the past matter? Not one bit unless one uses that knowledge to understand the droughts and other really serious impacts allowed by drought that will happen right here, starting now. This is exactly what our climate scientists have been doing for these last 20 or 30 years that they have been warning us that these things would become the normal on a warmer planet.

In June 2009, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), founded by Ronald Reagan, published a report that tells us that by 2080, Austin will see an average of 90 to 120 days of 100 degree weather every year -- 10 times more than today’s average of 12 days per year. And this evaluation was done based on one of the middle of the road scenarios.

We are currently smack-dab in the middle of the worst-case scenario of the climate models. FYI: the Sonoran Desert Research Station in Arizona, the one with the giant Saguaro cactus, has an average of 87 days every year where the temperature tops 100 degrees.

A paper in Geophysical Research Letters in July 2010 (Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq) tells us that climate conditions will continue to rapidly worsen in the interior of North America and especially the West. The worsening will be so rapid that the decade 2020 to 2029 will include three to five droughts as bad as or worse than the worst drought that we have seen since 1951 (like what we just had).

A report out of the National Climatic Data Center in February 2011 (Dia) tells us that beginning in just 19 years (2030) Dust Bowl conditions will be the average climate condition across much of the interior of the U.S. By 2060, much of the interior of the nation will be two to three times as bad as the Dust Bowl with some areas four to five times more extreme than the Dust Bowl.

If you think I am trying to scare you, you are wrong. Projecting the second year of this current drought similar to or worse than what we have just experienced, with a growing La Nina and Lake Travis at 38 percent of capacity right now -- that’s scary.

Lake Travis was 100 percent full just 16 months ago. Travis is at its third lowest level or as low as it has been in 47 years. The only reason that it is not the lowest level ever though, is that prior to 47 years ago Lake Travis was used extensively for hydropower generation. This has not been done since that time.

What are we gonna do? Getting through the drought and fires is very important. This situation is extremely dangerous. Trim your trees, police your underbrush, move that firewood pile away from the house, get your valuables together in a “go-bag.”

The threat of suburban and even urban firestorms, as demonstrated recently in Bastrop and accidentally predicted, to the weekend -- by our State Climatologist -- is real and it is not likely to get better for another year. The future is here now. We must change the evolution of our society fast, before we run completely out of water. Prehistory tells us that these abrupt climate changes can be exceedingly violent.

This is no longer business as usual. Water use restrictions will not meet this challenge alone. We must act now to convince our leaders that this is not just another in a long string of extraordinary weather events that we cannot yet blame on climate change. If we do not immediately change our habits and lifestyles, we will run out of water. Our forests are already dying because they have run out of water.

Now: if you have read this far, you deserve a break. The bigger picture is a little more comforting than what is happening in our region today. I just finished another book by Dr. Richard Alley, one of the pivotal climate scientists of our time. Professor Alley tells us in Earth, the Operators Manual, that fixing our climate will be no more difficult or costly than creating our society’s wastewater collection and treatment infrastructure.

Cleaning up human waste took about 100 years and so will fixing our climate. It took about one percent of global GDP to install our wastewater infrastructure and this is close enough to the latest economic analyses of dealing with climate change to make the comparison valid. One percent of global GDP is almost exactly the same amount of money as the U.S. spends on its military every year, not counting wars.

But please understand that our climate scientists have been warning us for more than 20 years that if we do not act now, the costs and impacts will only become greater.

[Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, writer, and front man for the band Climate Change. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, can be found, along with more climate change writing and outreach, critical environmental issue films, and the band’s original blues, rock, and folk music tuned to climate change lyrics at his website. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]


References:

A half billion trees:
Preliminary estimates show hundreds of millions of trees killed by 2011 drought, Texas Forest Service, December 19, 2011.
http://txforestservice.tamu.edu/main/default.aspx?dept=news

The Texas drought and future of drought in Texas:
Snapshot of the Texas Drought: Near-term and long-term, projections include more dry conditions in Texas, Texas Climate News, Houston Advanced Research Center, November 2011.
http://texasclimatenews.org/wp/?p=3548

Drought in Texas: Status, Future, Reinsurance, Willis Re, 2011.
http://www.willisre.com/documents/publications/Risk_Financing_Structuring/Resource/Property/TexasDrought_2011.pdf

August 2011 Weather Summary: National Climatic Data Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2011/8

Billion dollar U.S. weather disasters 2011, National Climatic Data Center:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/billionz.html

USGCRP, U.S. Climate Change Science Program Coastal Sensitivity to Sea Level Rise: A Focus on the Mid-Atlantic Region, U.S. Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Department of Transportation, 320 pages, November 2009.
Complete report available online: http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/saps/302

Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq, Intensification of hot extremes in the United States, Geophysical Research Letters, August 2010. http://www.stanford.edu/~omramom/Diffenbaugh_GRL_10.pdf

Dai, Drought under global warming - a review, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews - Climate Change, p 45-65, January-February 2011.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.81/pdf

Alley, Earth: The Operators Manual, WW Norton, 2011

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Bruce Melton : Kick the Climate Deniers off the Island

The Greenwood Acres fishing pier on Lake Buchanan, west of Burnet, Texas. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.

The climate science is certain:
Time to kick the deniers off the island

In just eight years, permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest (including Austin) will be comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years.

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / August 15, 2013

AUSTIN, Texas -- The science is certain, but the deniers are just as certain that their pseudo science is certain. Getting the last few deniers to agree with 97 percent of climate scientists though -- is that a good use of resources? We have the vast majority of the public on our side -- isn't that enough votes?

We can kick the deniers off the island. This is not a mean-spirited thing -- far from it. It's about the optimal path for resource-deprived situations.

The denier crowd is no longer a viable voting block. We need to be focusing on the rest of us. Very few understand the extreme nature of the most recent findings in climate science and the relative ease with which our climate pollution problem can be solved. Environmentally aware voices today advocate for Kyoto Era policies. But Kyoto Era policies were created in the early 1990s.

The psychology of denial is a tricky thing to overcome. It's not about what we think it is about. It's not about "their science" being as good as ours in their eyes. It’s deeper than that and involves social upbringing, false intuition, authority figures, geography, gender, and religion. Because "believers" control the voting block it no longer matters why deniers disbelieve. We no longer need to change their minds.

Because of the dwindling number of deniers, their opinions are no longer relevant. The only thing that has a chance of changing their minds is time or personal experience -- so says the global warming psychology literature. We can influence neither of those, so why waste valuable time and resources? In just eight years, permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest (including Austin) will be comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years. (1)

This megadrought has now begun. In Austin we are suffering from a devastating long-term drought, but only four of the last eight years in Austin have seen significantly below normal rainfall (less than 0.5 inches below average). In the Highland Lakes watershed at San Angelo, where the water comes from to fill our lakes that are at 36 percent of capacity, only three of the last eight years saw significantly below normal rainfall. Yet inflows to the lakes have fallen below the 1950s Drought of Record levels four times in the last eight years. How can this be?

A longer growing season soaks up more soil moisture and leaves less for the springs to create inflows into the lakes. More numerous bigger rainfall events and fewer smaller rainfall events happening already mean that dry periods are longer. When it does rain, more soaks in and less runs off.

Winters are warm enough now that many species do not go dormant any longer (in Central Texas). They keep using groundwater through the winter and leave less to create inflows into the lakes. Evaporation is disproportional to warmth. A little warmth equals a lot more evaporation; more evaporation creates a drier atmosphere allowing it to get warmer creating a feedback loop.

Inflows to the Highland Lakes during the drought of record were 14 percent more than what we have seen today. They were more during the Drought of Record.

• 1947 to 1956: 10,333,493 acre feet
• 2003 to 2112: 9,070,919 acre feet

(This does not include the drought buster year of 1957 with 4.4 million acre feet of inflow.)

Plus, during the Drought of Record, LCRA was releasing 460,000 acre feet of water annually above what they release today because of hydroelectric generation. If hydroelectric releases similar to LCRA’s hydroelectric generation era were made today, in 2011 lake levels would have been far lower than they were in the 1950s and today the lakes would be completely dry. LCRA quit making hydroelectric releases in the late 1970s and early 80s as coal- and natural gas-fired power plants came on line.

But the biggest surprise is that rainfall in Austin is 7 percent more than it was in 1990. Yet, inflows to the lakes are far, far below the average of the previous 50 years. Drought can be perpetuated even with greater rainfall.

Climate scientists have been telling us these things will happen for decades, and now they are happening. It shouldn't be counterintuitive, but the denier and delayer crowd has effectively killed discussion about anything except whether or not global warming exists from a high school greenhouse effect point of view.

We need to be focusing on the level of "belief" of the "believers." It's a business decision. We can fire the deniers. It might not be the "right" thing to do, but we do not have time to be so kind. As a bonus however, we can preserve our relationships with deniers by ignoring the topic like they do. It's ok, we have enough votes.

The amount of resources needed to convince the denier and delayer gang is disproportionally large compared to the fine-tuning of the message that needs to be delivered to "believers." Time is short. We are likely too far gone to forego major tipping points like the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, desertification of the interior of continents, and a 50 GT methane outburst from clathrates. Now we need to prevent our climate from crossing even more severe thresholds.

Solution requirements are much larger today than in the Kyoto Era. We were supposed to have reduced our emissions to 1987 levels by 2012 to prevent dangerous climate change. Instead we have increased emissions by 57 percent. Since 1987 we have emitted 81 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted from the beginning of mankind's emissions until 1987.

Greater than 100 percent emissions reductions are now needed to prevent "extremely dangerous climate change." (2) Spending all of our time trying to convince a few deniers that climate change is real is not a good use of limited time or resources.

The public needs to know the ease with which we can "treat" climate pollution. The 2 percent global gross domestic product cost of dealing with climate pollution advocated by most economists over the last decade is the same as we spend on advertising every year; or the annual U.S. military budget not counting wars; or the yearly costs of the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act; or the costs of normal weather losses every year in the U.S. alone not counting climate enhanced events. It is one quarter the annual cost of health care in the U.S. averaged from 2000 to 2009 -- before Obamacare went into effect.

But the latest research leaves the science of the mid-2000s in its dust. The Stanford/Cornell Plan for a fossil fuel-free New York State suggests that New York build a new alternative energy infrastructure at a cost of a bit more than $500 billion by 2030. Beginning in 2030, the savings and profits -- above a fossil fuel economy in New York State -- are $114 billion per year. This pays off the investment in less than five years. Savings and profits then only increase with time relative to the ever-increasing costs of a fossil fuel infrastructure.(3)

[Bruce Melton, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, as well as more climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website and at climatediscovery.com. Melton’s Climate Change Now Initiative has applied for nonprofit 501(c)(3) status. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]

References:

(1) In just eight years, permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest will be comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years -- Evaluation of work from NOAA and Columbia Earth Institute (Seager 2012) for Truthout.org. Melton, Worst Drought in 1,000 Years Could Begin in Eight Years, Truthout.org, Feb. 21, 2013.
 http://truth-out.org/news/item/14655-worse-drought-in-1000-years-could-begin-in-eight-years
Seager et al., Projections of declining surface water availability for the southwestern United States, Nature Climate Change, December 2012, page 5, last paragraph.
Abstract: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1787.html
NOAA: 
 http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/glodech/research11%20SW%20water%20surface.html
Earth Institute press release: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/12/23/smaller-colorado-river-projected-for-coming-decades-study-says/
 
(2) Extremely dangerous climate change, two degrees C: 550, 450, 350 and 300 ppm CO2 -- Morrigan, Target Atmospheric GHG Concentrations Why Humanity Should Aim for 350 ppm CO2e, University of California Santa Barbara, 2010.
http://www.global.ucsb.edu/climateproject/papers/
Ramanthan, On avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system: Formidable challenges ahead, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, 2008.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14245.full.pdf+html
Hansen et al., Target Atmospheric CO2, Where Should Humanity Aim, Open Atmospheric Science Journal, NASA, November 2008.  
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Hansen_etal.html
IPCC 2007, Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,, B. Metz, O.R. Davidson, P.R. Bosch, R. Dave, L.A. Meyer (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, Chapter 13, Policies, Instruments and Co-operative Arrangements.
IPCC 2001, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Third Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Technical Summary.  
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/
 
(3)A Fossil Fuel Free New York State -- Melton, A Fossil Fuel Free New York State by 2050: An in-depth look at Stanford and Cornell's 100 percent alternative energy road map for New York state, Truthout.org, May 26, 2013.  
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16540-a-fossil-fuel-free-new-york-state-by-2050
Jacobson et al., Examining the feasibility of converting New York State's all-purpose energy infrastructure to one using wind, water, and sunlight, Energy Policy 57 (2013) 585-601.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NewYorkWWSEnPolicy.pdf

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Bruce Melton : The Climate Change Awareness Drought is Over / 1

Photo © Bruce Melton, 2012.
The climate change
awareness drought is over
Part One: It’s time to change the tone

The shift in awareness is very encouraging and seems quite likely to be more or less permanent because the number of unprecedented weather events will very likely continue to increase.

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2012

[This is the first of a three-part series exploring the recent change in public awareness of climate change issues, the causes behind the change, biases, the latest science showing how much our climate has already changed, and academic support for a vigorous change in messaging.]

AUSTIN, Texas -- Polls, surveys and academic evaluations of public opinion are showing a shift in our collective understanding of climate change. Since the turn of the century, belief in the causes of and reality of climate change has fluctuated wildly at levels below those seen in the 1990s.

Some of this change has been caused by political cues. These are the messages that we get from our leaders and interest groups motivated to “advertise” their message. Change in awareness is also caused by actual climate extremes. Because the extremes are here to stay and there is a growing distrust of the “voices” that advertise the message being disproven by the extremes, the increasing change in awareness is grounds for a shift in advocacy policy towards how we urge for climate change action.

In a 2008 report, George Mason University says that only 60 percent of climate scientists believed that Earth was warming in 1991, compared to 97% today. Public understanding of climate issues was fair to poor until the Bush Administration came into office and awareness significantly declined. But President Clinton is not blameless because he first failed to do something about Senate Resolution 98 (in 1997) that refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and for four more years did not sign.

Bush’s subsequent failure to sign and then his premeditated campaign to derail international climate change policy work gave Americans permission to deny. The United States was the only country in the world except for Afghanistan and South Sudan that did not sign Kyoto.

Beginning in 2005 we saw a string of unprecedented blizzards in the northeastern U.S. and northern Europe. The cold weather convinced many that climate change was indeed as the voices were saying, and that they could continue to disregard the message from scientists. In 2009 more political cues penetrated the media deeply with the theft of climate scientists’ emails and attention being drawn to a single error in the 2007 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Report (Known as Himalayagate) -- and a slanderous campaign discrediting the 2007 IPCC reporting on the Amazon was faulty (Amazongate).

The climate science community hoped things would change with Obama’s election in 2008. His message about climate change, although with muted action, was radically different from the Bush Administration’s message. Political cues had radically changed across the country and even the failed Copenhagen Summit kept climate change in the news and was laying the foundation for a change in awareness.

In 2010 it finally happened. The press was paying attention to scientific findings showing that blizzards and snowtastrophes were associated with an unprecedented weather pattern in the Arctic, caused by climate change, sending abnormally severe winter weather far south on a berserk jet stream.

Then unprecedented weather simply exploded in 2010 with the Russian heat wave and Pakistan floods and in 2011 the extremes went off the charts. A study led by Anthony Leiserowitz out of Yale released in February 2012 tells us:

A large majority of Americans believe that global warming made several high profile extreme weather events worse, including the unusually warm winter of December 2011 and January 2012 (72%), record high summer temperatures in the U.S. in 2011 (70%), the drought in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 (69%), record snowfall in the U.S. in 2010 and 2011 (61%), the Mississippi River floods in the spring of 2011 (63%), and Hurricane Irene (59%).

For 20 years, the vast majority of climate scientists have been warning us that changes like these would happen if we did not reduce our emissions. We did not and they did. Now these same scientists (and more) are warning us that the extremes will continue to worsen even if we do stop all emissions, and a longer delay means more danger than otherwise. The message is getting through.

The Yale study tells us that over the past several years, Americans say the weather in the U.S. has been getting worse rather than better by a margin of over 2 to 1 (52% vs. 22%). The National Climatic Data Center tells us that 14 weather disasters costing more than a billion dollars each (inflation adjusted) happened in 2011. This is 56 percent more than the previous record of nine set in just 2005 and three times as many as the average of the last decade (4.8 per year, 3.8 in the 1990s).

Peer reviewed literature is now coming out that shows, in addition to the unprecedented blizzards, things like the Moscow heat wave in 2010, the Pakistan floods in 2010, the European heat wave of 2003, and the Texas heat wave of 2011 (in-press) were caused by climate change. The National Center for Atmospheric Research tells us that across the planet high temperature records are happening twice as often as low temperature records. In a stable climate this ratio should be one to one. The Yale study goes on:

About half of all Americans say that heat waves (53%), droughts (46%) and very heavy rain storms (43%) have become more common in their local area over the past few decades. People in the Northeast and Midwest are more likely to report that heavy rainstorms have become more frequent in their local area, while people in the South and West are more likely to report that droughts have increased.

Many Americans also say that extreme weather has increased the occurrence of other problems in their local area, including harm to crops (46%), floods (39%), problems with air quality (38%), forest fires (34%), problems with water quality (31%), and problems with transportation (23%). People in the Northeast and Midwest are more likely to report that local floods and harm to crops have become more frequent, while people in the South and West are more likely to report that forest fires in their local area have become more frequent.

The shift in awareness is very encouraging and oddly, even more encouraging is the concept that the shift seems quite likely to be more or less permanent because the number of unprecedented weather events will very likely continue to increase. The Brookings Institute tells us the change in awareness began in the spring of 2010.

Americans' environmental priorities have shown global warming at the very bottom since at least 2004. But it’s the relative position of the issue that counts, however (and of course the other issues being measured). When we compare March 2011 to March 2012 we see that those who “worry a great deal” about global warming have increased 5 percent to 30 percent. The lowest it has ever been in this record that dates back to 1989 is 24 percent in 1997.

Gallup’s 1997 to 2011 poll about public belief in the seriousness of global warming shows a 4 percent increase from 2010 to 2011. Pew shows a 6 percent increase in the belief that evidence is ”solid” from 2010 to 2011. Rasmussen is up 4 to 6 percent since 2010. Another Gallup poll from 1989 to 2011, about how much individuals personally worry about climate change, is also up 4 percent in 2011.

The Brookings Institute shows a 10 percent increase in the belief of solid evidence showing Earth’s temperature has been getting warmer in the 18-month period between spring 2010 and fall 2011. And finally, once again looking at Gallup’s long-term list of Americans' environmental concerns, global warming is still on the bottom but that five point increase from 25 to 30 percent is a 20 percent increase in one year.

Overall this is a solid 3 to 5 percent annual increase (or more), which is a very healthy change in overall public perception. Considering that this rate will likely increase, in just two or three years public sentiment could be at an all-time high.


Biased? (The science and/or the polls and petitions and “is this weather or climate we are talking about?”)

Nonbelievers out there would say my evaluation is one-sided or cherry-picked and that I should be looking at “other” sources of information and that public belief is a consequence of the climate scientists’ or government conspiracy. So looking at the three major treatises of the dissenter groups, the most astonishing is the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine Global Warming Petition Project with signatures of more than 31,000 scientists.

The original petition in 1998 that collected 17,000 signatures included a 12-page peer review-like paper that looked exactly like a U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) publication, complete with date, volume, and page numbers (it was not a published paper of any kind). The author of the petition, Frederick Seitz (founder of the Marshall Institute), is a former president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS has taken the extraordinary step of disassociating itself from the Oregon Petition in this statement:

The petition was mailed with an op-ed article from The Wall Street Journal and a manuscript in a format that is nearly identical to that of scientific articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. [the NAS statement goes on]. The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.

This “petition” contains signatures of over 13,000 medical doctors, engineers, and general science majors. Many, if not all, of these good folks could be qualified to say something about climate science, but are they? Generally, expert opinion in science is relegated to those with advanced degrees in specific disciplines. Engineers and medical doctors do not practice fundamental science, they apply fundamental science. There’s a big difference.

Out of all of the signatures that can even be identified, only an exceedingly small fraction are actual climate scientists. From the sidebar of Scientific American's “Climate of Uncertainty” in October 2001:

Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. [of the original 17,000] in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition -- one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages.

As an example of the lack of control in who signs this petition, there are 10,102 in the category of general engineering and general science broken down into I) Engineering (7,280), II) Electrical Engineering (2,169) and III) Metallurgy (384), and General Science (269). Not included in the engineering category are 223 nuclear engineers, 2,169 electrical engineers, 1,693 chemical engineers, and 2,637 mechanical engineers.

Over half (16,555) of the signatures are from engineers. Are engineers capable of understanding climate? Sure. I am an engineer. Are engineers represented in the academic literature publishing about climate? The answer is a resounding “no.” To finish with the Oregon Petition; it includes 81 food scientists and 384 metallurgical scientists.

Climate Change Reconsidered is an 880 page report prepared by the Marshall Institute and co-authored by Fred Singer. The opening remarks of the original video press conference of this 2009 report on their website primarily refers to the 31,000 “scientists” of the Oregon Institute Petition as their scientific support.

The header on their website tells us to “Learn the Benefits of Atmospheric CO2.” Singer is an 83-year-old physicist who made a name for himself studying clouds. Singer also made a name for himself fighting against the anti-smoking movement and he was outspoken against regulations to curb acid rain. Then he fought against global protection for the ozone layer.

Emailgate, Himalayagate, Amazongate, etc.: Theft of personal emails; a single error about Himalayan glacier among thousands of facts in the 2007 IPCC Report, and a Scribner’s citation error about the Amazon are resources that have been considered. The email scientists have been cleared of all charges by four separate independent investigations.

As for public opinion, there are certainly other sources of information on public opinion that I have not cited, and many of them say the same thing that I have reported, like the Public Religion Research Institute. But then there are those sources like The Heartland Institute or the George C. Marshall Institute that have carried out long and expensive campaigns to discredit.

When the Heartland Institute compares those who believe the consensus position on climate change to the Unabomber, a line must be drawn. Rush Limbaugh and the talking heads on Fox News use similar crude tools to frighten and attempt to discredit with their “message.” This is not something that happens in credible science.

Photo © Bruce Melton, 2012.
To conclude part one of this series, the relatively recent increase in unprecedented weather extremes has shaken up an increased public apathy towards climate change that has been prevalent since about the turn of the century. The opinions of the dissenters are well established, prominently advertised, and look enormously authoritative, but they lack hardly any credibility.

Climate scientists have been warning us that weather extremes would happen sooner if we did not reduce emissions. We did not and they did. The American public has broadly taken notice, blamed the unprecedented nature of these weather extremes on climate change, and this is represented by numerous public opinion polls, surveys, and recently published academic work.

It’s time to ramp up the discussion.

[In Part 2 (out of 3) of this series -- titled “Voices Tell Us the Warmists are Dead” -- we will explore academic work showing the lack of credentialed viewpoints in the scientific opinions of the dissenters, and the exceedingly small number of credentialed climate scientists that do not support the consensus.]

[Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, can be found at this link. More climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog. Photography © Bruce Melton, 2012]

References:

Gallup, March 30, 2012 In U.S., Global Warming Views Steady Despite Warm Winter: http://www.gallup.com/poll/153608/global-warming-views-steady-despite-warm-winter.aspx
Pew Center, Modest Rise in Number Saying There Is “Solid Evidence” of Global Warming, November 9-14, 2011 (Published December 1, 2011) : http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/12-1-11%20Global%20warming%20release.pdf
Yale 2012: Weather extremes caused by climate change have changed public awareness: Leiserowitz et al., Extreme-Weather-Climate-Preparedness, Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, April 2012.pdf http://www.climateaccess.org/sites/default/files/Leiserowitz_Extreme%20Weather%20Climate%20Preparedness.pdf
Gallup, March 30, 2012 - Americans' Worries About Global Warming Up Slightly: http://www.gallup.com/poll/153653/americans-worries-global-warming-slightly.aspx
Public belief that climate change is happening has only recently risen above 1991 beliefs of climate scientists: Climate Scientists Agree on Warming, Disagree on Dangers, and Don’t Trust the Media’s Coverage of Climate Change, George Mason University, STATS, 2008. http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html
Climate Change Cues: Brulle et al., Shifting public opinion on climate change. An empirical assessment of factors influencing concern over climate change in the US 2002 to 2010, Climatic Change, Feb 2012. http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~brullerj/02-12ClimateChangeOpinion.Fulltext.pdf

Leaders and interest groups capable of advertising climate misinformation: Cooper, Media Literacy as a Key Strategy Toward Improving Public Acceptance of Climate Change Science, Bioscience, March 2011. http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1525/bio.2011.61.3.8
Change in advocacy policy: Yale, Climate Change in the American Mind, Public Support for Climate and Energy Policies in March 2012. http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/Policy-Support-March-2012.pdf
Weather Extremes Caused by Climate Change: Rhamstorf and Coumou, Increase of extreme events in a warming world, PNAS, October 24, 2011. http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_coumou_2011.pdf
Prominent Dissenter Campaigns: Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine Petition Project: http://www.petitionproject.org/
Climate Change Reconsidered: http://www.nipccreport.org/index.html
Brookings Institute, Fall 2011, National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, Issues in Governance, Feb 2012. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2012/02/climate-change-rabe-borick
Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D.: http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~kotliar/honors/honsem/somalwar/honsem/2002/articles/sciam_uncertainty.html

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Bruce Melton : World Bank on Climate: 'Turn Down the Heat'

Glacier melt. Photo by Dave Appleby / Flickr / Truthout.
Is it really this bad?
World Bank on climate:
'Turn down the heat'

Instead of working on climate pollution emissions reductions, we are now emitting more than was imagined in the 1998 worst-case scenario.

By Bruce Melton / Truthout / January 17, 2013

See Bruce Melton's writing about climate change on The Rag Blog.

Mega reports on climate change are piling up almost as fast as the extreme unprecedented weather events. The latest by the World Bank is just another summary of conservative consensus climate science. Impacts are already worse than stated, but fortunately, solutions could be easier than are commonly understood.

As incredible as it sounds, the effects of climate change are even worse than the World Bank says in its latest report, "Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C World Must be Avoided," a summary of the latest findings in climate science.

Much of this work is based on 1998 climate change scenarios and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change consensus position from 2007. Because science takes years and years to happen, a lot of this research is based on a world where Kyoto was still a part of the deal.

But in our world today, instead of working on climate pollution emissions reductions, we are now emitting more than was imagined in the 1998 worst-case scenario. Even though much of the work in the World Bank Report is the latest and greatest, it is still largely based in research on one of the "middle-of-the-road" climate change scenarios.

This is why these consensus reports are so dangerous. It's not that they project global catastrophe, it is that those projections are based on a consensus opinion. Whenever you get more than one specialist of any kind agreeing on a position that satisfies more than that one specialist, the result is almost always a group opinion that is watered down.

So alone, the scientific consensus on climate change is not as extreme as any of its given parts. It's easy to agree on the middle-of-the road scenario now that the "best-case" scenario is so obviously a pipe dream.

The consensus opinion includes the solutions as well as the impacts. What the latest forward-leaning findings are now reporting is that treating climate pollution using existing technologies will be no more difficult than supplying Earth with clean drinking water every day. This is hardly a path that destroys our economies.

These existing technologies are things like efficiency improvements, electric and hybrid vehicles, fluorescent light bulbs, wind, solar, wave, tidal, carbon capture and storage (CSS), carbon sequestration and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC), natural gas combined cycle (NGCC), saline aquifer sequestration, mineral sequestration, oil field disposal -- the list is a mile long.

New technologies now in the field-proving stages are in addition to the economic evaluations that show the cost of treating climate pollution being no different than that for supplying our society with clean drinking water. These “new” technologies have the promise of being far less expensive than existing technologies. Photo copyright Bruce Melton 2012.
More interesting and likely far more valuable is the up and coming technology of air capture. Traditionally, air capture has been seen as infeasible because of the low concentration of CO2 compared to smokestack concentrations from energy generation or industrial processes.

But this is changing. Billionaires across the globe are investing in carbon capture and sequestration technologies to meet the climate change challenge. Outfits like SRI in California are looking to capitalize on the vast amount of money soon to be spent on cleaning up climate pollution by sucking CO2 straight out of the air. The future could be brighter than we think.

While "Heat" is a vast scientific summary of all the major research, it focuses on global average temperature change and largely leaves out what is likely the most important thing about climate change impacts. It is a little thing involving the calculation of averages, but it means a lot to us humans who live on land.

Earth's oceans cool our climate considerably. This is why the report's projection of seven degrees Fahrenheit of warming will be so catastrophic. Seven degrees is a lot to ecosystems but not to air-conditioned humans. Warming over land, however, is much greater than over oceans, and this skews the average considerably. What we will actually experience is a lot more warming than the average global warming projections reported by "Heat" suggest.

More evidence of the conservative (small "c") consensus can be found in "Heat." It tells us the Amazon will be devastated by global warming in the future.

But a report in April 2011, by a team from the University of Boston, NASA's Ames Research Center and the University of Viçosa, Brazil, tells us that the Amazon has already changed from a carbon sink to a carbon source, emitting greenhouse gases at a rate that is 75 percent as large as that of the entire United States. The cause is the death of over two billion trees, say the paper's authors. They were killed by two massive droughts: a 100-year drought in 2005 and one four times as extreme, in 2010.

The Amazon has unexpectedly flipped from a carbon sink to a carbon source nearly as big as all emissions from the United States. The reason is drought: a 100-year drought in 2005 and one four times more extreme, in 2010, that killed more than 2 billion trees. Copyright Bruce Melton 2012.
Billions more have been killed across North America. Over 64 million acres have been impacted in the Rockies in the United States and Canada, where a devastating pine beetle outbreak remains uncontrolled. Extreme cold is the beetle's only enemy, and extreme cold has gone away.

Warming is twice as much or more than the global average in the Rockies and high latitudes because of the snow and ice feedback. This is caused by warming that melts snow a little earlier, allowing for a longer hot season. Because snow reflects nine times more energy harmlessly back into space than does earth, rock, water, or vegetation, more warming is created. This feeds back into more snowmelt even earlier, and the cycle continues in a rapid warming spiral.

The Texas Forest Service tells us that the drought in the South Central United States in 2011 killed 301 million trees. Findings in Nature Geoscience, by a team from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, together with scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Forest Service, tells us that the black spruce forest of Alaska (much of the forested area in Alaska) also has now changed from a carbon sink to a carbon source. The team tells us that Alaska's CO2 emissions from increased forest fires due to climate warming is about equal to all of the emissions from all of Canada's forest fires during the period 1959-1999.

Research published in Nature Climate Change tells us that forests in the Canadian Rockies are dying 10 times faster than they did 50 years ago, and another piece of research by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2009 reveals that in about the same time frame, forest mortality across the western United States increased five times.

Both studies are careful to mention that the big pine beetle outbreak and increased forest fires are not included in their work. Both studies in the Rockies look at long-term evaluation (100 years plus) of old growth forests not impacted by logging.

What this means is that tree death has increased from roughly 0.5 percent per year to 5 percent per year. In 20 years, the average tree age and its associated carbon sequestration (capture and storage) capacity will be one-quarter what it is today -- in just 20 years -- not only across high altitudes and high latitudes in North America, but across the world.

"Heat" tells us the average global temperature will rise by seven degrees across the planet by the end of the century. This is not really a whole lot of warming to you and me. But the crazy part is not about how much damage seven degrees of warming will do to many global ecosystems. Seven degrees is the average across the planet. It will warm much more over land areas.

Our oceans are the reason why our climate has not caught up to our greenhouse gas emissions. We all hear that there is a lot more warming "in the pipeline." In other words, greenhouse gases already emitted will cause additional warming even if we stopped all emissions tomorrow morning. Cool ocean water and cooling from polar ice are both responsible. The refrigerator door has been left open, and it will take decades to generations for the oceans to warm up. So they cool our climate in the meantime.

Different studies from NASA, Columbia and the University of California, Santa Barbara tell us the additional warming will be between 2.5 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit. Then again, these evaluations are based on the middle-of-the-road scenario, so the actual warming in the pipeline is probably a lot more.

So all this cool ocean water cools that air over the oceans. Globally, because oceans cover more than two-thirds of earth, this means that the temperature over land will warm more than twice the global average. Wow!

In September 2009, research workers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Notre Dame, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research told us that because emissions are now along the path of the worst-case scenario, we should be focusing our understanding of future (and current) changes based on this scenario, not the middle-of-the road (A1B) scenario.

What the first few sentences of the report states is telling: "Recent observations of global-average emissions show higher trajectories than the worst-case (A1FI) scenario reported in IPCC AR4 (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 Report). Average A1FI temperatures trend higher than the best-case B1 as well as the relatively worse-case A2 scenario." (The IPCC scenarios include 40 different futures.)

This team went on to model the 1998 worst-case climate scenario from the 2007 IPCC report instead of the middle-of-the-road scenario used in so many of the research works evaluated in "Heat." The latest generation models also use a high-resolution framework that can show much greater detail than before.

What these models are now telling us backs up the "averaging effect" that the oceans have on the global temperature average. Their overall findings for the global average temperature increase under the worst-case scenario are little different from the IPCC consensus position that "Heat" discusses, it's the difference between warming over land and warming over the oceans that will cause all the chaos.

Auroop R. Ganguly and colleagues tell us that across the vast majority of the North American continent and most land masses on Earth, by just 2050, we can expect 14.4 degrees Fahrenheit of warming. By 2100, it's an unthinkable 22 degrees.

Research from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Notre Dame, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research shows warming over land that is far in excess of what is commonly understood. Much of this is because of the averaging effect of global temperature differences between those over land and over water.

So now we can begin to see why this World Bank Report is so strident in its findings. Only, what will happen in reality is likely much worse than what the World Bank Report recites.

But all is not lost. I already mentioned that the solutions will be no more difficult than supplying humanity with clean drinking water, and I will get back to that, but first I need to add a little bit of non-consensus knowledge to an assertion that "Heat" makes. Even before that let me clarify a little about the research findings I am reporting.

These individual findings are on the leading edge of science. As is often the case with leading-edge science, there is dissention in the scientific community about validity. What we have been seeing in climate change literature is what climate scientists have been warning us would happen for a couple of decades now: that if we did not reduce emissions, impacts would be more extreme and happen faster.

Much of the consensus knowledge about climate change today is relatively old. It takes a half decade or more for enough knowledge to be gained so that the consensus can begin to acknowledge the changes. This is what is happening across climate science these days. The latest reports are validating the warnings. Yet, the body of science is still young; the conservative consensus is reticent to change.

So "Heat" tells us that large portions of Earth will become uninhabitable because of desertification caused by warming. The desertification that we will actually endure is a lot more than anticipated in "Heat" because our emissions are so much greater. They are  50 percent greater than in 1988, and since 1988, we have emitted 87 percent of the total amount of greenhouse gases mankind has emitted since we started emitting.

Even so, vast desertification -- even coming much sooner than the consensus tells us -- will not render large tracts of developed nations uninhabitable. There is, you see, this little thing called air conditioning. While non-desert ecosystems will collapse, they will be replaced by desert ecosystems that can handle the heat and dryness. Extinctions will come and go, environmental chaos will reign, blah, blah, blah. All the while we will sit comfortably in our air-conditioned homes and offices.

Food-growing regions will diminish or disappear when groundwater runs out, but agriculture areas will arise. The Amazon for instance, will likely not become a desert overnight. Those Brazilians will continue with their agricultural development, and output will in all likelihood increase greatly, at least for the next couple of decades or generations.

In developed nations everything will become more expensive, but we have the cash to pay for it. The world however is not made up of only "developed nations." It's hard to imagine that our society could let things go this far, but if it does, the warming does not stop -- it gets worse even faster.

Now let me finish on a high note, also not reported with gusto in "Heat." "Authoritative" voices tell us climate change is not real, that it is a scientific conspiracy, that it is a natural cycle soon to end, and that it will be good for society. These same confused voices that are telling us all of these things at the same time are the voices that tell us that the solutions to climate change will ruin our economies.

The vast majority of credentialed climate specialists say nothing of the sort. Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University, one of the lead authors of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Reports, member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and one of the pivotal international researchers in climate science, tells us in his book Earth: the Operators' Manual, that about 100 reports have been published concerning the economic impacts of the solutions to climate change, and they are focusing in on one thing.

The solutions to cleaning up climate pollution, using existing technologies, will cost about one percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) per year for 100 years. The astonishing thing to understand about this one percent of global GDP -- this $540 billion a year -- is that it is little different from what we have spent on our efforts to provide safe drinking water across the planet every year for the last 100 years.

It is little different from what we spend on the U.S. military every year not counting wars, or what we spend on advertising every year across the planet. It is little different than the normal economic costs to our nation every year because of normal inclement weather -- rain, snow, heat, cold, wind, flooding and drought.

It is four times less than what we spend on health care every year in the United States alone, based on the annual 2000 to 2009 average that does not include Obamacare. And remember, this is using existing technologies. New technologies will significantly reduce or even convert these costs into profits.

Cleaning up climate pollution across the planet, in ways that we are already doing today, will cost far less than what we spend on health care every year -- just in the U.S. alone.

The "voices" of vested interests are very powerful. Their money has created doubt that threatens the existence of life on this planet. They did not do this purposefully; they did it because of greed, ignorance, innocence, and the pressures of their respective industries' economics. Their billions, and their quest for billions more, has allowed them to ignore, for whatever reasons, the dire warnings.

There are always a few scientists that disagree. In 2010, 97 to 98 percent of actively publishing climate scientists supported the consensus position. Should we trust the few or the many?

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

[Bruce Melton, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, as well as more climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website and at climatediscovery.com. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...