A few months back, those who care about accurate climate science and energy education in high school classes registered a minor victory. Under fire from outlets like The New York Times, the education publishing behemoth Scholastic (of Clifford the Big Red Dog and Harry Potter fame) pulled an energy curriculum sponsored by the American Coal Foundation, which gave a nice PR sheen to coal without bothering to cover, uh, the whole environmental angle. The curriculum had reportedly already been mailed to 66,000 classrooms by the time it got yanked.

When it comes to undermining accurate and responsible climate and energy education at the high school level, Scholastic may have been the most prominent transgressor. But precisely because it is a massive and respected educational publisher, and actually cares what The New York Times thinks, it was also the most moderate and easy to reason with.

Although it’s hard to find online now, I’ve reviewed the offending coal curriculum, entitled “The United States of Energy.” In my view, it didn’t even contain any obvious falsehoods—except for errors of omission. It was more a case of subtle greenwashing.

What’s currently seeping into classrooms across the country is far, far worse—more ideological, and more difficult to stop. We’re talking about outright climate denial being fed to students—and accurate climate science teaching being attacked by aggressive Tea Party-style ideologues.

Science magazine just released a report on the state of affairs out there in this place called America, and it’s ugly. From the piece:

How to fight this?

That’s very difficult because, as the Science piece notes, you can’t use the First Amendment. It only bans teaching religion in classrooms, and it is hard to claim that climate change denial—unlike evolution denial—is fundamentally religious in nature. I wouldn’t want to have to argue that case in court.

But while not religiously impelled in a traditional sense, the conservative activists who are attacking the teaching of climate science at the grassroots do fit a familiar profile. We’ve gotten to know them very well by now.

They are hierarchical in outlook, and tend to deny all manner of environmental risks. They often believe that climate science is part of a global conspiracy to impose a statist economy. And of course, they are often conservative white men like Jeffrey Barke, the Los Alamitos Unified School District board of education member who has placed this school at the center of attacks on accurate climate science teaching.

These people are nothing if not highly politicized and emotional. Here’s Barke in his own words:

What is the case for not letting people like Barke influence young students?

Simple: When a political fight erupts at a school over the teaching science, students are effectively being taught to tie science together with emotional, politicized reasoning processes–the way the adults who are interefering in the curriculum have already done in their own minds.

That’s precisely the opposite of what we want to be instilling in young brains. Students ought to be learning to think critically, to be dispassionate and apportion their beliefs to the evidence.

Attacks on climate science in schools aren’t just interferences with teaching, then. By supplying teenagers with politicized misinformation, you’re prepping them to have the kinds of emotionally driven argumentative responses that make our public discourse at the national level so fruitless.

You’re not just instilling denial. You’re creating the next generation of political dysfunction.

You’re not teaching kids to think, you’re teaching them to shout.

Chris is Washington correspondent for Seed magazine, senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and author of the bestselling book The Republican War on Science, dubbed “a landmark in contemporary political reporting” by Salon.com and a “well-researched, closely argued and amply referenced indictment of the right wing’s assault on science and scientists” by Scientific American.

The national debt isn’t the greatest short-term problem we face.  That is spurring jobs and economic growth.

And the debt certainly isn’t close to the greatest long-term problem we face.  That would obviously be unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases, which threaten human civilization with multiple simultaneous catastrophes — from endless superstorms to permanent DustBowls.  And yes, we could solve the first by addressing the second — but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

I can understand why the Tea-Party-driven GOP has made the national debt its focus.  Conservatives are using the debt debate as a stalking horse for their disdain of government to gut as many federal programs as possible, from clean energy to Medicare to EPA oversight.  Since those  programs are popular, the best strategy is for the GOP to attack them under the guise of their concern over some other issue.

As an aside, I’m not certain “conservatives” is the right word for them anymore, since they don’t actually want to conserve anything.  If they cared about the debt more than their rigid anti-tax ideology, they’d obviously be open to the unbelievable $4 trillion deficit-reduction deal that Obama put on the table and keeps offering every single day.

It’s mostly a mystery why the president has thrown the full weight of his bully pulpit and political muscle behind something that isn’t the biggest short-or long-term problem we face.  Yes, he has highlighted the GOP’s willingness to continue to call for spending cuts while rejecting a very aggressive $4 trillion deficit-reduction proposal— but for what gain?  He has bought into and reinforced the GOP narrative that debt and spending concerns reign supreme, which will undermine short-term and long-term efforts to create jobs or promote clean energy or reduce oil dependence or cut carbon pollution.

But what’s going on in Washington DC right now does provide an interesting window into the question, “What if the CO2 Ceiling Debate Were Like the Debt Ceiling Debate.”  Obviously, that is purely a counterfactual for the foreseeable future.  But by 2025, give or take 5 years, most everybody inside and outside of DC will realize that those pesky climate scientists were right all along.  Our concern over greenhouse gas emissions then will exceed our concern over the debt now to an unimaginable degree — indeed by more than our concern over the debt currently exceeds our concern over emissions.

In this post, I’ll look at the counterfactual.  After the debt ceiling debate is “resolved,” I’ll do a post on lessons learned.

What would be different if CO2 ceiling debate were like the debt ceiling debate?

First and most important, the right wing would be demanding urgent and strong action to reduce emissions.  Indeed, their “green tea party” would be demanding that we set a ceiling of 350 parts per million atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (we’re currently at more than 390 and rising 2 ppm a year).  After all, anything less would pose an unacceptable risk to all of our children and will devastate the lives of billions of people, for many decades if not centuries (see Royal Society special issue details ‘hellish vision’ of 7°F (4°C) world — which we may face in the 2060s! and A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice).

We would hear over and over again how unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions threaten an explosion of government control over our lives.  If we don’t restrict CO2, the government will inevitably get into the business of telling people where they can and can’t live (can’t let people keep rebuilding in the ever-spreading flood plains or the ever-enlarging areas threatened by sea level rise and DustBowlification) and how they can live (sharp water curtailment in the Southwest DustBowl, for instance) and possibly what they can eat.  Who else can possibly fund massive sea walls and levees but government?  Who else can respond to the mega-disasters that will be a yearly occurrence?  (See “Don’t believe in global warming? That’s not very conservative”).

And we’d hear endlessly from the “green tea party” about the value of resource conservation as a basic ethic.

Second, the president would convene daily meetings with members of Congress on how to address the climate problem.  He would hold regular press conferences on the subject  patiently explaining the underlying science and the remarkable low cost of the solutions (see “Intro to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost“).  He’d make sure all of his senior advisers focused on climate and did messaging on little else.  Heck, he’d actually practice some of the rhetorical techniques that got him to be president, like explaining things relatively simply and repeating them again and again.  Remember, this is a counterfactual! (see The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2)

Third, the media would run stories every day about climate change and climate solutions.  Heck they’d even patiently explain to the public the connection between global warming and extreme weather, since they spent a lot of time explaining to the public why addressing the debt is so important to our economic health, which is a far weaker arguments substantively.  Sadly, this, too, is all part of the counterfactual (see Silence of the Lambs: Media herd’s coverage of climate change “fell off the map” in 2010).

Fourth, the public would rally around climate action and clean energy.  Oh, wait, that isn’t a counterfactual (see a dozen polls over the last two years here).  Ironically, the counterfactual here is that the public doesn’t actual think reducing the deficit is the number one problem — and yet it is now our national obsession.  But they have always supported reducing pollution and accelerating the deployment of clean energy — and so of course we are now increasing pollution and facing cuts in clean energy funding.

Bottom Line:  Would the climate problem actually get addressed in this counterfactual? That still means the parties would have to work together, and the Republicans would have to give Obama a major political victory — whereas their top priority, as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has said repeatedly, is to make Obama a one-term president.

So, no doubt the green tea party would be incredibly uncompromising.  They’d refuse any solution that required government mandates or tax increases.

Instead, conservatives would demand Obama embrace Republican ideas supported by major utilities and energy companies.  In particular, they’d insist on a Republican-created, business friendly policy that actually creates a “right to pollute” and turns it into an economic product that could be traded like any other — so-called emission allowances.  Conservatives would demand that businesses and consumers be given these allowances either directly or through their local utility to protect them from the short-term costs of the clean energy transition and to ensure that higher cost for dirty energy could be ameliorated most equitably.

In short, they would insist on a cap-and-trade system — and we all know that could never pass Congress.  Oh well, I guess we don’t solve the problem even in the counterfactual.  This is like one of those time travel paradoxes where no matter how many times you try to go back and change things, you just can’t….

Joe Romm is the Editor of Climate Progress and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. A version of this article originally appeared on his blog.

Political philosophy has a legitimate role in policy debates, but not in the underlying climate science. There are no Democratic or Republican carbon dioxide molecules; they are all invisible and they all trap heat.

On June 13 a larger group of Australian scientists one-upped that American letter by publishing their own open letter with even more uncharacteristically blunt statements of scientific fact. Besides direct calls for media accountability, the Australians are taking their letter one step further by following it up with a two-week series of statements titled “Clearing up the Climate Debate.” Each statement in the series explains a basic science concept that the media gets wrong again and again, such as: why we know the greenhouse effect is real, why we know humans are contributing to it, and the difference between peer review and rhetoric.

Below is the text of the initial letter (emphasis is ours). At the bottom you can find a list of all of the signatories and links to each of the daily statements. Now to be fair, not everyone on the list is a “climate scientist.” In July 2010 a group of 31,000 purported climate scientists was slammed for inflating its numbers with nonscientists in a similar short petition stating that there is “no convincing scientific evidence” for anthropogenic climate change.

But here’s the difference. That petition had only 39 actual climate scientists among its 31,000 signatories, and scarcely more than a quarter of the total had doctorates in any field at all. The signatories of the Australian letter by contrast at least seem to all hold professorships, and have published in the peer-reviewed literature. Some of them can even be found in the interactive climate science literature graphic we featured last week. And let’s also not forget that while a National Academies study found that 97 percent of climate experts agree that climate change is “very likely” caused by human activity, in the end science is–thankfully–not decided by majority vote.

Here’s the Australian letter from June 13:

The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in climate changes that cannot be explained by natural causes.

Climate change is real, we are causing it, and it is happening right now.

Like it or not, humanity is facing a problem that is unparalleled in its scale and complexity. The magnitude of the problem was given a chilling focus in the most recent report of the International Energy Agency, which their chief economist characterised as the “worst news on emissions.”

Limiting global warming to 2°C is now beginning to look like a nearly insurmountable challenge.

Like all great challenges, climate change has brought out the best and the worst in people.

A vast number of scientists, engineers, and visionary businessmen are boldly designing a future that is based on low-impact energy pathways and living within safe planetary boundaries; a future in which substantial health gains can be achieved by eliminating fossil-fuel pollution; and a future in which we strive to hand over a liveable planet to posterity.

At the other extreme, understandable economic insecurity and fear of radical change have been exploited by ideologues and vested interests to whip up ill-informed, populist rage, and climate scientists have become the punching bag of shock jocks and tabloid scribes.

Aided by a pervasive media culture that often considers peer-reviewed scientific evidence to be in need of “balance” by internet bloggers, this has enabled so-called “sceptics” to find a captive audience while largely escaping scrutiny.

Australians have been exposed to a phony public debate which is not remotely reflected in the scientific literature and community of experts.

Beginning today, The Conversation will bring much-needed and long-overdue accountability to the climate “sceptics.”

For the next two weeks, our series of daily analyses will show how they can side-step the scientific literature and how they subvert normal peer review. They invariably ignore clear refutations of their arguments and continue to promote demonstrably false critiques.

We will show that “sceptics” often show little regard for truth and the critical procedures of the ethical conduct of science on which real skepticism is based.

The individuals who deny the balance of scientific evidence on climate change will impose a heavy future burden on Australians if their unsupported opinions are given undue credence.

The signatories below jointly authored this article, and some may also contribute to the forthcoming series of analyses.

Signatories

Winthrop Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Australian Professorial Fellow, UWA

Dr. Matthew Hipsey, Research Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Environment, Centre of Excellence for Ecohydrology, UWA

Dr Julie Trotter, Research Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Environment, UWA Oceans Institute, UWA

Winthrop Professor Malcolm McCulloch, F.R.S., Premier’s Research Fellow, UWA Oceans Institute, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Professor Kevin Judd, School of Mathematics and Statistics, UWA

Dr Thomas Stemler, Assistant Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics, UWA

Dr. Karl-Heinz Wyrwoll, Senior Lecturer, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Dr. Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleoclimate scientist, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Research School of Earth Science, Planetary Science Institute, ANU

Prof Michael Ashley, School of Physics, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof David Karoly, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Prof John Abraham, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, University of St. Thomas

Prof Ian Enting, ARC Centre for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems, University of Melbourne

Prof John Wiseman, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne

Associate Professor Ben Newell, School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Matthew England, co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr Alex Sen Gupta Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof. Mike Archer AM, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Steven Sherwood, co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr. Katrin Meissner, ARC Future Fellow, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr Jason Evans, ARC Australian Research Fellow, Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Global Change Institute, UQ

Dr Andy Hogg, Fellow, Research School of Earth Sciences, ANU

Prof John Quiggin, School of Economics, School of Political Science & Intnl Studies, UQ

Prof Chris Turney FRSA FGS FRGS, Climate Change Research Centre and School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW

Dr Gab Abramowitz, Lecturer, Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Andy Pitman, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Barry Brook, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, University of Adelaide

Prof Mike Sandiford, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Dr Michael Box, Associate Professor, School of Physics, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Corey Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling, The Environment Institute, The University of Adelaide

Dr Paul Dargusch, School of Agriculture & Food Science, UQ

Prof Nigel Tapper, Professor Environmental Science, School of Geography and Environmental Science Monash University

Prof Jason Beringer, Associate Professor & Deputy Dean of Research, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

Prof Neville Nicholls, Professorial Fellow, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

Prof Dave Griggs, Director, Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University

Prof Peter Sly, Medicine Faculty, School of Paediatrics & Child Health, UQ

Dr Pauline Grierson, Senior Lecturer, School of Plant Biology, Ecosystems Research Group, Director of West Australian Biogeochemistry Centre, UWA

Prof Jurg Keller, IWA Fellow, Advanced Water Management Centre, UQ

Prof Amanda Lynch, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

A/Prof Steve Siems, School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University

Prof Justin Brookes, Director, Water Research Centre, The University of Adelaide

Prof Glenn Albrecht, Professor of Sustainability, Director: Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy (ISTP), Murdoch University

Winthrop Professor Steven Smith, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, UWA

Dr Kerrie Unsworth, School of Business, UWA

Dr Pieter Poot, Assistant Professor in Plant Conservation Biology, School of Plant Biology, UWA

Adam McHugh, Lecturer, School of Engineering and Energy, Murdoch University

Dr Louise Bruce, Research Associate, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Are you a scientist? Do you agree? If you’d like to add your name to the list, send an email to megan.clement@theconversation.edu.au

This is the first part of our series Clearing up the Climate Debate. To read the other instalments, follow the links below:

• Part Two: The greenhouse effect is real: here’s why.
• Part Three: Speaking science to climate policy.
• Part Four: Our effect on the earth is real: how we’re geo-engineering the planet
• Part Five: Who’s your expert? The difference between peer review and rhetoric
• Part Six: Climate change denial and the abuse of peer review
• Part Seven: When scientists take to the streets it’s time to listen up on climate change
• Part Eight: Australia’s contribution matters: why we can’t ignore our climate responsibilities

This article is adapted from a Climate Progress post by Joe Romm.

While scientific questions are not answered by majority vote, the tool is nonetheless a fun and useful way of displaying and accessing a long history of scientific literature. When you click on the circle for a given year, you can actually get a list of all the scientific journal articles in that category that were published that year, with a link to the journal for each. Very useful.

You can play with the interactive climate science history tool here, and the article about it below is republished from Skeptical Science.

For years, I’ve been casually accumulating a database of peer-reviewed climate papers. A few months ago, some Skeptical Science contributors began brainstorming creative ways to visualize this database – a kind of visual sequel to Naomi Oreskes’ famous Science paper on consensus. Paul D decided to take it a step further and began programming a Javascript visualization that very cleverly packs an incredible amount of information into a single, user-friendly graphic.

The visualization displays the number of climate papers published each year, sorted into skeptic/neutral/pro-AGW categories (more on these categorizations shortly). What really blew me away is the slider at the bottom — drag it from left to right to observe the evolution of climate science research from Joseph Fourier in 1824 to the flood of research in 2011.

[Click on image to access visualization with slider].

How the Interactive History of Climate Science works

The Interactive History of Climate Science displays the number of climate papers published in each year from 1824 to 2011.

Each year is represented by a circle with the size of the circle determined by the number of papers. By moving the slider, you change the “current year” – more years are shown as you slide from left to right. The visualization begins with the slider parked in 1824 when Joseph Fourier first published General remarks on the temperature of the terrestrial globe and the planetary space.

Mouseover any circle and a small box displays the year and number of papers published in that year. Here’s the cool part – click on any circle and all the papers published that year are displayed beneath the visualization with a link to the paper. In one succinct visualization, Paul D has managed to cram in an incredible amount of information, with links to thousands of climate papers. It captures the ethos of Skeptical Science – multiple layers of information with both a user-friendly version for the layperson and a more detailed layer allowing deeper exploration.

How the papers are categorized

We took a different approach to Naomi Oreskes’ Science paper who sorted her papers into “explicit endorsement of the consensus position”, “rejection of the consensus position” and everything else (neutral). In the case of Skeptical Science, the backbone of our site is our list of climate myths. Whenever a climate link is added to our database, it is matched to any relevant climate myths. Therefore, each link is assigned “skeptic”, “neutral” or “proAGW” whether it confirms or refutes the climate myth.

This means a skeptic paper doesn’t necessarily “reject the consensus position” that humans are causing global warming. It may address a more narrow issue like ocean acidification or the carbon cycle. For example, say a paper is published examining the impacts of ocean acidification on coral reefs. If the paper finds evidence that ocean acidification is serious, the paper is categorized as pro-AGW and added to the list of papers addressing the “ocean acidification isn’t serious” myth.

There are a large number of neutral papers. Neutral does not mean to say each paper was unable to resolve the climate myth. Sometimes, a paper is relevant to a number of climate myths and the results are mixed as to whether it endorses or rejects all the myths. In many cases, the paper doesn’t directly set out to directly resolve the myth or the paper has a regional emphasis rather than global. Some papers are about method development more than obtaining a final result. Papers that met any of these criteria are often categorized as neutral.

So yes, categorization can get a little complicated and there willl be a blog post shortly discussing these issues in more detail. I’m starting to think Naomi’s approach was the better way to go!

How we built the database of peer-reviewed papers

The database of peer-reviewed papers is a crowd sourced effort. Special credit must go to Ari Jokimäki and Rob Painting who both submitted thousands of papers to the database (the horse race between the two was fascinating to watch). Ari runs AGW Observer, a blog that keeps track of peer-reviewed climate papers, so he had a huge collection at his fingertips. I also highly recommend his Twitter account which announces new climate papers on a daily basis and there’s been a continuous flow of papers in the Skeptical Science Daily Climate Links email.

How you can join the crowd sourcing effort

You can help by joining the crowd sourcing effort. To add peer-reviewed papers, you can use our web based form or the Skeptical Science Firefox Add-on. I’d suggest using the Firefox Add-on – if you can get into the habit of adding any climate links as you browse around, you’ll make this data collecting geek very happy! Check out how you’re doing by comparing how many papers everyone has submitted (I’ll probably revamp this page, add some more features and extra layers of information).

We consider this visualization a first step, not a final destination. While we have over 4,000 papers in the database, that is just the tip of the iceberg with many more papers yet to be added. As well as build the number of papers, we’d like to experiment with different ways of displaying the papers. In addition to the visualization, you can also view all the papers grouped by skeptic/neutral/proAGW and grouped by which climate myths they address. But I’m sure there are other creative ways this data could be displayed (eg – by using the categories each paper falls under, it should be possible to determine which papers fall under Naomi Oreskes’ “reject/endorse the consensus” categorization). I’m sure there will be much discussion on the issue of categorization and how it can be more robust and clearly defined.

If you have any ideas on how this information could be organized and displayed, post a comment here and we’ll discuss it further (Paul D’s visualization could have gone in many different directions). As with any social media phenomenon, anything is possible when a community starts brainstorming.

John Cook is the editor of Skeptical Science, where this article originally appeared.

But such reckless disregard for the Earth, its people, and natural resources is being challenged by a broad base of faith leaders who point to the many passages in the Bible that call for humans to be caretakers and good stewards of the planet. We can now add to their voices those of a working group of scientists appointed by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a nonsectarian organization presided over by Werner Arber, a Nobel laureate and a Protestant. The academy has just issued a report that declares, without qualification and with utmost urgency, that global climate change is occurring, that humans bear responsibility for it, and that it is our gravest moral imperative to reduce carbon emissions as quickly as possible.

The report focuses on the causes and implications of retreating mountain glaciers and other ice forms because their melting is a key indicator of global warming. The report says these developments provide “some of the clearest evidence we have for a change in the climate system.” The report’s authors consist of “glaciologists, climate scientists, meteorologists, hydrologists, physicists, chemists, mountaineers, and lawyers.” The authors document the quickened pace of melting glaciers, ice, and snow across the globe, and the potential drastic consequences for human populations.

They recommend three main actions: “reduce worldwide carbon dioxide emissions without delay … reduce the concentrations of warming air pollutants … [and] prepare to adapt to the climatic changes, both chronic and abrupt, that society will be unable to mitigate.”

While the report is significant in its acknowledgment of climate change and insistence on the need for the global community to take responsibility, it is hardly surprising that Catholic leadership commissioned and supported these findings. Pope Benedict XVI has been an ardent supporter for many years of recognizing the truth of climate change and the collective responsibility to reduce carbon emissions and preserve clean air and clean water. In fact, he has been dubbed the “Green Pope” in diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks.

And in a true example of “lived faith,” the pope and his leadership spearheaded renewable energy projects right in Vatican City. In 2008 the Vatican began installing 2,400 solar panels atop the pope’s audience hall, which prevents 230 tons of carbon dioxide from being emitted annually. The Vatican even flirted with the idea of going completely carbon neutral by reforesting degraded land in Hungary to offset their emissions, though critics assailed the plan for its focus on offsets over efficiency improvements.

In the new pope’s first social encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” he proclaimed there is a “covenant” between humans and the environment, and “responsibility is a global one, for it is concerned not just with energy but with the whole of creation, which must not be bequeathed to future generations depleted of its resources.” He highlighted in particular the responsibility of wealthy developed nations to take the lead on these efforts.

The pope’s encyclical in tandem with the working group’s report are not meant to scare people. Rather, they are meant to confirm, once and for all, that people need to take climate change seriously, that it is no longer a matter of legitimate debate. The church’s strong moral voice shows the urgency of the issue and should persuade conservatives who oppose action to protect God’s creation that if they listen to one of the leading lights of the Christian faith on other issues, they should pay attention on this one as well.

Marta Cook is a Research Assistant to the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative and the Progressive Studies Program. This article is cross-posted at American Progress. See Joe Romm’s coverage of the groundbreaking Vatican report at Climate Progress.

Though Powell is an accomplished scientist, appointed to the National Science Board by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, his approach is more than a simple juridical account of the scientific evidence. Rather, 2084’s events and characters are fictional, drawing upon established climate science in order to provide a basis for Powell’s wild imagination. And it is wild indeed.

Powell’s characters vividly describe the consequences of climate change for their cities and nations. New York City is abandoned after huge storms drown thousands and submerge large parts of the city. Miami Beach disappears under five feet of water and its abandoned buildings collapse as their ground floors are reclaimed by the sea. Fifty million Bangladeshis become climate refugees as more than a quarter of the country is submerged. The island of Tuvalu disappears, as does Rotterdam and half of The Netherlands. Vast tracts of land are rendered unlivable by water scarcity and the Amazon is reduced to a handful of acres. The last polar bears survive only in zoos.

But Powell doesn’t merely describe the physical changes caused by the great warming; he also tries his hand at predicting the geopolitical consequences of these dramatic events. In Powell’s imagination, the great warming unleashes the worst in human nature. Arab states, with the support of a nuclear-armed Iran, attack Israel as the Jordan River runs dry. After disputes over water rights in the Punjab, Pakistan and India descend into full-scale nuclear war, resulting in the literal erasure of Lahore, Karachi, Bangalore, Calcutta, New Delhi, and Islamabad, along with their 150 million inhabitants.

As if that isn’t frightening enough, climate refugees flood into developed nations, sundering all pretenses of tolerance and ending centuries of liberal democracy. The United States devolves into fascism, establishes an Orwellian Department of Homeland Purity, and forces Americans of color to wear armbands, á la Nazi Germany. And true to form, America invades and annexes our feeble neighbor to the north in order to seize what has by then become a quite pleasant climate.

All combined, Powell crafts an extraordinarily alarming fiction. His description of climate change and its geographic consequences are descriptive and compelling. His characters’ narratives are embedded with plausible scientific extrapolations that make the shifts seem genuine and credible. But his venture into geopolitics is far-fetched, pessimistic, and perhaps counterproductive to his larger persuasive goals. Powell writes, “to almost any politician or scholar at the turn of the century, the notion that fascism might appear again would have been risible.” Indeed.

Powell may risk losing skeptical readers he may have otherwise persuaded by entertaining his dystopian predictions. It is difficult, however, to persuade an audience of the need to act with anything but a tragic end. After all, the title of the book is 2084, a clear nod to Orwell’s dystopian canon. Powell hopes to shock society out of climate complacency with vivid descriptions of human suffering in the same way 1984 inoculated its readers against totalitarianism. One wonders, though, if Powell did take it a little far with the Nazi references.

Overall, 2084 is a thoughtful work of science fiction that asks us to confront a bleak picture of the worst ravages of unabated climate change. Rooted in rigorous scientific research, Powell’s climate dystopia is a compelling—if extreme—illustration of the greatly diminished existence in store for mankind should we fail to transcend petty political squabbling and ignore climate science.

Junayd Mahmood is an intern with CAP’s Energy Opportunity team. Also see John Atcheson’s review of 2084 and the Amazon Singles format at Climate Progress.org.

Earlier this month, the Texas Forest Service warned that “critical drought conditions, high temperatures and high winds are combining to create a perfect storm for wildfire,” adding that conditions “could shape up to be among the worst in Texas history.” And conditions are likely to deteriorate further. The U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook issued on April 7th and valid through June 2011 indicates that drought is likely to persist or intensify in Texas.

“The current drought cannot be absolutely attributed to climate change, but it is consistent with the warming and drying conditions expected for this area based on climate change projections,” said Connie Woodhouse, Associate Professor Geography & Regional Development, University of Arizona.  “Water resources in Texas are already stressed.  The inevitable warming and drying in the future will only make droughts like this worse.”

Members of Congress are misleading their constituents by not acknowledging that the climate is changing and heat-trapping pollution is responsible.  A majority of the House voted to reject an amendment affirming an understanding of climate science to a bill in the House.  While the bill would compromise the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to enforce the Clean Air Act, the rejected amendment simply called on Congress to at least accept the EPA’s scientific finding that greenhouse gas pollution threatens the health and welfare of Americans with a wide range of impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts and wildfires.

The current drought is not expected to end anytime soon. The U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook for April – June, 2011 indicates persistent drought for most of Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, New Mexico and large parts of Arizona, Colorado, Kansas as well as parts of the southeast.

These conditions come as no surprise to scientists.  Nearly two years ago the U.S. Global Change Research Program stated, “Human-induced climate change appears to be well underway in the Southwest. Recent warming is among the most rapid in the nation, significantly more than the global average in some areas.”  And that was an affirmation of years of research reporting the same conclusions.

It’s a double whammy for Texas and the Southwest. “What’s happening today in Texas and the Southwest should be a wake-up call on climate change. These are the kinds of conditions that we expect to see more often as climate warms,” said Dr. Julia Cole, Professor of Geosciences, University of Arizona.

“Droughts like this can be triggered by natural causes like the La Niña that is now dying down in the Pacific. But the same pattern of drought is expected to become more frequent as the world warms. In both cases, we expect to see the storms that normally bring rain to the southwestern US move northwards, and our region to become drier. Warming temperatures will only make the drying worse.”

But right now, Congress isn’t listening.  “We need our elected leaders to get serious about climate change and stop putting ideology ahead of science.  There is no question that the carbon that we’re putting into the air, and that will stay there for hundreds of years, is trapping heat and warming the planet.  Anyone who contends that climate change is simply due to natural variation is either deluding themselves, their audiences or both,” said Dan Lashof, Director of the Climate Center for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Last year, the most authoritative and respected scientific body in the world, the National Academy of Sciences, reported to Congress, “Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities . . . and in many cases is already affecting a broad range of human and natural systems.”

“Records from tree rings show us that droughts much more severe than any we’ve experienced to date have occurred in the western US in the past and there is no reason to think droughts of this magnitude could not occur in the future… but under warmer temperatures.  Increases in water demand where supplies are limited, along with inevitable droughts, and the added effects of climate change dictate some serious thinking about the ways we use water,” added Dr. Woodhouse

The burning of over 88,000 acres and 58 homes in Western Texas led Texas Forest Service spokesman Lewis Kearney to say, “With the drought pattern Texas has had, fire season now is almost running 12 months out of the year. I mean that’s not normal.”

“Unfortunately, it is the new normal,” says Nick Sundt of the World Wildlife Fund in a recent post. As Forrest Wilder said in February in the Texas Observer:

‘While Republicans in Congress, led by members of the Texas GOP delegation, work to defund and defang the EPA, climate change – and the science of climate – marches on. The GOP’s willful suspension of trust in what ever-mounting evidence – and dare I say, common sense? – tells us is happening to the planet is not just short-sighted. It’s reckless.’”

This repost is excerpted from two articles by Abbey Watson at The Project on Climate Science and Nick Sundt at the World Wildlife Fund.

For those wondering why the x-axis jumps to 11.1°C, I emailed Hansen that very question, and he explains, “the numbers on the far right and far left of the color scale give the most extreme value that occurs in that particular (set of) map(s).”

It’s no surprise that new colors and extended ranges are need, given the accelerated Arctic warming we’ve been seeing.  As I reported in January, Canada sees staggering mildness as planet’s high-pressure record is “obliterated”:

Surface temperature anomalies for the period 17 December 2010 to 15 January 2011 show impressive warmth across the Canadian Arctic….

The largest anomalies here exceed 21°C (37.8°F) above average, which are very large values to be sustained for an entire month.

The NSF-sponsored researchers at UCAR/NCAR posted some staggering data on just how warm it has been in northern Canada:

To put this picture into even sharper focus, let’s take a look at Coral Harbour, located at the northwest corner of Hudson Bay in the province of Nunavut. On a typical mid-January day, the town drops to a low of –34°C (–29.2°F) and reaches a high of just -26°C (–14.8°F). Compare that to what Coral Harbour actually experienced in the first twelve days of January 2011, as reported by Environment Canada…

• After New Year’s Day, the town went 11 days without getting down to its average daily high.
• On the 6th of the month, the low temperature was –3.7°C (25.3°F). That’s a remarkable 30°C (54°F) above average.
• On both the 5th and 6th, Coral Harbor inched above the freezing mark. Before this year, temperatures above 0°C (32°F) had never been recorded in the entire three months of January, February, and March.

Both NOAA and NASA data showing 2010 tied with 2005 for hottest year on record.  As meteorologist and former NOAA Hurricane hunter Dr. Jeff Masters of Weather Underground reported last November, “The year 2010 now has the most national extreme heat records for a single year–nineteen. These nations comprise 20% of the total land area of Earth. This is the largest area of Earth’s surface to experience all-time record high temperatures in any single year in the historical record.”

NASA may have added pink to their maps, but the climate situation has been code-red for a while.

Joe Romm is the Editor of Climate Progress and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. This is cross-posted at Climate Progress.

Year after year the worriers and fretters would come to me with awful predictions of the outbreak of war. I denied it each time. I was only wrong twice.

-Senior British intelligence official, retiring in 1950 after 47 years of service

One of the defining characteristics of humans is our ability to ignore or downplay facts that would shatter or overturn our world view.  At the same time, we tend to favor or selectively recall information that confirms our preconceptions, which is called “confirmation bias.”

I bring that up because, these days, pretty much everything that seems anomalous is called a “Black Swan,” a term popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in writings such as, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.”

And so we have both the Washington Post and Foreign Policy writing major pieces on Japan’s “black swan.”  But how exactly can a nuclear accident in Japan be a black swan.  The Japan Times ran an article whose lead sentence was “Of all the places in all the world where no one in their right mind would build scores of nuclear power plants, Japan would be pretty near the top of the list” back in May 2004 — seven years ago!

The article warns “that Japan has no real nuclear-disaster plan in the event that an earthquake damaged a reactor’s water-cooling system and triggered a reactor meltdown.”   It even notes, “there is an extreme danger of an earthquake causing a loss of water coolant in the pools where spent fuel rods are kept.”  It was written by “a geoscientist who worked at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory on the Yucca Mountain Project,” and has this quote:

“I think the situation right now is very scary,” says Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist and professor at Kobe University. “It’s like a kamikaze terrorist wrapped in bombs just waiting to explode.”

So again, how precisely is the current accident a black swan?

In the first chapter of his book, Taleb writes:

Before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists (and others extremely concerned with the coloring of birds), but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans….

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.  First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.

Ah, you see the sleight of hand.  The summary doesn’t match the original definition.

“Rarity” isn’t the same as lying “outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.”  Indeed, come to think of it, the fact that “nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility” isn’t quite the same as being “outside the realm of regular expectations.”

People often warn of things that lie “outside the realm of regular expectations.”  Global warming comes to mind.

If you Google “global warming” and “black swan” you’ll get nearly 2 million results — which is in its own way evidence that global warming isn’t a black swan.  Yes, the post at the top of that search is one of the earliest pieces I wrote on CP, “The Black Swan and Global Warming,” back in 2006, when I was young and naive, posting but once a day.

I quoted a Taleb essay that began, “A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations.”

Taleb argues at length that 9/11 was a black swan, stating:

ad a terrorist attack been a conceivable risk on Sept. 10, 2001, it would likely not have happened.

But that is a dubious claim at best.  Indeed, even Joel Achenbach in his WashPost piece, “Japan’s ‘black swan’: Scientists ponder the unparalleled dangers of unlikely disasters” notes:

People debate what qualifies as a black swan. Most alleged black swans turn out to have obvious precursors and warning signs — the Sept. 11 attacks included. Nothing comes out of the blue, truly.

Was Pearl Harbor a black swan?  Were the oil shocks of the 1970s.  In my 1994 book Lean and Clean Management, I write about the strategic planners at Royal Dutch Shell, who anticipated those shocks (see here).  As for Pearl Harbor, consider this, from my book:

The Japanese commander of the attack, Mitsuo Fuchida, was quite surprised he had achieved surprise.  Before the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, the Japanese Navy had used a surprise attack to destroy the Russian Pacific Fleet at anchor in Port Arthur.  Fuchida asked, “Had these Americans never heard of Port Arthur?“

So Pearl Harbor wasn’t a black swan.

The fact is that the events that we are shocked about over and over again weren’t merely “explainable and predictable” after the fact.  They were vary often predicted or warned about well in advance by serious people.  The powers that be simply chose to ignore the warnings because it didn’t fit their world view.

The Trojan horse was a black swan, if one ignores Cassandra, which, of course, was her fate.

I first had the idea for this piece after posting on Transocean, the company that operated the infamous Deepwater Horizon oil rig, who told its shareholders that it gave its executives multi-million-dollar bonuses based on the company’s “best year in safety performance.”  As Interior Secretary Ken Salazar noted, this “complacency” matched the “complacency that created an oil spill that was pouring over 50 thousand barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico a day.”

A commenter on that post then directed me to this Crooked Timber post, “With Notably Rare Exceptions,” which starts by quoting Alan Greenspan:

Today’s competitive markets, whether we seek to recognise it or not, are driven by an international version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that is unredeemably opaque. With notably rare exceptions (2008, for example), the global “invisible hand” has created relatively stable exchange rates, interest rates, prices, and wage rates.

As Henry at CT then writes:

It’s best not to interpret this as an empirical claim, but a carefully-thought-out bid for Internet immortality. It has the sublime combination of supreme self-confidence and utter cluelessness of previously successful memes … but with added Greenspanny goodness. I tried to think of useful variations on the way in to work this morning – “With notably rare exceptions, Russian Roulette is a fun, safe game for all the family to play,” …  but none do proper justice to the magnificence of the original. But then, that’s why we have commenters. Have at it.

With notably rare exceptions, nuclear power is safe.  With notably rare exceptions, unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases are safe.

My point in this quote is that, of course, lots of people warned about the bubble that Greenspan himself helped create.  But even now, it appears to have been a black swan for Greenspan.

Global warming obviously is not a black swan.  It is an event “outside the realm of regular expectations” but one can’t say “nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility”:

• Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.”
• Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred

In my 2006 post, I argued that rapid polar warming and the potential for a melting of the tundra and massive release of methane was a black swan.  I suppose, for 99% of policymakers and the media it is a black swan, but in fact even the worst-case scenario for global warming isn’t technically a black swan:

• Science stunner: On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter

We have been warned as much as one could reasonably expect us to be warned, but we choose to ignore the warnings.  In fairness, though, there is a massive fossil-fuel-funded disinformation campaign out there trying to convince us that all swans are in fact white.  Would it were so.

This article is cross-posted at climate progress. Joe Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Editor of Climate Progress.

Japan’s recent 9.0 magnitude earthquake and the tsunami it caused together killed 9,737 people and left an additional 16,501 missing. The destruction left millions homeless and caused almost $200 billion in damage.

These natural disasters caused severe damaged to 4 of the 6 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, leaving them without functioning primary, secondary, or tertiary cooling systems. The resulting partial meltdown of the core at one reactor and of a waste fuel rod storage tank in another has resulted in the release of radioactive material into the atmosphere, soil, and water, forcing the evacuation of what was at first a 12-mile radius and now a 19-mile radius surrounding the facility.

Though reactors in the United States are built to strict safety standards, they are nevertheless vulnerable to any number of natural and manmade disasters, from earthquakes and tsunamis to flash floods, droughts, and hurricanes. U.S. reactor safety standards have been effective in preventing catastrophe, though a recent report highlights 14 “near misses” where improperly implemented safety protocols nearly caused major problems. More troublingly, many of these standards were based on an understanding of our climate system that is now 40 years out of date. Today we know that climate change is making floods, droughts, and hurricanes stronger and more frequent, which means we must ask whether our safety standards, even when followed perfectly, are enough to prevent disaster.

As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducts its review of U.S. nuclear safety in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown, they need to be sure they are doing a thorough review of all possible risks, and should not ignore recent science about how climate change could increase those risks.

Current state of US nuclear plant safety

The United States currently has 104 functioning power reactors at 65 sites around the country, roughly a quarter of which use the same “Mark 1” containment vessel design used in the failing Japanese reactors. They supply roughly 20 percent of the country’s total electricity needs. Nuclear plants demand large sources of water in order to cool and control the core temperatures of the reactors that power them. To meet this inevitable requirement, nuclear plants are situated in low-lying areas near rivers and lakes, and many others are built on the coasts. This proximity leaves these plants vulnerable to floods and other water-related disasters.  (See our map below.)

(click for a high res version.)

Many regulations are already in place to ensure that nuclear energy remains safe from floods, surges, tsunamis, and droughts. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, oversees licensing applications, reactor specifications, and radioactive waste disposal. The Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, or ACRS, also reviews the adequacy of proposed safety standards and creates individualized specifications to withstand the projected worst-case disasters for each plant location. Nuclear facilities are initially granted a 40-year license that must be renewed after 20 years. They then have the opportunity to extend their license for additional 20-year increments.

The problem is that our nuclear reactors are all old. Thirty years old on average in fact, since political will for new nuclear reactors has weakened since the 1979 Three Mile Island incident. Seven operating reactors have eclipsed their original 40 year lifespans and been permitted to operate for another 20 years. This makes them vulnerable to problems, like stronger floods caused by climate change, about which we had considerably less knowledge three to four decades ago when the plants were built.

Climate change will increase certain risks

Climate change will compound existing weather-related risks. In the years since most of our nuclear reactors were built, we’ve learned that climate change is increasing the risk profile of many kinds of extreme weather. Two scientific studies published this year in Nature have supported this. Large and destructive floods once thought likely to happen only once in 100 years on average are now expected to happen every 20 years: a five-fold increase. Similar trends hold for droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires. Droughts and heat waves can impact nuclear reactors because they use large amounts of water in the power generation process. If water levels drop too low, or the temperature of adjacent water bodies rises too high, the ability of the reactors to operate can be impaired. Sea-level rise is also of particular concern, since many of our nuclear facilities are located on the coast.

In response to this growing awareness of disasters that can result from climate change, the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, released a safety guide in 2003 detailing flood-related hazards to nuclear power plants on coastal and river sites. The safety guide suggests that newly constructed plants should account for several consequences of climate change over the lifespan of the plant:

• Rise in mean sea level: 35-85 cm
• Rise in air temperature: 1.5-5 ⁰C
• Rise in sea or river temperature: 3 ⁰C
• Increase in wind strength: 5-10 percent
• Increase in precipitation: 5-10 percent

Higher sea levels, in combination with the warmer air, water, and sea temperatures will produce larger, stronger waves, increase the flow rate of rivers, and alter the dominant wind patterns, according to the report. The IAEA recommendations offer a good framework for assessing siting of new nuclear facilities, but current safety standards at the 104 operating nuclear reactors in the United States remain in question. Are they sufficient to deal with the increased risks caused by climate change?

This is a question we must answer, and soon. As we have written at Science Progress before, climate change creates considerable uncertainty for businesses and governments who must make difficult decisions that will affect the way we do business over the next 10, 20, or 40 years. In making long-term decisions about policy and business, decision makers need to have all the data they can get. The problem is that extremely rare events by definition provide us with little opportunity for study, even though their impacts can be catastrophic.

The seawalls at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex, for example, were designed to withstand an 18-foot wave, though the tsunami that caused the eventual nuclear meltdown was estimated to have been more than 40 feet high. Japanese engineers simply didn’t have enough data to accurately predict just how big a tsunami could be. Could this happen in the United States? For reference, the San Onofre reactor in California is built right on Pacific coast, with a sea wall of only 23 feet.

The bottom line is that sometimes, what we think to be a “worst case” scenario is not really the worst case. Just because there is uncertainty about how climate and weather will affect our nuclear reactors does not mean we should ignore the issue. Quite the opposite; it would be negligent to ignore this uncertainty as we continue to assess our nation’s nuclear safety standards.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has taken some steps to incorporate current climate science into its standards, but it has not gone far enough. In 2009, the NRC released an information notice that suggested plants re-evaluate flood protection measures, but they did not require action. To make matters worse, the guidelines in use were established in 1977, with the latest updates occurring in 1984. As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducts its review of U.S. nuclear safety in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown, they need to be sure they are doing a thorough assessment of all possible risks, and should not ignore recent science about how climate change could increase those risks.

Countries around the world have already begun to take increased risks from climate change into account in their nuclear safety protocols.  It’s high time the United States follows suit. The United Kingdom has insisted that new nuclear plants demonstrate countermeasures taken to prevent damage from more extreme floods, France has begun reviewing all 58 of its reactors to check how much flooding they can handle, and Austria has even called for nuclear “stress tests” similar to those banks undergo. Germany has even ordered all reactors built prior to 1980 (all American reactors would qualify) to be shut down for three months.

The disaster in Japan has afforded the United States the opportunity to re-examine the safety of its own fleet of nuclear reactors. Given how often we underestimate the “worst-case” scenario, this is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss.

Sean Pool is Assistant Editor for Science Progress, Elaine Sedenberg is an Intern with Science Progress, and Matt Woelfel is an Intern with CAP’s Energy Opportunity team. The authors would like to thank Kate Gordon, Richard Caperton, and Valeri Vasquez, and Evan Hansleigh for their invaluable contributions to the article.

Take a look at our map, based on new data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, which shows just how much worse our forecasting would be without polar-orbiting environmental satellites.

For 2010′s “Snowmageddon” storm, without the satellite data, NOAA’s forecasts would have lost as much as 50 percent of their accuracy, underforecasting snowfall in Washington, D.C. by almost foot, and rainfall in the Gulf by up to an inch.

The resulting failure to prepare for flash floods, roadside strandings, air traffic delays, and transit interruptions could halt all commerce. Even worse, failing to maintain our satellite network, according to NOAA, would reduce future flood preparedness time from days to mere hours, putting human lives at risk.

Illustrations of this challenge occurred in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona this past month. Record cold temperatures in Texas and New Mexico contributed to a series of technological failures in the region’s natural gas pipelines that ultimately led to electricity blackouts in Texas, a complete shutdown of natural gas supply in many areas of New Mexico for close to a week, and the shutdown of seven gas-fired electricity-generating plants in Arizona. While the exact causes of these events are yet to be determined, they illustrated the brittleness of the pipeline system in the face of unexpected climatic conditions as well as the challenge of bringing the pipeline system back online once it had failed.

Another illustration from the Southwest involves ongoing water shortages in the Colorado river system. Lake Mead, from which Las Vegas draws the bulk of its water supply, sits at record-low water levels. Further reductions in water levels would cause the water to drop below the level of the pipeline that takes water to Las Vegas. To prevent that, rules governing the allocation of Colorado river water would kick in and significantly reduce water availability to users in the region. In the short term, water managers will probably allow water to flow into Lake Mead from upstream reservoirs rather than implementing water restrictions. But if ongoing drought in the region continues or escalates, water restrictions for the region’s agriculture are likely to come sooner rather than later.

Infrastructure reform has received high-profile attention in Washington, D.C., in recent years. The American Society of Civil Engineers report on the state of U.S. infrastructure described the serious degradation of the economy’s technological foundations. President Obama called for significantly increased infrastructure funding in his State of the Union address, and the administration’s FY 2012 budget released this week includes funding for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank.

Somewhat surprisingly, however, adapting infrastructure to the challenges of climate change has received little attention in this conversation. To be sure, the National Academies spilled some ink on the topic in its recently released series of reports on “America’s Climate Choices.” Nonetheless, engineers, policymakers, and the public remain largely unaware of the significant challenges ahead.

Now is the time to begin a serious conversation about climate change and the future of the nation’s and the world’s engineered systems. When we upgrade the country’s infrastructure, climate change must be front and center in our engineering, policy, and business—not only because of the need to think systematically about how infrastructure contributes to carbon dioxide emissions but also because the world is committed to at least modest climate change, no matter how fast we reduce atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases. Hurricane Katrina may or may not have been influenced by anthropogenic climate change. Even so, its devastation of New Orleans highlighted the risks of extreme weather events that exceed the design parameters of technological infrastructures. We are now entering an era where climatic patterns may systematically drift outside the designed operating conditions of many of our most critical systems.

One last point: Infrastructure transformation is not simply an engineering problem or a finance problem. As Boston’s “Big Dig” project made clear, reengineering major infrastructural systems in place requires a new kind of engineering—and a new level of collaboration between leaders in engineering and other societal institutions—that recognizes the social, political, and economic dimensions of technological systems. The country needs engineers, policymakers, business leaders, and citizens who understand the infrastructure challenges we face and who are prepared to work together through the difficult challenges of redesigning and reengineering some of the most complex sociotechnological systems on the planet.

Clark A. Miller is associate director of the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University.

Some dismiss Ray Kurzweil as a quack. His predictions of a future sound like plotlines from the nuttiest sci-fi films. According to Kurzweil’s theories, by around 2029 information technology will become more sophisticated than the human brain, and by 2045 what he calls “the Singularity” will occur—information technology will have advanced to the point at which people can become immortal by downloading their consciousness onto nanobots, which can race around the world and infuse other bodies or inanimate objects with human consciousness.

Kooky sounding indeed. Last week, however, at the D.C. premiere of ‘Transcendent Man,’ hundreds of people gathered to hear Ray Kurzweil and see a documentary about him and his theories. While this may sound more like science fiction than actual science, the man did invent the musical synthesizer, created a device that uses optical character recognition to help blind people read, predicted the year and month in which a computer would defeat a human at chess, and has 17 Ph.Ds. Kurzweil has even received the National Medal of Technology, the highest medal the president can bestow for pioneering new technologies, from three separate U.S. presidents. So let’s not dismiss him just yet.

Kurzweil has studied the progression of information technology since the dawn of time, noticing that the rate of technological innovation tends to proceed in an exponential fashion. Based on Moore’s Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, Kurzweil’s studies find that the capacity and speed of information technology has doubled about every two years and he believes it will continue to do so. Adding to this, Kurzweil notes how many industries, from retail to genomic medicine to manufacturing, are beginning to function more and more like information technologies.

For example, scientists working in labs across the world can email whole genomes back and forth, and then “print” them out using ever-cheaper, ever-faster DNA sequencers. With the rise of 3D printing, Kurzweil asserts that the day is not far off when one can simply download a blouse or a solar panel from the Internet and “print” it out at home. With exponentially accelerating information technology influencing innovation in so many fields, Kurzweil posits that technological advancement will accelerate at asymptotic speeds, so fast that the human mind will be incapable of understanding it.

But Kurzweil’s theory is centered around the human relationship to technology only. It is unclear how these speculative technological changes would affect the human relationship to nature. If nanobots will be able to repair our bodies from within so that humans do not have to age or get sick or get fat or starve, does it even matter if global warming and environmental degradation destroys ecosystems and warms our planet to the point of disrupted food chains and massive environmental disasters?

When I spoke with Kurzweil last week, I asked him about this, specifically how climate change and the environment fits into his theory. (You can hear the whole interview at the link here.) He responded that stopping climate change matters because many millions of people will suffer if we don’t. He continued:

I have a whole thesis on resources. … it’s really only these exponentially growing information technologies that have a scale to address problems like energy and the environment. … right now solar energy is actually a half of a percent of the world’s energy but it’s doubling every two years and has been for 20 years, so it’s only eight doublings away … which is 16 years, from meeting 100 percent of the world’s energy needs. … do we have enough sunlight to do that? Yes, we have 10,000 times more than we need.

Kurzweil’s theories are rooted in a fierce optimism. For him technology is the answer to the world’s most difficult challenges, namely suffering and death, and as demonstrated by his answers to my questions, climate change and environmental degradation. But his rhetoric and discussion are maybe too optimistic and too easy. He is concerned with the what, namely what happened with technology development in the past and what will happen in the future. But he glosses over the how. It is precisely the how that we need to concentrate on now.

Technology will not just double itself. As Bracken Hendricks and I have written in a report on clean energy deployment for the Center for American Progress:

It is critical to remember that Moore’s Law is not a law of physics. It is a law of markets. Capturing this opportunity to make clean technology cheap requires a clear assessment of the real barriers in the market today. … the combined public and private investments [in communications technology, for instance] created tremendous public value while giving birth to a brand new industry. Predictability in the market made this possible. That is just what is missing for clean energy today.

Like Moore’s Law, Kurzweil’s concept of exponential technological development is not a law of physics. I am also optimistic about the potential of clean technology but it will not develop in a vacuum. If technology is to solve our energy and climate problems, it will require massive amounts of capital from the private and public sectors to accelerate innovation and scale up clean energy deployment. This is why the United States needs a concerted and cohesive clean technology innovation policy effort that provides policy incentives to help clean energy projects attract private investment.

We must pick up where Kurzweil’s theory leaves off and look into the mechanics of how public policy can be used to build an American economy that runs on clean energy. This means enacting policies to eliminate market barriers that prevent clean energy technologies from competing fairly with incumbent fossil technology, and ending perverse subsidies for ancient, outdated, and environmentally destructive industries like coal and oil. You can read a more detailed list of policy proposals to accelerate clean energy deployment in a Center for American Progress report, “Cutting the Cost of Clean Energy 1.0.”

We live in a time in which premature deaths are accelerated by pollution and environmental degradation, and global climate change threatens the very future of all mankind. If these trends continue, we face a potentially dismal future. It may be a stretch to say technology innovation alone will solve these problems. Kurzweil is right, however, in that our ability to use clean technology will be crucial to solving climate change and our energy challenges, and will relieve many millions of people of suffering along the way.

Kurzweil’s vision for the future reminds us that, unhampered by market externalities, regulatory barriers, and competition from the entrenched infrastructure of the past, the clean energy economy has the potential to grow exponentially and meet our needs. With the right policy incentives, Kurzweil’s unrelenting optimism should inspire us to believe that a future free of climate change and fossil-fuel addiction is well within our reach.

Lisbeth Kaufman is Special Assistant for Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress and co-author of the report, “Cutting the Cost of Clean Energy 1.0.” A version of this article also appears on Pluck Magazine, a great new online magazine featuring young adult voices on the changing of culture, society, and career paths in the 21st century.

On Tuesday, in its latest three-week extension of government spending, the GOP, apparently not content with the depth of its evisceration, upped the ante by voting to cut an additional $115 million from NOAA’s Acquisition account.

As we wrote in February after the initial cuts passed the House:

At least an 18-month gap in coverage will be unavoidable without adequate funding for new polar-orbiting satellites this year. More troubling, taking an acquisition program offline and then restarting the process at a later date would lead to cost increases of as much as three to five times the amount the government would have to spend for the same product today.

So here’s the choice: Spend $700 million this year for continuous service or $2 billion to $3.5 billion at some point in the future for the same equipment and a guaranteed service interruption.

The tragic events in Japan serve as the most recent reminder that betting against Mother Nature is a losing proposition, yet House Republicans seem intent on insisting they can protect Americans without adequate information. They know the hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods are coming. Apparently we simply can’t afford to know when.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Oceans Policy at the Center for American Progress. This is cross-posted at Climate Progress.

Let’s be clear. Congress should not attempt to make scientific decisions. The role of Congress is to take the best science and use it to make the best possible policy. The three amendments rejected unanimously by committee Republicans each lays out a fairly basic statement about generally accepted climate science.

• Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado offered an amendment that simply reaffirmed what EPA scientists stated, that “‘the scientific evidence is compelling’ that elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from anthropogenic emissions ‘are the root cause of recently observed climate change.’” That amendment was rejected in a party-line vote with all Republicans voting no.
• Rep. Jay Inslee of Washington state offered an amendment, again quoting the EPA, which stated “the public health of current generations is endangered and the threat to public health for both current and future generations will likely mount over time as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere and result in ever greater rates of climate change.’” This, too, was rejected in a party-line vote with all Republicans voting no.
• The last amendment, offered by Rep. Henry Waxman of southern California, asserted even more unassailable scientific findings. His amendment stated simply that “Congress accepts the scientific finding of the Environmental Protection Agency that warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.” It was also unanimously rejected in a party-line vote with all Republicans voting no.

This is really getting ridiculous. In countries around the world, political parties on the left and right are debating how to deal with climate change. But by continuing to debate whether the world is even warming—an objective, empirical, verifiable, scientific fact—our great nation is demonstrating to the rest of the world that we are still in the Stone Age on this issue.

Let’s keep in mind that virtually every credible climate scientist and science organization, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, has declared climate change a “settled fact.” Here is another quote from the academy which reaffirms all three of the rejected amendments:

Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities … and in many cases is already affecting a broad range of human and natural systems.

The National Academy of Sciences might be thought of like the Supreme Court for science, so what they say matters a lot. But then again, even the U.S. Supreme Court itself has decided that the EPA should have the authority to regulate carbon pollution in the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision.

Notwithstanding the advice of every U.S. science agency and the opinions of virtually every credibly international science organization, the committee voted 34-19 to pass the Upton-Inhofe dirty air bill, H.R. 910, which eliminates the ability of the federal government to regulate planet-warming carbon pollution. The Project on Climate Science summed it up nicely:

Through this antiscience legislation, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is substituting ideology for the intensive, comprehensive, peer-reviewed analysis of thousands of scientists, including the scientists at the EPA.

Comically, as Joe Romm noted yesterday, one of the committee members voting against the amendments John Shimkus (R-IL), cites the Bible as his reason for rejecting climate science. “God said the earth would not be destroyed in a flood.” Another, Michael Burgess (R-TX), cited an online public opinion poll (in and of itself an unscientific way of sampling opinion data) as reason for rejecting the science of global warming. Making matters worse, it turns out the particular poll was targeted by well-known climate science denial website Watt’s Up With That in a campaign to skew the results.

Meanwhile, a recent Gallup poll (the scientific kind with random sampling, rather than self-selecting Internet sampling) indicates more than 50 percent of the public believe global warming is happening and is mostly due to human activities. But again, opinions–even scientifically polled public opinions–don’t determine science. Just because 99.99 percent of the world public believed the sun revolved around the earth in the time of Galileo does not mean his theory of heliocentrism was wrong.

So, on the one hand we have virtually every credible government and nongovernmental science organization in the developed world reaffirming the fundamental science behind global warming is sound. On the other hand, you have an online poll that was co-opted by a well-known science denial blog. Who would you believe? Apparently the opinion poll, if you are a Republican member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

“The denial of science has taken deep root on the Committee,” said Rep. Waxman (D-CA) in a recent talk he gave at the Center for American Progress. Even more troubling is the amount of money taken by Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans from major polluters with a stake in undermining the scientific consensus about climate change.

Certainly it is the duty of a congressional representative to represent constituents’ opinions. But perhaps the representative needs to draw the line where those views directly contrast with reality. We need our leaders to understand the difference between opinion and science. More importantly, we need them to look past childish debates on scientific subjects about which they have no expertise. Instead they should concentrate on how our government can work to address great challenges science gives us the power to identify.

Sean Pool is Assistant Editor for Science Progress.

To our dismay, and the nation’s detriment, self-described climate change deniers – strongly supported by fossil-fuel interests — continue to mislead Congress and the public.

In late January, we joined 14 other leading scientists in writing a letter to every member of Congress, asking our elected representatives to separate science from policy. We called attention to the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change, urging Congress to “address the challenge of climate change, and lead the national response…” We want Congress to understand that, with each passing day, the problem worsens.

Our letter was certainly not the first plea to Congress to address climate change, and it won’t be the last. An open letter just last May from 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences urged similar actions. But the race to run away from the problem is nothing short of staggering. [emphasis added]

So begins an excellent Politico op-ed by John Abraham,  associate professor of thermal sciences at the University of St.Thomas, Peter Gleick,  president of The Pacific Institute, Michael Mann,  director of the Earth Science Center at Penn State University, and Michael Oppenheimer,  professor of geosciences at Princeton University.

The NYT magazine published a piece last month  with a similar theme, “Fact-Free Science,” which noted:

… more than half of the Republicans in the House and three-quarters of Republican senators … now say that the threat of global warming, as a man-made and highly threatening phenomenon, is at best an exaggeration and at worst an utter “hoax”…. These grim numbers, compiled by the Center for American Progress, describe a troubling new reality: the rise of the Tea Party and its anti-intellectual, anti-establishment, anti-elite worldview has brought both a mainstreaming and a radicalization of antiscientific thought.

Even former leading Republican members of the House have made the same point (see Former GOP chair of House Science Committee Sherry Boehlert on “Science the GOP can’t wish away”).

While some ‘appeasers’ think we should let the deniers win the debate and simply stop talking about climate science, that is the road to certain ruin.  As difficult as it is to imagine a aggressive action on climate or clean energy energy time soon, there  is no possibility whatsoever of  the nation and the world taking the necessary steps to avert multiple simultaneous catastrophes in the coming decades absent  abroad understanding of the science.  Moreover, if only the anti-science crowd participates in the debate, then there is no possibility the public’s confusion will end.

Imagine if the  public health community had taken the same view of the lies from the tobacco industry and given up on the health message.

“Energy independence” and “reducing dependence on oil” are great messages — indeed, they have been great messages for decade upon decade upon decade now, far longer than  climate change has been a major message — but they have never succeeded in creating a sustained set of policy is to actually reduce oil consumption in absolute terms (let alone the set of policies needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in absolute terms).

In the end,  you can’t cure the disease unless  you understand the diagnosis and prognosis.  And so we come back to the article by the four scientists:

Nothing exemplifies this more than a bill by House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), to overturn the scientific finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health.

We are saddened and disturbed that Upton is apparently planning to hold a vote in committee very soon to overturn a science-based determination absent any scientific justification for doing so.

This science-free approach serves only the interests of oil and coal producers and other big polluters who don’t want Congress — or the American people — to know what decades of scientific research have revealed about current climate trends and the growing future risks we face.

Science is the Achilles heel for those who try to perpetuate the myth that climate change is not occurring, or that the massive build-up of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere is not the main reason the climate is changing. There is no serious disagreement in the scientific community that global temperatures are increasing, sea levels are rising, the oceans are becoming more acidic and that fossil fuel combustion is the primary cause.

In addition, the rapid shrinking of Arctic sea ice and the pattern of extreme weather and climate — including widespread drought, extraordinarily intense rainstorms, heat waves and wildfires — reflect more than just natural climate variability.

These findings have been confirmed by all the leading scientific academies around the world, most prominent among them, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which last year issued a series of four comprehensive reports that were unambiguous. The academy stated, “Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities … and in many cases is already affecting a broad range of human and natural systems.”

Like the tobacco industry before them, fossil fuel interests regularly trot out discredited voices, false and disproven arguments and selective and misleading evidence to generate doubt. Their goal is to create the perception that fundamental aspects of climate science are controversial. They are not.

All their claims, all the studies they cite and all the evidence they have presented has been thoroughly reviewed by climate scientists. There is no scientific basis for contesting the academy’s finding. But that doesn’t stop fossil fuel interests from pouring millions of dollars into distorting, misrepresenting and, at times, falsifying the science.

We are disheartened that many in Congress choose to be guided by those who profit from pollution. Now we learn that Republicans in the House are proposing to cut more than $170 million in climate change programs, as well as to compromise the EPA’s ability to carry out its science-based mission. Given the staggering costs of disaster response and the financial ambush awaiting us if we fail to anticipate the risk of massive climate disruption, such action can only be labeled irresponsible.

These same Republicans pledged no cuts to national security. Yet the growing risk of climate change has been clearly identified as a national security threat by top military experts and analysts.

If Congress turns a deaf ear to science, it would be up to mayors, city planners, the building trades, transportation officials, health care workers, small and large businesses, universities, city councils, agriculture interests, water management officials and many others to take the lead in laying out the risks. We are grateful that many already are.

Hear!  Hear!

This reposted from ClimateProgress.org where Dr. Joseph Romm is Editor.

Efforts to improve climate literacy may prove ineffective because they don’t reach their intended audience, or perhaps because those people who disagree with conclusions from climate scientists need more than explanation. People don’t want to be told that they are science illiterate. They may disagree with the scientific consensus because of misconceptions about the process of science or because of distrust. They want to see the data for themselves and make their own conclusions.

We at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC, think we should help them do just that. Scientists and writers at the NSIDC have been experimenting with such an open approach to data sharing since 2006. Through the Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis website, we not only make near-real-time data available to the public, but also explain it in basic terms. The project is a collaboration between scientists and science writers at the center, and made possible by our access to near-real-time data.

The decline of Arctic sea ice extent is one of the most visible signs of climate change. Since satellite records started in 1979, Arctic sea ice has declined more than 30 percent at the end of summer. Researchers expect the trend to continue, with the Arctic Ocean becoming ice-free in summers well before the end of the century.

NSIDC archives and distributes data related to snow, glaciers, sea ice, and other elements of the cryosphere, or frozen regions of the Earth. And since we provide satellite data on sea ice extent, we have become a go-to resource in recent years for both journalists and the general public who want to know more about the changes in the northern polar region.

The white Arctic sea ice cover reflects sunlight that would otherwise warm the frigid ocean waters beneath the ice. As the ice cover declines in summer, more heat accumulates in the ocean, which leads to further melting and amplifies climate warming.

The Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis website started out of a need to efficiently convey information. In 2006, overwhelmed with questions about shrinking Arctic sea ice extent, our data center started a simple web site to share updates on conditions at the end of the summer melt season. Then in 2007, Arctic ice extent fell to a record low, covering just 4.28 million square kilometers for the month of September. That record low fostered an explosion of interest in sea ice data from the general public as well as journalists, and that attention spurred us to turn our simple site into a year-round project.

The site, now partially funded by a NASA grant, includes daily updates of sea ice data, along with monthly to weekly posts written by scientists in collaboration with science writers. The posts provide context for the data—scientists compare the current extent to previous years and discuss the weather contributing to current conditions. We also address questions brought up by readers.

Making data available to the public is a popular idea, but simply providing access to data is not enough. Most NSIDC data were publicly available before we started the Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis website—they were just difficult for a nonscientist to find and interpret. Scientific terms such as bias, statistical significance, and error can be easily misinterpreted and need explanation.

In addition, data documentation for scientific users sometimes assumes basic knowledge that nonscientists lack—for example, where the data come from in the first place, how they are obtained, and what conclusions one can make from the data. We learned this lesson after a sensor degraded on a satellite, yielding erroneous sea ice extent. Scientists quickly caught the problem and had another data source lined up, but the erroneous data led to pointed questions and even accusations of malfeasance from readers of our site. Although our site provided links to technical documentation that explained the glitch in the satellite data, most readers didn’t read it, or didn’t understand it. We ended up explaining the issue with a series of special posts that started with the basics.

People have responded both positively and negatively to the Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis website. We receive a surprising amount of criticism, often from people who disagree with mainstream climate science and see our site as biased. At the same time many journalists, teachers, and others have written in to commend the site. By explaining our data and science to the public we open ourselves to greater public scrutiny, but we also facilitate better communication and understanding of sea ice and climate.

Government and science organizations are increasingly pushing the idea of free and open access to data. But in order to make those data useful and clear, we also need to provide people with the tools to understand and work with the data. The Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis website is doing just that for ice data. We hope others will join us in making climate change data more transparent and available to all.

Katherine Leitzell is a science writer at the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder Colorado.

Weather predictions used to be a frequent punchline but they have improved dramatically in recent years. More often than not you’ll need an umbrella if your local television channel or website of choice tells you to bring one when you leave the house. But we could take a huge step back to the days when your dartboard had a reasonable chance of outpredicting Al Roker if House Republicans have their way with the 2011 federal budget.

The House of Representatives is debating the Full Year Continuing Resolution Act (H.R. 1) to fund the federal government for the remainder of fiscal year 2011. The Republican leadership has proposed sweeping cuts to key programs across the climate change, clean energy, and environmental spectrum. They have also decided that accurate weather forecasting and hurricane tracking are luxuries America can no longer afford.

The GOP’s bill would tear $1.2 billion (21 percent) out of the president’s proposed budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. On the surface, cutting NOAA may seem like an obvious choice. The FY 2011 request for the agency included a 16 percent boost over 2010 levels that would have made this year’s funding level of $5.5 billion the largest in NOAA’s history.

Even this total funding level, however, is woefully insufficient for an agency tasked with managing such fundamental resources as the atmosphere that regulates our climate, the 4.3 million square miles of our oceanic exclusive economic zone, the ecological health of coastal regions that are home to more than 50 percent of all Americans, response to environmental catastrophes including the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and fisheries that employ thousands of Americans and annually contribute tens of billions of dollars to the national economy.

More than $700 million of the president’s proposed 2011 increase in NOAA funding would be tagged for overhauling our nation’s aging environmental satellite infrastructure. Satellites gather key data about our oceans and atmosphere, including cloud cover and density, miniscule changes in ocean surface elevation and temperatures, and wind and current trajectories. Such monitoring is integral to our weather and climate forecasting and it plays a key role in projections of strength and tracking of major storms and hurricanes—things most Americans feel are worth keeping an eye on.

In fact, NOAA has been making great strides in hurricane tracking. The average margin of error for predicting landfall three days in advance was 125 miles in 2009—half what it was 10 years prior. This data translates into a higher degree of confidence among the public in NOAA’s forecasts, which means individuals will be more likely to obey an evacuation order. Further, since evacuating each mile of shoreline costs approximately up to $1 million, greater forecasting accuracy translates to substantial savings.

The United States needs these satellites if we’re to continue providing the best weather and climate forecasts in the world. The implications of the loss of these data far exceed the question of whether to pack the kids into snowsuits for the trip to school. The concern here is ensuring ongoing operational efficiency and national security on a global scale. In some cases it can literally become a question of life and death.

Consider the following numbers:

• The $700 billion maritime commerce industry moves more than 90 percent of all global trade, with arrival and departure of quarter-mile long container ships timed to the minute to maximize revenue and efficiency. Shipping companies rely on accurate forecasts to set their manifests and itineraries.
• Forecasting capabilities are particularly strained at high latitudes and shippers have estimated that the loss of satellite monitoring capabilities could cost them more than half a billion dollars per year in lost cargo and damage to vessels from unanticipated heavy weather.
• When a hurricane makes landfall, evacuations cost as much as $1 million per mile. Over the past decade, NOAA has halved the average margin of error in its three-day forecasts from 250 miles to 125 miles, saving up to $125 million per storm.
• Commercial fishing is the most dangerous profession in the country with 111.8 deaths per 100,000 workers. A fisherman’s most valuable piece of safety equipment is his weather radio.
• When disaster strikes at sea, polar-orbiting satellites receive emergency distress beacons and relay positioning data to rescuers. This resulted in 295 lives saved in 2010 alone and the rescue of more than 6,500 fishermen, recreational boaters, and other maritime transportation workers since the program began in 1982.
• Farmers rely on NOAA’s drought predictions to determine planting cycles. Drought forecasts informed directly by satellite data have been valued at $6 billion to 8 billion annually.
• NOAA’s volcanic ash forecasting capabilities received international attention last spring during the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull. The service saves airlines upwards of $200 million per year.
• NOAA’s polar-orbiting satellites are America’s only source of weather and climate data for vast areas of the globe, including areas key to overseas military operations. Their data are integral to planning deployments of troops and aircraft—certain high-atmosphere wind conditions, for example, can prohibit mid-air refueling operations.

All of these uses will be compromised if the Republicans succeed in defunding NOAA’s satellite program. At least an 18-month gap in coverage will be unavoidable without adequate funding for new polar-orbiting satellites this year. More troubling, taking an acquisition program offline and then restarting the process at a later date would lead to cost increases of as much as three to five times the amount the government would have to spend for the same product today.

So here’s the choice: Spend $700 million this year for continuous service or $2 billion to $3.5 billion at some point in the future for the same equipment and a guaranteed service interruption.

Environmental satellites are not optional equipment. This is not a debate about whether we should splurge on the sunroof or the premium sound system or the seat warmers for our new car. Today’s environmental satellites are at the end of their projected life cycles. They will fail. When they do, we must have replacements ready or risk billions of dollars in annual losses to major sectors of our economy and weakening our national security.

That’s an ugly forecast. Tragically, it’s also 100 percent accurate.

Michael Conathan is Director of Oceans Policy at American Progress. This is cross-posted at the Center for American Progress.

Podcast: Play in new window | Right click to download

In The Inquisition of Climate Science, former Reed College president and National Science Board member James Powell elucidates the landscape of climate denial; diagrams, analyzes, and debunks the most frequently used denier arguments; and advances a progressive vision for what science communication could become in the 21st century. Prepublication reviewers summed up the book: “A devastating, crushing blow against the deniers. I would not want to meet Powell in a dark alley.”

At once a quick read and an informational reference guide, The Inquisition of Climate Science is a must for climate science advocates as well as casual readers. Powell’s meticulous research makes the book a useful all-in-one guide to the science, politics, messages, and media coverage of climate change. At the same time, his engaging narrative style grabs the reader and makes the pages seem to fly by.

From the very first chapter, The Inquisition makes crystal clear the distinction between science and pseudoscience, and arms the reader with the tools to dispel common misconceptions. Powell opens the book with accounts of two dichotomous climate change conferences that exemplify the difference between legitimate, fact-based debate, and political demagoguery. The first, held by the American Geophysical Union, consisted of presentations by scientists about new data and findings about climate change.

In contrast, the second conference, organized by the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank, had a very different goal. Rather than bringing together scientists to discuss science using scientific evidence, the Heartland conference brought together “scientists, economists, legislators, policy activists, and media representatives” to repeat a set of talking points about the dangers of “climate alarmism.” Not only were no peer-reviewed scientific findings presented at the conference, but almost none of the speakers were published climate scientists. Instead, the Heartland Institute invited such figures as a former astronaut, the president of the Czech Republic, and an MIT meteorologist, almost the sole speaker to be a practicing scientist.

What Powell shows with such clarity is that the so-called climate “debate” is not a scientific one. In example after example he illustrates the lopsided nature of the climate discourse: with scientists using scientific evidence on one side, and political activists using knee-jerk imagery and philosophical misdirection on the other. In his analysis, Powell breaks down some of the most common hallmarks of the denier movement. “They:

• Engage in publicity stunts designed to gain media attention and that promulgate disinformation.
• Repeat claims long after scientists have shown them to be false.
• Make assertions without presenting any evidence to back them up. Had a speaker at the AGU meeting said that carbon dioxide does not cause global warming, the audience would have demanded to see the evidence.
• Have no scientific findings that falsify global warming.
• Have opposed global warming for twenty years. True, back then, many scientists were also skeptical, but as the evidence mounted, they changed their minds. Deniers do not change their minds, a sure sign that they base their denial not on science, but on ideology. To paraphrase Richard Lindzen, ‘global warming denial has always been about politics, not science.’”

The book also examines the connections between antiscience front groups and the fossil fuel interests that fund them. And with rigorous research, Powell shows how the same tactics of science denial have shown up again and again over the years, from the tobacco industry-orchestrated denial of the health effects of smoking, to groups who deny that HIV causes AIDS, to evolution denial, to the organized denial of the harmful health effects of toxic substances like asbestos and chromium hexafluoride.

The solution? In my interview with him, James Powell summed up his simple advice for scientists fighting for truth:

“It’s time for scientists to stand up and be counted. Not be reticent. Not be cautious. Not say for instance that there’s no way to tell whether Katrina was caused by global warming, but to say very forcefully that Katrina is exactly the kind of thing we can expect more of under global warming.”

Powell’s comprehensive book is a welcome addition to the growing literature debunking fossil fuel-funded, antiscience disinformation.

Sean Pool is assistant editor for Science Progress and Climate Progress. You can download or stream the whole interview above. You can order the forthcoming book here.

But has all the debate and airtime affected how well Americans understand climate science? A recent study released by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication sought to find out.

Americans’ Knowledge of Climate Change, released October 12 and conducted from June 24 to July 22, questioned a group of 2,030 American adults on their knowledge of “how the climate system works, and the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to global warming.” The findings highlighted just how far we still have to go to educate our nation about climate science.

The study suggested that many misconceptions associated with climate change continue to persist. The study, for example, indicates that a majority of Americans believe incorrectly that the “climate” changes from year to year (62 percent) and that “weather” is the average climate conditions in a region (51 percent), suggesting that many Americans still confuse “climate” and “weather.” Only 57 percent of Americans have both heard of, and correctly understand what the greenhouse effect is, while only 45 percent know that carbon dioxide contributes to it.

A majority of Americans also incorrectly believes that the hole in the ozone layer, toxic wastes, aerosol spray cans, volcanic eruptions, the sun, and acid rain all contribute to global warming. These misconceptions are important to identify and understand because they lead people to question climate science and deny the impact of human-caused pollution on global warming— making it easier for climate science deniers to beat the drum of inaction.

The study also displayed the contradictory nature of Americans’ understanding of climate change. The study showed that people trust scientists and scientific organizations (such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) as “a source of information about global warming,” but they don’t trust scientists to predict future climate change.

The most trusted sources of information were the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (78 percent), the National Science Foundation (74 percent), natural history museums (73 percent), and scientists (72 percent). The least trusted were environmental organizations (58 percent), television weather reports (50 percent), military leaders (42 percent), and the mainstream news media (35 percent). At the same time, only 37 percent of people surveyed said scientists’ models for predicting climate change are reliable, and only 39 percent think that scientists can predict future climate.

Another interesting contradiction is that while 63 percent of those surveyed acknowledged the major role that natural climate variations have played in the collapse of past civilizations, only 27 percent say that global warming is either extremely (7 percent) or very (20 percent) important to them personally. This would seem to suggest that Americans understand the power of climate to affect society broadly, but still don’t recognize the myriad ways that those effects impact their lives.

Overall, 63 percent of Americans believe that global warming is happening, according to the study. This is down from 85 percent in March of 2006, according to a November 2009 Washington Post-ABC News Poll.

But despite this recent decline, public support for climate action remained high in 2009 and 2010 amid the attacks on climate science. A June 2010 NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found that respondents favored comprehensive energy and carbon pollution reduction legislation by 63 percent to 31 percent—a two to one margin. Even as prospects for a climate bill dimmed in the Senate, an August 2010 Benenson poll showed support for alternative approaches to capping global warming pollution.

When this poll asked whether “the government should regulate greenhouse gases from sources like power plants and refineries in an effort to reduce global warming,” 60 percent of respondents support it and just 34 percent oppose it. And 54 percent say they are confident in the Environmental Protection Agency when it comes to regulating greenhouse gases while 42 percent are not. Finally, when asked about a bill that “would suspend the EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gases for two years,” just 37 percent support it, while 53 percent oppose it.

There is support for EPA regulation of greenhouses across the political spectrum. Fifty-four percent of independents supported it—with just 35 percent opposed. Even Republicans are evenly split, with 45 percent supporting and 43 percent opposing it.

The upshot: Support for climate action among the public has stayed remarkably strong throughout 2009 and 2010—despite record ad spending and lobbying from Big Oil and dirty energy friends to oppose climate and clean energy legislation.

Fortunately, those surveyed by the Yale Project also offered a suggestion for how to address the knowledge gap and put the misconceptions to rest. Participants were given the statement, “Schools should teach our children about the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to global warming” and asked to either strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with the statement. Seventy-five percent agreed (35 percent strongly) while only 25 percent disagreed (11 percent strongly).

More Americans believe in the need to teach our children more about global warming in schools than believe global warming is happening. It is perhaps the study’s most powerful finding. This suggests that while many Americans may still be skeptical or confused by the details of climate change, a vast majority recognize that their children need to learn more.

Ultimately, while the dip in belief about climate change since 2006 is disheartening, this study is hopeful because nearly two-thirds of Americans still believe global warming is real. Most support clean energy and climate action as well. Those who understand the science surrounding these issues and those who know the serious challenges a changing climate will continue to present must continue to speak up and not be deterred by climate change science deniers. A majority of Americans demands it.

Brett Daley is an Intern with the Center for American Progress’s Energy Opportunity Department.

On October 6, Spanish wind giant Gamesa Corp Technologica SA, a leading global designer and manufacturer of wind turbines, and Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding, America’s largest shipbuilder, signed a research and development agreement to jointly develop two prototypes of what will be the world’s largest offshore wind turbine, known as G11X -5.0 MW. The prototypes will be built piecemeal and then deployed and tested for kinks in U.S. waters, likely off the Virginia Coast.

At five megawatts each, just one of these turbines running at full speed could power nearly 4,000 homes. The turbine also builds off of Gamesa’s recent incremental innovations that have made its previous designs operate more efficiently and cost-effectively. These include:

• Innoblade: a blade that has been divided into sections allowing it to be easily transported. It also includes new aerodynamic features to minimize noise.
• Multismart: a turbine control system modulating the pitch of each blade, reducing vibration and lessening load.
• ConcreTower: a tower made of steel and concrete with the aim of reducing costs and facilitating transportation.
• Flexifit: a crane coupled to the nacelle (the main housing for a wind turbine) that can hoist or lower components such as the drive train or generator.
• GridMate: a permanent magnet synchronous generator using a full converter, “to guarantee the compliance with grid connection regulations.”

Once a final design for the turbine and marine stabilization platform are finalized, Gamesa will build a manufacturing facility to mass-produce the equipment, creating hundreds of jobs, according a spokesperson. Gamesa was the first foreign turbine manufacturer to come to the United States and since then has established two turbine manufacturing facilities in Pennsylvania that today sustain 800 permanent manufacturing jobs. Despite being a foreign-owned subsidiary, Gamesa’s U.S. operation has one of the highest domestic content rates (more than 50 percent) of any turbine maker in the country.

What’s more, on October 7, Interior Secretary Salazar finally approved the lease for the Cape Wind wind farm, bringing to a close the nine-year regulatory and political stalemate that had ensnared it. Cape Wind will deploy 130 turbines designed and built by Siemens Energy, and an agreement between Cape Wind Associates, LLC, Mass Tank Sales Corporation and EWW Group of Germany will result in the construction of first manufacturing facility for offshore wind foundations and other metalwork in the U.S., creating hundreds of jobs.  Cape Wind is the first of a handful of offshore wind projects currently winding their way through various local, state, and federal regulatory hurdles in search of approval. According to a third party analysis, the Cape Wind project will create between 600 and 1,000 construction and manufacturing jobs in the region while boosting labor income, state GDP, and increasing tax revenue by millions of dollars.

On October 12, Trans-Elect, a major transmission line developer, announced its intention to develop a subsea electrical transmission backbone that could one day connect and support the thousands of megawatts of offshore wind capacity being planned for development off the East Coast. This American Wind Connection would span 350 miles from northern New Jersey to the North Carolina/Virginia border and could support enough wind farms to power 1.9 million homes upon its completion in 2016. What is unique about this particular proposal is that its backers—Google; Marubeni Corp., a Japanese trading firm; and Good Energies LLC—have no plans to ask for a single federal dollar to finance the project. This indicates that offshore wind energy is approaching profitability and commercial readiness today.

At Science Progress we have written extensively about the formation of bottom-up innovation “clusters” or “ecosystems” around particular technologies in certain regions of the country. These networks are often anchored around a particular geographic location where shared infrastructure, favorable policy conditions, and a large pool of human talent can be leveraged by collaborating public and private entities. All of these recent announcements show the clear outlines of what could be the kernel of an offshore wind technology innovation cluster anchored in the Northeast and extending across the country.

The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic are particularly well-suited to serve as a cradle for a new offshore wind innovation ecosystem thanks to of a host of region-specific assets. These include:

• The availability of a vast amount of potential offshore wind resources (over 60,000 megawatts).
• A shallow coastal shelf that extends miles out to sea. These shallow waters make it cheaper and easier to install large turbines further out to sea where they can harness stronger and more consistent ocean winds while remaining virtually out of sight.
• Close proximity to large population centers where the power can be used, day or night.

Innovation networks form when different types of firms in an industry collaborate, create shared objectives, and exchange money, knowledge, and risk in the pursuit of those objectives. This can happen through a joint agreement for technical collaboration and development between companies with R&D operations, such as that of Gamesa and Northrop Grumman; through an economic exchange between buyer and seller, such as Siemen’s sale of 130 of its turbines to Cape Wind; or through advancing an investment in infrastructure, such as Google’s intention to take a stake in the development of the American Wind Connection.

All of these interactions exemplify the kind of collaboration among technology researchers, producers, users, and financiers that is so essential to the formation of a functional innovation ecosystem. New project finance expertise will be developed as Google, Good Energies, and Marubeni Corp. work with Trans-Elect to piece together the first-of-its-kind multijurisdictional offshore transmission system. The infrastructure created by this collaboration will make it easier for project developers to accelerate construction of planned and future offshore wind farms in the Northeast, which in turn will drive demand for turbines and equipment designed and produced by Siemens, Gamesa, Northrop Grumman, General Electric, and others.

All of these activities will help to increase scale and decrease cost while creating jobs in the Northeast and in turbine component manufacturing plants around the country. According to a recent report published by Oceana, the offshore wind industry in the United States has the potential to create and sustain as many as 212,000 permanent American jobs annually by 2030. This is more than three times as many jobs as the American Petroleum Institute predicts could be created by aggressive expansion of offshore oil and gas drilling. This finding is consistent with an analysis released by CAP and the Political Economy Research Institute last year that showed a similar figure.

The offshore wind innovation milestones reached this week stand as a testament to the innovative power of America’s entrepreneurs and businesses but much more could be accomplished if the government were to take an active partnership role in this nascent innovation network. Innovation ecosystems thrive when private sector producers, users, financers, and researchers can collaborate closely with public sector regulators, program administrators, and policymakers to address both market and regulatory barriers to technology development.

While the preliminary accomplishments of the American Wind Connection, Cape Wind, and the Gamesa-Northrop partnership demonstrate the potential of America’s private sector to innovate, so much more would be possible if the federal government could articulate a remotely coherent offshore wind energy strategy. The federal government needs to address regulatory hurdles like ones that ensnared Cape Wind for decades.

Some steps have been taken, such as the formation of the Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy Consortium among 10 Eastern states and the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the recent rulemaking by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which will make it easier to site new clean energy transmission lines like the American Wind Connection. But much more is needed and our economic competitors are beating us to the punch.

Earlier this year China beat the United States to join the offshore wind club alongside Denmark, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. This puts China’s command-and-control economy fully two years ahead of the United States in offshore wind, since the first U.S. wind farm, Cape Wind, will not be complete until 2012 at the earliest. (see chart)

(Data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, p. 42.)

As technologies like offshore wind advance along the innovation lifecycle toward commercialization and maturity, mobilizing large amount of private capital becomes a paramount objective. But private capital won’t flow where there is no return, so besides collaborating to clear away regulatory hurdles, it must also sustain policies to keep demand for clean energy technologies strong.

Until now, the states have carried the burden of implementing demand-driving renewable energy standards in a piecemeal fashion, and these policies have been instrumental in helping the wind industry increase scale and reduce costs as much as it has. But in our current environment of political uncertainty and state budget shortfalls, this patchwork of policies is in jeopardy. The job then falls to the federal government to provide the regulatory clarity and long-term policy certainty needed to keep big investors at the table financing innovation.

There is a lot of work to do but the events of the past week have shown that the building blocks are there to develop a job-creating innovation ecosystem for offshore wind energy in the American East. With a little federal leadership, America’s private sector is ready to bring its capital and expertise to the table to build the factories, wind farms, and research centers that will drive energy innovation into the future.

Sean Pool is Assistant Editor at Science Progress.

Last week Fox News and other conservative media outlets tried once again to fabricate controversy over climate science when they pounced on a presentation made by the president’s science adviser Dr. John Holdren in Oslo. In it, Holdren makes the case (for the umpteenth time) that it’s time to move past the oversimplified term “global warming” and start facing the painful reality that without sharply reducing our carbon pollution, we face something more akin to a “global climate disruption.”

Sadly, even the Atlantic monthly (which is seen as center-left but is center-right on climate) repeated the right-wing narrative that the White House was somehow pushing new rhetoric in place of real science with its stenographic post, “Right Has Field Day With New ‘Global Warming’ Term.”  Ironically, the Atlantic criticized Holdren’s phrase  “global climate disruption” while its own construction “the scientifically supported but nevertheless controversial theory of global warming” is risible.  Yes, well, it is only “controversial” if one buys into and keeps repeating right-wing anti-science talking points.

I’ve been writing about efforts to come up with a better term than “global warming” for a long time (see “Is ‘Global Weirding’ here?”).  I myself tried to coin the term “Hell and High Water” a few years ago, since that is a more accurate description of what is to come if we stay on or near our current emissions path.  It didn’t take — even though Time magazine used the phrase for its Pakistan flooding story, which didn’t mention global warming and which wasn’t shared with U.S. readers anyway!

It was GOP strategist and wordmeister Frank Luntz who counseled in a confidential 2003 memo that the Bush administration and conservatives should stop using the term “global warming” because it was too frightening:

It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming and “conservation” instead of preservation.

1) “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming”. As one focus group participant noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.

So let’s set the record straight on two points.  Holdren’s speech focused on laying out the rock-solid and increasingly dire science (must-see PPTs here).  And the term he was recommending is essentially identical to one that he and many other scientists suggested 13 years ago:

Scientists’ Statement
Global Climatic Disruption

June 18, 1997

We are scientists who are familiar with the causes and effects of climatic change as summarized recently by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We endorse those reports and observe that the further accumulation of greenhouse gases commits the earth irreversibly to further global climatic change and consequent ecological, economic and social disruption. The risks associated with such changes justify preventive action through reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases. In ratifying the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the United States agreed in principle to reduce its emissions. It is time for the United States, as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, to fulfill this commitment and demonstrate leadership in a global effort.

Human-induced global climatic change is under way. The IPCC concluded that global mean surface air temperature has increased by between about 0.5 and 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years and anticipates a further continuing rise of 1.8 to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit during the next century. Sea-level has risen on average 4-10 inches during the past 100 years and is expected to rise another 6 inches to 3 feet by 2100. Global warming from the increase in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere causes an amplified hydrological cycle resulting in increased precipitation and flooding in some regions and more severe aridity in other areas. The IPCC concluded that “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” The warming is expected to expand the geographical ranges of malaria and dengue fever and to open large new areas to other human diseases and plant and animal pests. Effects of the disruption of climate are sufficiently complicated that it is appropriate to assume there will be effects not now anticipated.

Our familiarity with the scale, severity, and costs to human welfare of the disruptions that the climatic changes threaten leads us to introduce this note of urgency and to call for early domestic action to reduce U.S. emissions via the most cost-effective means. We encourage other nations to join in similar actions with the purpose of producing a substantial and progressive global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions beginning immediately. We call attention to the fact that there are financial as well as environmental advantages to reducing emissions. More than 2000 economists recently observed that there are many potential policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions for which total benefits outweigh the total costs.

The Framework Convention on Climate Change, ratified by the United States and more than 165 other nations, calls for stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at levels that will protect human interests and nature. The Parties to the Convention will meet in December, 1997, in Kyoto, Japan to prepare a protocol implementing the convention. We urge that the United States enter that meeting with a clear national plan to limit emissions, and a recommendation as to how the U.S. will assist other nations in significant steps toward achieving the joint purpose of stabilization.

Initial Signatories

• Dr. John P. Holdren
• Dr. Jane Lubchenco
• Dr. Harold A. Mooney
• Dr. Peter H. Raven
• Dr. F. Sherwood Rowland
• Dr. George M. Woodwell

Signed by 2409 scientists as of June 11, 1997

Now I don’t actually think Holdren should spend time proposing different names for global warming in his capacity as White House science adviser, even if he has been doing so for over a decade.  It just gives people an excuse to ignore the science and call it “controversial.”  That said, it would be nice if any of his critics actually looked at his terrific presentation.  I am reposting a few of his PPTs.

Scientists have been advocating for a new term for “global warming” for a long time. That’s because slight changes in global average temperature can have drastic effects on local climates and ecosystems around the world, affecting billions of lives. The simple term “global warming” does not capture the very severe and uneven impacts that warming is already having on society.

“Global warming is in fact a dangerous misnomer,” Holdren said, “because it implies something that is uniform across the planet, is mainly about temperature, is gradual, and indeed might even be good for you.” He then went on to tell how “the phenomenon in question” is none of these things. It is “highly non-uniform, it’s not just about temperature….  It is not gradual but rapid compared with the capacity of society to adjust … [and] it’s gonna be mostly bad and worse and worse going forward for more and more people.”

Warmer average global temperatures mean more devastating storms like Nashville’s Katrina, more floods like the devastating one that put one-fifth of Pakistan underwater, more intense droughts and wildfires like the one that wiped out tens of thousands of homes in Russia and caused them to stop exporting wheat for the year, and long-term droughts like the on Australia has faced for more than a decade years (see Absolute must read: Australia today offers horrific glimpse of U.S. Southwest, much of planet, post-2040, if we don’t slash emissions soon).

Unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases also means a host of other interrelated problems from ocean acidification to species migration to the erosion and eventual submersion of coastal communities due to sea level rise.

Anyone who follows the science of climate change will agree that the term “global warming” is outdated, oversimplified, and gives only an incomplete picture of the multitude of ways in which a warmer world will disrupt not only the functioning of Earth’s ecological life support systems, but also our economic, social, and geopolitical systems. So Dr. Holdren’s suggestion that we replace the 40-year-old misnomer with something more accurate is welcome and long overdue.

Despite the laughable conspiracy theorists’ pouncing on Holdren’s remarks — “Sounds like somebody’s starting to feel uncomfortable because the icecaps and Greenland ice sheets aren’t melting fast enough” — the dire nature of the facts and analyses that he presents go far beyond simple “global warming.”

That’s why so many people have been recommending other terms for so long.  James Gustav Speth, the former chair of the Council on Environmental Quality under the Carter administration and founder of both the World Resources Institute and the National Resources Defense Council used the term “global climate disruption” in an article as far back as 2005. Other examples of scientists using the term before the Obama administration include:

• The organization of university presidents in 2007
• Chuck Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering in 2008
• Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine in 2008
• References in academic journals like this one in 2009
• Paul A.T. Higgins of the American Meteorological Society in a report for the American Association for the Advancement of Science earlier in 2010

So fear not, conservative and center-right media. “Global climate disruption” is not some new White House brand name designed to trick people into the malevolent clean energy conspiracy. It is simply a more accurate way of describing the many catastrophic impacts that global warming will have on our society, environment and economy if we keep listening to the siren song of “do nothing” from your fellow anti-science disinformers.

Shakespeare wrote in “Romeo and Juliet,”

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Call it what you will, but that which we call global climate disruption by any other name will still drastically alter our way of life, cause irreversible damage to our climate, and harm the health and welfare of billions of people.

Joseph Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and is editor of ClimateProgress.org. Sean Pool is Special Assistant for Energy, Science and Technology Policy at the Center for American Progress. A version of this article is cross-posted under the title “Climate disruption caused by global warming driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases” at Climate Progress.

Glaciers such as those spread across Greenland hold almost 70 percent of the world’s freshwater. If all of the world’s glaciers were to melt, the sea level would rise approximately 230 feet. Although this extreme scenario is unlikely, the panel concluded that it would not be off base to link the latest ice island to embark into warmer waters with human-caused global warming.

This is the second major iceberg to break off, or calve, from glaciers this year, the first being the Merz Glacier Tongue in Antarctica in March. The new floating ice island is the largest iceberg in the northern hemisphere, and the freshwater contained in it is enough to supply the entire U.S. population with public tap water for 120 days, according to Dr. Andreas Muenchow, an associate professor of physical ocean science at the University of Delaware who testified before the subcommittee. Dr. Muenchow also noted in his testimony that the ice island was the largest piece to break from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier in 50 years.

If you have ever poured a cup of water over a glass of ice, you know how much more quickly the ice melts when it is in contact with water than when it sits in an empty cup. The same is true for glaciers. Once they break free from land and plop into the ocean, they can melt up to twice as fast, according to Dr. Rober Bindschadler, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, who also testified before the subcommittee. Land ice entering the sea and melting is the largest contributor to rising sea levels.

This event is consistent with scientists’ recent findings that sea level is expected to rise at least one meter (about three feet, three inches) by the end of the century due to global temperature increases but possibly by much more. These more recent projections far exceed the 0.6 feet-to-two-foot rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The scientists at the emergency briefing last week said the IPCC presented “underestimates.”

A 2008 study in the prestigious journal Nature Geoscience, for example, showed that glacial melt could cause the sea level to rise by as much as five feet by 2100. A more recent study in Nature showed that catastrophic sea level rise of 20 inches per decade for five straight decades occurred during the last interglacial period when the world was 2 degrees warmer. Since human-caused global warming is expected to cause an increase in temperature by at least 2 degrees this century, the authors conclude that such a drastic jump in sea levels could happen again:

“…the potential for sustained rapid ice loss and catastrophic sea-level rise in the near future is confirmed by our discovery of sea-level instability at the close of the last interglacial.”

“When the world warms, the Arctic warms more. When the Arctic warms more, Greenland melts,” explained Dr. Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University.  In his testimony, he noted that both Greenland and the Arctic are losing mass.

Greenland’s ice sheet alone holds 10 percent of the world’s ice.  If the whole of it were to melt, the scientists told the subcommittee that the global average sea level would rise 23 feet. Rep. Markey pointed out that water heights in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were almost this amount. Such sea level rise would drastically change the coastlines of each of the world’s continents, undoubtedly with severe social, economic, and security consequences.

Dr. Ally warned that it is possible that Greenland could completely melt by the end of this century. The scientists on the panel believe that a “tipping point” will be reached in one decade, where global temperatures become too high for Greenland’s ice sheet to remain frozen. Their claims are consistent with another study in Nature showing that the combined melting of Antarctic and Greenland coastal glaciers could create a “runaway effect” that would be difficult to reverse.

The panel of informed scientists that testified before the Select Subcommittee on Energy Independence and Global Warming agreed that this year’s melting in the polar regions is an early warning of future calamity. The scientists confirmed that this new ice island should be added to the snowballing narrative of global climate change.

Sean Pool is Special Assistant for energy, science, and technology policy at the Center for American Progress. Sarah Busch is a junior at Smith College and an intern at the Center for American Progress Energy Opportunity Team.

This coalition, promoting disinformation while claiming to be dedicated to science, is nothing new. In fact, today’s climate deniers are using the same playbook used by supporters of Ronald Reagan’s failed “Star Wars” program in the 1980s, and by the tobacco industry to avoid regulation of secondhand smoke in the 1990s. Indeed, science denial, free-market fundamentalists, and big industries have a long and sorry past together.

Let’s start with secondhand smoke. In the 1950s, scientific evidence demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that the tars in tobacco smoke caused cancer. The tobacco industry responded by trying to get science on its side, pumping money into scientific and medical research that might show that tobacco was all right after all. It didn’t work. Despite decades of effort and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the industry was losing the public relations battle, and, more important, customers. By the 1980s, smoking rates had decreased dramatically.

In the early 1990s, things got even worse for the industry, as science showed that secondhand smoke was deadly, too. Philip Morris executives decided then that science itself was their enemy. In 1993 they created an organization called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, or TASSC, and a website, junkscience.com, which claimed that the science surrounding secondhand smoke was “junk.”

Soon, TASSC was making that claim about the science related to the ozone hole and global warming as well, and Philip Morris was recruiting third parties—mostly libertarian think tanks and antitax groups, such as the Heartland Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, and National Empowerment Television, a conservative TV network—to join the effort.

It is perhaps not surprising that the tobacco industry found antigovernment groups willing to make common cause. But it is a bit more surprising that they found reputable scientists—indeed, some exceptionally distinguished ones—willing to help them. As we document in our new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming—the tobacco industry and libertarian think tanks knew that to make their claims seem credible, they would need scientists to make them.

In the 1950s, the Tobacco Industry had recruited C.C. Little, a prominent geneticist (and one-time eugenicist) to direct a “research program” to challenge the mainstream scientific position that tobacco was deadly.

In the 1970s, after Little retired, R.J. Reynolds created its own Biomedical Research Program, and recruited former National Academy of Science president Frederick Seitz. From 1979 to 1985, Seitz (by this time retired from the presidency of Rockefeller University) ran a research program for Reynolds that served to generate results and experts that could be deployed to defend smoking.

How did Seitz segue from defending tobacco to attacking these other lines of scientific inquiry? Well, in 1984, Seitz had joined forces with Robert Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and William Nierenberg, retiring director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, to create the George C. Marshall Institute. The goal of the new organization was to defend President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (also known as “Star Wars”) from attack by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and in particular by the equally prominent physicists Hans Bethe, Richard Garwin, and astronomer Carl Sagan.

Between 1984 and 1989, the Marshall Institute focused on defeating communism by emphasizing the Soviet threat and the defensive possibilities of Star Wars. In hindsight it is clear that they greatly exaggerated both. One 1987 piece by Jastrow thundered that “America had five years left” before the Soviet Union became so superior it would achieve world domination without firing a shot. The collapse of the Eastern Block only two years later proved them wrong, yet the Marshall Institute didn’t go out of business for its inaccurate advocacy.

Instead, they found a new enemy to fight, an internal enemy they perceived as the next great threat to liberty—environmentalism and the science that supported it.

During the 1988 election, candidate George H. W. Bush had promised to address climate change—pledging to meet the “greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” But soon after Bush took office, Nierenberg presented a briefing to the White House staff that claimed global warming was caused by the sun, not greenhouse gases, and that as solar irradiance declined during the 1990s, the Earth would begin to cool.

Despite a complete lack of evidence that the sun actually had increased in brightness during the previous few decades, Nierenberg’s briefing was taken seriously. One White House staffer commented on the written report that accompanied it, “Everyone has read it.” And it strengthened a faction within the White House, led by Chief of Staff John Sununu, which opposed environmental regulation.

Alan Bromley, appointed a few months later as the president’s science advisor, realized how the White House staff had been misled. After some effort, he managed to restart discussion of the pros and cons of carbon taxes and cap and trade systems within the White House. In 1992 President Bush signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change despite continued opposition inside his own administration. But the Framework Convention was only a promise of intent—it set no binding limits on greenhouse gases. That was supposed to be done later, in what became the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in the mid-1990s. By then, the Marshall Institute had forged links to the American Petroleum Institute and to Republican leaders who now controlled Congress.

Meanwhile, Seitz and Nierenberg had joined forces with another Cold War physicist, S. Fred Singer, one of the original rocket scientists of the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1990, Singer had established the “Science and Environmental Policy Project” in office space shared with the Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy, a think tank financed by the strongly anticommunist Unification Church. In editorials published by the Washington Times (owned by the Unification Church) and in many other venues, Singer now took on the issue of the ozone hole, insisting that the problem was being exaggerated, and that there was no scientific consensus on the issue, and it would be premature to regulate chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC’s.

Of course, in retrospect scientists from around the world decisively and conclusively determined CFC’s to be a major threat the ozone layer, which is the planet’s natural line of defense against cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation. Thankfully, world leaders listened to the urgency of the actual science, and in 1987 signed the Montreal Protocol, which set a declining cap on ozone-depleting pollution. Kofi Annan hailed the treaty as “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date,” and thanks to swift political action, scientists believe the ozone layer will recover fully by 2050.

Undeterred by overwhelming scientific evidence, Singer also defended tobacco. In the mid 1990s, finding all avenues for legitimate scientific debate about the effects of second-hand smoke exhausted, he turned to   attacking the Environmental Protection Agency’s review process. His work was extensively cited in a handbook of antiscience circulated by the industry in 1993: Bad Science: A Resource Book. The two-hundred page collection of opinion pieces and quotations was designed to make mainstream science appear corrupt and unreliable. But legitimate scientific debate occurs in the pages of academic journals, not in op-eds or in industry-circulated handbooks.

Then, in 1996, Singer joined Seitz and Nierenberg in attacking a young scientist from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Benjamin Santer, over his leadership of one chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Second Assessment Report.  In the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, they attacked Santer, and claimed that he had altered the report to fit U.S. climate policy (as if there even was one!). The attack on Santer in op-eds and other non-science fora presaged last year’s assault on climate science, the theft of email from the University of East Anglia, and subsequent media feeding frenzy.

The attack also presaged Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe’s recent threat to indict climate scientists, and the witch-hunt by Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli focused on climate scientist Michael Mann, who had previously taught at the University of Virginia, and who has been exonerated by four separate panels. All these events are consistent with a longer history of attempts to undermine science and scientists to prevent government regulation of harmful industrial products and activities.

The New York Times recently declared the East Anglia affair a “manufactured controversy,” but this is just the most recent in a pattern of manufactured controversies spanning decades, a product of the ideology that George Soros has called “free market fundamentalism.” It is an ideology that rejects the idea that government regulation is ever appropriate.

Over the past half century, science has demonstrated that many industrial activities and consumer products are damaging to the natural environment and to human health: tobacco, DDT, acid rain, ozone depletion, and the burning of fossil fuels. These activities have unintended consequences that the marketplace did not anticipate, and did not succeed in preventing. Because these unintended consequences are “market failures,” it is reasonable to conclude that something needs to be done, something that creates a “price” for bad behavior that markets can recognize.

That something could be a carbon tax, or it could be a cap and trade system, or it could be some other form of regulation or prevention. Yet some people have continued to insist—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that all problems can and should be solved in the marketplace and no government action is needed. Because science suggests that government action is needed to protect the common good, free market fundamentalists have come to see science itself as their enemy.

The efforts of these free market ideologues to undermine legitimate scientific debate in the popular media helps to explain why, 18 years after President Bush signed the U.N. Framework Convention, people are still confused about the science of climate change. It also helps explain why the federal government has taken no action to reduce emissions while nearly every other major economy puts together climate action plans. Meanwhile, the ice caps continue to melt, the permafrost thaws, and weather events become more extreme.

Ironically, worsening climate change and the increasing risk that we are approaching irreversible tipping points make it more likely that the heavy-handed government intervention that conservatives dread will actually be required. The longer we wait, the harder the problem of climate change will become to solve—and the more likely it is that climate change will become not just inconvenient, but very destructive, and perhaps catastrophic.

Naomi Oreskes is a professor of history of science and provost of Sixth College at UC San Diego. Erik Conway is a historian of science and technology, living in Pasadena, California.

A little more than half, or 54 percent, of U.S. weathercasters accept that climate change is happening. And in many local television newsrooms, weathercasters have become the de facto science reporters at their station. Edward Maibach, who headed a recent study surveying professionals in the field, sees this as an opportunity for enhancing their role as informal science educators.

Previous public surveys demonstrate that weathercasters are the second-most trusted source of information on climate change. For Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, that finding was unexpected. The first is climate scientists themselves, and running a distant third are “friends and family.” “That clued us into the fact that our nation’s weathercasters are a potentially important source of informal education about climate change,” he said in an interview with Science Progress. He spoke about his new research with Andrew Light, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress focusing on international energy policy, and the director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason. (The podcast audio is accessible above.)

The latest study from the Center for Climate Change Communication is the largest and most representative survey of TV weathercasters to date, and its findings on how this group of professionals thinks about climate change science and news generated significant media attention, including a front-page story at The New York Times. Coverage like that is hard to earn, and Maibach is grateful for it, though he disagrees with the conclusions. Much of the media attention has been on the 25 percent of respondents who said that global warming isn’t happening at all. But as Maibach points out, the idea that this group is “a hotbed of climate change skepticism turned out to not be the case.”

“We see this as a ‘glass already half full’ finding,” he said, referring to the majority of weathercasters who accept global warming. “To the extend to which they were not currently acting as climate change educators, we wanted to identify the path to cultivate them as an important source of education for the public.”

Maibach says the data points to that opportunity, as two out of three survey respondents said they were interested in educating their viewers about the relationship between local weather and the changing global climate.

Weathercasters as informal science educators

The latest survey confirms other findings on the small fraction of dedicated science reporting at local outlets. The study reached almost 1,400 weathercasters who belong to the two major professional associations, the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association. Almost all, or 94 percent of the 571 respondents, said they are the only full-time staffer covering science or environmental issues at their station. Some 79 percent embraced this role, a fact the American Meteorological Society already recognizes. The organization, Maibach says, sees an opportunity to embrace weathercasters as “station scientists” and is pursuing educational programs to support them.

Moreover, weathercasters share their professional expertise not just on air, but at local school and adult education events. Almost 70 percent of the respondents do between one and three speaking events each month, building loyalty that helps draw viewers to their broadcasts. According to the survey, a small proportion of these weathercasters are incorporating climate change information into their broadcasts, but a large proportion of them are finding ways to address the issue in their community presentations.

For Maibach, the “Ah-ha!” moment of the study came from looking at the responses from those participants who said they were interested in communicating more information on climate change. Ninety percent of that group indicated that a variety of relatively simple resources would help them do their jobs more effectively. They needed access to peer-reviewed journal articles, which are typically locked behind paywalls. They need to be able to interview media-savvy climate scientists. Most valuable, they said, are high-quality graphics and animations explaining key concepts of climate science. His group is now working with climate science communication experts to produce these resources.

Andrew Light pointed out that federal government already plays an important role supplying these types of resources, as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration produce a wealth of climate science information. As well, he suggested that a move within NOAA to create a National Climate Service will further ramp up the amount of accessible information. Administrator Jane Lubchenco is particularly interested in filling this information gap, he said.

Meteorological myths

While about four out of five weathercasters are men, there is a diversity of professional and educational backgrounds within the community. Previous research shows that about half of the practicing weathercasters in the United States are meteorologists, certified by the AMS or the NWA. Some hold scientific degrees, some have journalism backgrounds, and some simply come to the role through experience in broadcasting.

But the survey results also dispel the notion that there is a rift between weathercasters and professional climate scientists, who tend to be academic researchers. “Approximately three out of four of our respondents look at climate scientists as a trustworthy source of information about climate change,” said Maibach. “That’s good news.”

The myth of this “culture gap” between meteorologists and climatologists, he said, rests on an assumption that forecasters, who struggle to model weather a few days into the future, consider it hubris to claim that they should trust climate models that are decades in scope. But the trust meteorologists say they have in climate scientists doesn’t support this idea, said Maibach.

Light suggested that the immediate media response to the survey may have rested upon this explanation, which he called “seat-of-the-pants sociology—of the working class meteorologists who ‘don’t get no respect.’” In that context, the survey fit into a particular storyline about the the continuing fallout of the overhyped “Climategate” incident, in which computer hackers stole emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. The content of the years of private correspondence revealed scientists besieged by freedom of information requests from climate skeptics, and global warming deniers said the information undermined climate science itself. A recent inquiry of the British House of Commons found no basis for either that claim, nor others leveled against the Climate Research Unit at the University, its director, Phil Jones, and the research on historical climate data the group manages.

“None of that has changed any of the overwhelming consensus on the causes of anthropogenic global warming and what are the necessary solutions,” said Light.

In the present media climate, the release of the survey data did create the opportunity for “talking head debates” on cable news, said Light, pitting high-profile weathercasters who deny climate change against scientists who accept the facts.

Setting up the discussion as a debate reinforces the notion that there is disagreement within the scientific community, said Maibach. “And that’s a totally erroneous notion.” Approximately 97 percent of climate scientists who are active researchers say that climate change is real and human-caused. “So this notion that there is still disagreement out there in the scientific community about climate change is fundamentally wrong.”

Climate change as a public health hazard

Maibach’s goal for future projects supported by this research is to enable “local weathercasters to make the connection between the conditions we are living with here, in our community, and the changing global climate.” People have a sense that climate change is “happening somewhere else,” he said, “We understand there is a problem, but it isn’t our problem.”

“The way in which the climate change story has been framed historically is as an environmental problem,” he explains, and it is unquestionably an immense environmental problem. But it is also a public health problem, and before turning to climate change research in 2007, Maibach’s career focused on public health communications. “As a result of 25 or more years in the field, I’m absolutely convinced that for the American people, health is right up along with baseball, mom, and apple pie,” he said—it is something of immense social value. He aims to engage citizens “at a fundamentally deeper, more values-based level” by magnifying research on the public health impacts of climate change.

The Obama administration focuses its discussion of climate change on jobs in clean energy industries and energy security, Light points out. Because it takes time to train scientists to communicate on the expanding set of issues, including the public health threats, it could be effective to provide that information to weathercasters in the near term.

Maibach reports that he is already working with small group of 18 weathercasters who are actively using their platform to talk about climate change as informal science education.

He is also collaborating with the weather team at WLTX, the CBS affiliate in Columbia, South Carolina, headed by Jim Gandy, to become “climate change educators in their community.” Climate Central, a nonprofit that provides scientific information on the issue, will develop graphics, and for the next year, the station will try to help its viewers better understand climate change science and the impacts the global phenomenon has on the local area. If the effort is effective, then Maibach’s group will have a strong case for scaling it.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor for Science Progress.

The findings challenge the assumption that the impacts of carbon dioxide pollution are the same regardless of location. The human-caused emissions of the heat-trapping gas are the leading cause of global climate change, but “domes” of CO₂ accumulate over cities, leading to additional health impacts on top of those related to global warming.

The author, Mark Z. Jacobson, concludes the domes of CO₂ have fundamentally local consequences. Cutting local emissions, he argues, would reduce the related premature deaths in that area:

“If locally emitted CO₂ increases local air pollution, then cities, counties, states, and small countries can reduce air pollution health problems by reducing their own CO₂ emissions, regardless of whether other air pollutants are reduced locally or whether other locations reduce CO₂.”

Of course, climate change also brings warmer temperatures and significant health consequences from heat waves. The Chicago heat wave of 1995 killed more than 700 people, and under lower emissions scenarios, similar heat waves are projected to happen every other year by the middle of the century. So reducing emissions is good for the health of cities in the short term and the long term.

Some six decades later, cigarette smoking causes about 443,000 deaths every year in this country, about 20 percent of the U.S. population smokes, and every day 1,000 young people pick up the habit.

That’s why the Food and Drug Administration issued new rules today banning cigarette company marketing tactics designed for getting their product into the hands of youth. The FDA authority comes from legislation passed last year that for the first time allowed the agency to regulate “unregulated drug delivery systems.”

The intellectual heirs of this strategy to defend corporate interests by assaulting science are the polluter-driven deniers of climate change research. And at the moment, climate scientists are under heavy assault.

The hopeful lesson from the new FDA rules is that no amount of corporate funding can suffocate the science indefinitely. But we shouldn’t have to wait 60 years to act on what we know about climate change. The impacts are already very real.

This attack on global warming was prefigured in the announcement last August by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that it planned to gin up “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.” Senior vice president for the environment William Kovacs exulted: “It would be evolution versus creationism. It would be the science of climate change on trial.”

Kovacs later apologized, explaining, “My ‘Scopes monkey’ analogy was inappropriate,” as it undermined his insistence that the Chamber “is not denying or otherwise challenging the science behind global climate change.” However embarrassing and erroneous Kovacs’ description of the chamber’s campaign might have been, they foreshadowed the South Dakota legislature’s move toward its own version of a global warming Scopes trial.

The Scopes trial of 1925 grew out of the first great anti-science movement of the 20^th century: creationism. John Scopes was convicted of violating a Tennessee law forbidding teachers “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” Similar bills remained on the books until the 1960s, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. Creationists soon adopted a new strategy, with laws in Louisiana and Arkansas requiring “balanced treatment” of evolution and creationism. Both bills were declared unconstitutional in the 1980s.

Creationists have not given up. Some have recently partnered with global warming deniers to demand “academic freedom” for public school science teachers to depart from generally accepted science when discussing supposedly controversial scientific topics. In the last two years, a dozen states have considered such bills, some (including Louisiana’s—the only one to pass into law) naming global warming and evolution along with human cloning or stem cell research as especially controversial. These topics are notable for being subject to intense political dispute without any question in the scientific community about the underlying science.

South Dakota’s HCR 1009 is the first bill to attack global warming only, and is especially notable for its attempt to resurrect the creationist “balanced treatment” strategy of the 1980s. As it passed the South Dakota House on February 17, the resolution calls “for balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools of South Dakota.”

To make clear what that balance would entail, the 33 sponsors of HCR 1009 cited widely debunked claims of climate change deniers. They presented vineyards in Greenland as evidence that our modern warming is unremarkable; in fact, the Medieval Warm Period they point to appears to have been a local phenomenon and unlike the current warming, was not driven by atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by human activities. They offer “shifting warm water currents” as an alternative explanation for the dramatic decline in Arctic sea ice; actually, such shifts are predicted consequences of global warming. They repeat the widely mocked claim that carbon dioxide is “the gas of life,” and therefore not a dangerous pollutant; this despite more than a century’s documentation that the gas traps heat in the air. They cite a deeply flawed petition organized by climate change deniers as if science were determined by plebiscite; instead they should have looked to published research, where researcher Naomi Oreskes has found near unanimity that global warming is happening and largely results from human activities.

The resolution invokes these fallacious claims in the service of four points: “That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact”; “That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect [sic] world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity [sic] of these factors is largely speculative”; “That the debate on global warming has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints which have complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of global warming phenomena”; and that instruction about global warming should be “appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.”

When the bill reached the Senate floor on February 24, it was amended to strike most of the scientifically erroneous justifications. South Dakota’s teachers and even a few of its legislators know better than to repeat the creationist canard of equating a theory with uncertainty. As the state’s science standards explain, a theory is “an explanation for some phenomenon that is based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning”—a way to explain facts, which are merely “statement[s] or assertion[s] of verifiable information.” The stars were not aligned for the puzzling references to “astrological” and “thermological” explanations for global warming, and some legislator must have seen the irony of decrying politically biased science while seeking to legislate a scientific result. But the Senate strengthened the final line, insisting now that teachers offer a “balanced and objective” presentation of global warming. However reasonable such advice may be in the abstract, the effect of the law will be chilling to teachers on the ground. Science is not and should not be resolved through the legislative process, and the details of what teachers present as science should not be dictated by legislators with no experience as scientists or teachers.

If the revised bill passes the House, it will put the hardworking teachers of South Dakota in a bind. Will they bow to political pressure and misinform their students about global warming? Or will they soldier on, preparing their students to understand the climatic forces driving the breadbasket from Kansas to the Dakotas and expanding the market for South Dakota’s abundant wind power? If that is the case, it may take a latter-day John Scopes to shoulder the burden of public ignominy, defend the integrity of science education, and show the South Dakota legislature the error of its ways.

Joshua Rosenau is the Public Information Project Director at the National Center for Science Education.

Human activity generates heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide that are warming the planet and changing the climate. In framing the conversation, Romm summarized an MIT study concluding that on our current emissions path, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide will more than double from pre-industrial levels and the median temperature increase at the Earth’s surface in the 2090s could be 5.2˚C, or nearly 10˚F. “We’re talking about a completely different planet,” he said.

MacCracken emphasized during his panel presentation that our understanding of the fundamental physical science behind climate change is sound and has been for decades. In fact, the idea that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide could warm the planet is more than a century old—the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius explained the concept in 1896. The first official report submitted to a U.S. president on the impact of atmospheric carbon dioxide arrived on Lyndon B. Johnson’s desk in 1965.

Human-generated emissions enhance the natural greenhouse effect and disrupt the planet’s carbon cycle, MacCracken explained. Observations of carbon dioxide levels since the middle of the 20th century show a clear annual oscillation: concentrations of the gas go up and down with the “seasonal breathing” of the biosphere. Part of that cycle is plants absorbing carbon from the air during spring and summer and releasing it during the fall and winter; part of it is ocean absorption. But increasing human emissions mean that the cycle is no longer balanced, and the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere is climbing steadily. “We’ve had a huge subsidy for our carbon,” Field said, because so much of it absorbed by “sinks” on land and in the water.

When sunlight strikes the atmosphere, MacCracken explained, some of its energy is reflected back into space, and some of it passes through, warming the surface of the planet. A small portion of that surface heat radiates back into space again, but greenhouses gases absorb most of it, recirculating the energy back to land and the lower atmosphere. As concentrations of carbon dioxide and other gases increase, more of that heat stays within the atmosphere, leading to a warmer and warmer planet.

Moreover, the warming effects of carbon dioxide in particular are long lasting and the increased concentrations already in the air would continue to warm the Earth for decades to come, even if emissions were immediately reduced to zero. That’s why it is the most important emissions product under consideration by governments around the world.

Surface temperatures and ocean temperatures are rising, MacCracken said, summarizing multiple lines of evidence that confirm the climate is changing now. Sea ice is shrinking, glacier and permafrost are melting, and snow lines are creeping toward mountain peaks. Consequently, sea levels are rising, and increased amounts of evaporated water in the air lead to more intense precipitation where rain falls. And plant and animal species are retreating toward the poles as their original habitats get warmer.

Field reemphasized the importance of focusing on carbon dioxide as the leading cause of these changes because it is intimately linked to human prosperity. “We haven’t figured out how to make people rich without associating that with a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. Historical data indicates that there is a linear relationship between national wealth and carbon emissions. The question, he said, is how to move from an environment where this relationship is strong to one that breaks that link, creating the “opportunity for more economic activity with lower carbon emissions.”

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that the global “warming is unequivocal,” and Field emphasized that analyses cannot look selectively at merely a few years or even a single decade within the climate record to see this trend. It requires a longer view, but multiple independent temperature records confirm the fact that the planet is getting warmer.

In explaining the process that generates these massive reports on climate science, Field said that, “The IPCC is the most ambitious, thorough, and successful assessment of anything that I think has ever been done.” The process is designed to keep errors to a minimum, but he spoke from personal experience in describing the particular frame it creates for presenting information.

Author teams draw scientists from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and from countries all over the world; they then absorb and synthesize a huge amount of information. For the chapter Field worked on for the last IPCC report, two rounds of expert review each produced 250 pages of notes.

Representatives from all of the United Nations countries later approve, line by line, the IPCC summary chapters for policymakers that synthesize the scientific reports. Field described displaying sentences on a board for a room of participants and being unable to proceed before there was total consensus on the characterization of the science. This produces a “very tight boundary” around what appears in the final summaries, and the characterizations of the science are therefore very measured, not extreme.

MacCracken said that some critics of the process have suggested that scientists simply give policymakers the original research and leave the interpretation up to them. He compared the folly of that approach to giving a cancer patient all of the available medical research on his or her condition, expecting them to make a decision independent of a doctor’s advice. The IPCC summaries are the record of a conversation in clear terms, he said, between scientists and government policymakers.

Most recently, the IPCC came under fire for erroneous projections published in a scientific chapter on the rate at which the Himalayan glaciers are melting. The dubious information originated from a piece of “gray literature,” that is, a report that did not come from a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Addressing the use of gray literature in the IPCC process, Field explained the value of this information in understanding the impact and implications of climate change. These sources include insurance company research, unpublished scientific work, observations of impacts in various publications, and industrial and corporate reports. It is hard to imagine how the IPCC could tackle the range of subjects it is tasked with understanding without access to this gray literature, he said.

Video: “The Science of Climate Change” (Download presentations)

Video: Interview with Christopher Field, Ph.D. “Climate Change Is a Clear and Present Danger”

Video: Interview with Michael MacCracken, Ph.D. “How We Know Humans Are Changing the Climate”

(transcript, YouTube, mp4)

For more information, see:

• Event information: The Science of Climate Change
• Video interview: How We Know Humans Are Changing the Climate: Joe Romm Interviews Michael MacCracken

Fortunately, the budget request for fiscal year 2011 that the Obama administration released on Monday includes foundational investments that will help the United States remain the leader among innovative nations. Congressional leaders should support the president’s vision by adopting these investments in their budget later this year.

In keeping with the president’s pledge to freeze domestic discretionary spending, the overall increase in research and development is only a modest 0.2 percent increase over FY2010, but by trimming defense-related research, the budget requests a 5.9 percent boost for non-defense R&D for a total $147.7 billion for federal R&D. This is an important step toward investing 3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in public and private R&D—a goal President Obama laid out in a speech last spring to the National Academy of Sciences.

This also continues the about-face in funding trends begun last year. The Bush administration allowed the federal R&D investment to decline in real dollars after FY2004. Some sectors were hit harder by this neglect than others. Flat funding for the National Institutes of Health from 2004 through 2008 led to a situation in which the purchasing power for the inflation-adjusted budget actually declined 13 percent over the course of those five years. In addition to the two-year, $10 billion boost the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act directed to NIH last year, the president’s budget calls for a $1 billion bump in annual funding, for a total of $32.1 billion.

The budget expands support for R&D over the next fiscal year, but it also continues laying the foundation for sustained advances in science and technology by moving along the path to double the budgets for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the Commerce Department’s National Institutes of Standards and Technology. The Center for American Progress advocated this doubling effort in the 2007 report, “A National Innovation Agenda.”

To that end, the request expands the DOE Office of Science budget by 4.6 percent to a total of $5.1 billion. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy would receive $300 million to fund high-risk, high-return research. ARPA-E funds blue-sky projects in advanced energy technologies, and is modeled on the fabled Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where bold thinkers have the resources to “aim for the fences.” The DOE budget also includes $107 million for the three existing Energy Innovation Hubs, and adds a fourth Hub focused on batteries and energy storage.

Jonathan Sallet, Ed Paisley, and Justin Masterman noted in their Science Progress report, “The Geography of Innovation,” that the hubs will help “spur the development of the innovation clusters that will help solve our national energy challenges, create jobs, and promote widespread economic growth.” Targeted regional innovation support is also a focus of president’s budget for the Economic Development Agency, with $75 million to support innovation clusters that leverage local competitive strengths. The “Geography of Innovation” authors explain wisdom of this place-specific approach, writing that “regions that are bound together by a network of shared advantages create virtuous cycles of innovation that succeed by emphasizing the key strengths of the local businesses, universities and other research and development institutions, and non-profit organizations.”

“One of the changes that I would like to see,” the president told an audience at Georgetown University just a few months into his administration, “is once again seeing our best and our brightest commit themselves to making things—engineers, scientists, innovators.” This budget pours more resources into that goal, with $3.7 billion for science, technology, engineering, and math education. This builds on the administration’s public-private Educate to Innovate partnership that will enhance STEM education in schools across the country.

The NSF budget would also support the next generation of scientists by increasing the number of Graduate Research Fellowships. An 8 percent increase in the requested NSF budget, totaling $7.4 billion, maintains its doubling trajectory.

An 18.3 percent increase over FY2010 in NASA’s R&D portfolio would bring the total to $11 billion. Writing last year in Science Progress, former presidential science adviser Neal Lane and former Director of the NASA Johnson Space Center George Abbey advised reversing a trend of neglect for the agency’s scientific work. They recommended that scientific research, including earth observations, should be a top priority for NASA. This budget embraces the same priorities, reflecting the administration’s commitment to “to deploy a global climate change research and monitoring system.” As well, a 21 percent increase (for total of $2.6 billion) for U.S. Global Change Research Program, which spans 13 agencies, will advance our understanding of global warming and enhance our ability to adapt to a changing climate.

In short, as Science Progress editor-in-chief Jonathan D. Moreno points out today on the main website of the Center for American Progress, “We observed in Science Progress on several occasions that the founders of our country appreciated the new nation’s need for strength in science, oftentimes more than some of their benighted successors in government. That’s why it is encouraging that we have a president and an administration with a vision in the founders’ spirit. Now Congress needs to do its job to ensure that the United States of Science rescues America—and perhaps the assumptions behind the global stability on which we depend—from a decade of financial mismanagement.”

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor for Science Progress.

Timeline: A Brief History of Stem Cell Research
One of our most popular features ever, this interactive timeline marked key moments, beginning the in the 1970s, from the interrelated stories of human embryonic stem cell research and the policy governing that work. The piece collects research featured in the Center for American Progress report, “A Life Sciences Crucible: Stem Cell Research and Innovation Done Responsibly and Ethically.” The Obama administration’s final stem cell policy closely resembled the one recommended in the paper.

Dude, Where’s My War on Science?
By Chris Mooney
Conservatives tried to expose what they claim was a case of science suppression by the Obama administration—and in the process demonstrated how little they know about science in the first place. The attack on EPA’s policy process, Mooney explained, fails peer review.

The George Will Scandal
By Chris Mooney
When The Washington Post ran a column by Will rife with errors on climate science, Mooney asked: If a major media outlet can’t even correct facts about global warming, is it still socially relevant?

What Does This Generation Think it Means to be a “Scientist”?
By Chris Mooney
Many students don’t see a life of academic specialization as the best way to employ their scientific talents. They want to do something more to bring science to the rest of America. Changing definitions could entail a changing relationship between science and society, wrote Mooney.

How the Global Warming Story Changed—Disastrously
By Chris Mooney
Skeptics didn’t need good science to make another attack on climate change research. Their strength has always been in communication tactics anyway, and not scientific exactitude or rigor, wrote Mooney, examining the fallout from the “ClimateGate” scandal. And the U.S. public, never overwhelmingly sure about climate change, has long been susceptible to their smokescreens and misinformation campaigns.

Throwing the Baby Out With the Amniotic Fluid
By Michelle N. Meyer
One important distinction that is not made often or clearly enough by either ethicists or lawyers is that between decisions to procreate and decisions not to procreate. Witness, for instance, the reaction to Nadya OctoMom™ Suleman.

Hold Off On Holdren (Again)
By Chris Mooney
Conservatives found another ludicrous charge to hurl against the president’s science adviser. It was just the latest attempt to distract from actual science policy.

Autonomous Contraception
By Lisa Campo-Engelstein
A recent discovery, wrote Campo-Engelstein, might open the door to an effective male contraceptive drug, a technology that could have been developed decades ago, were it not for social factors that enable women but not men to effectively regulate their fertility outside of sexual activity and without their partner’s participation or knowledge.

Regional Centers of Innovation 101
Regional centers such as Silicon Valley and Boston cultivate technology-based economic development through a dynamic mix of researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, and infrastructure. Drawing lessons from their success can help revitalize the U.S. economy. This feature marked the beginning of our ongoing project developing policies that support innovation clusters around the country.

The restoration of the program is an apt example of the scientific and intelligence communities working together. Not only can the tools for satellite reconnaissance support critical scientific Earth observations, officials recognize that climate change and national security are interrelated policy issues. As Dr. Christopher Tucker argued here at Science Progress, an effective Earth observation strategy is crucial to confronting issues in both arenas:

A comprehensive approach to developing, deploying, and utilizing our eyes in the sky can ensure more effective and efficient use of precious intellectual and financial resources as we struggle to address traditional national security challenges, the array of transnational threats that plague us, as well as the complex, looming menace posed by global climate change. But this will require significant attention paid to national security reform, the governance of Earth science, a fundamental rethinking of the programming and budgeting process, and—not least of all—leadership.

Reviving the Medea program is a low-cost step in the right direction, as it merely re-purposes images already gathered for intelligence purposes. The pictures are degraded before they are released in order to mask the capabilities of the satellites.

“It,” of course, was the year 2009—and for science in the United States and beyond, it featured developments and revelations variously exciting, disturbing, and above all, political.

It was the year of H1N1 flu, an unsettling test run with a less-than-catastrophic pandemic. The response called into question our capability, and our infrastructure, for dealing with the next threat.

It was the year the Large Hadron Collider finally got those protons smashing—despite being interrupted by various maintenance problems and, yes, even by bread dropped by a bird flying above the machine, which led to overheating.

It was the year of great scientific anniversaries—200 years since Darwin’s birth, 150 since his publication of the Origin of Species, and 400 since Galileo raised his telescope to the heavens. Unfortunately, some sought to exploit these occasions. Creationist Ray Comfort distributed thousands of special “editions” of the Origin to college campuses, each featuring his lengthy anti-Darwinian “introduction.” Only then came the words of Darwin himself, almost unreadable due to their tiny font size.

It was a year of complete U-turns in science policy. President Barack Obama reversed George W. Bush’s dramatic restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, and the first 13 new stem cell lines were approved for federally funded research since 2001. Meanwhile, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency moved to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, finding that they do indeed endanger the public.

It was also the year of the first-ever passage, by a 219-212 margin in the U.S. House of Representatives, of a cap-and-trade bill that would cut domestic greenhouse gas emissions—but not the year for any parallel action in the U.S. Senate.

It was the year that everyone seemed to own an iPhone and use the word “app” in regular conversation. It was the year Twitter went from being a mere annoyance to the epitome of web-based communication.

It was a year that saw the very first Nobel laureate scientist assume a cabinet position, in the figure of U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu.

It was the year in popular culture when science ceased to be nerdy and became world-saving cool. The disaster film 2012 epitomized the trend. Despite the plot’s scientific incoherence, the lead character is a scientist who is described in the film as a “deputy geologist” at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

It was the year of new calls for science communication and public engagement: The Year of Science 2009 movement was launched, the second installment of the World Science Festival was held in New York City, and three books came out exhorting scientists to kick off their shoes and speak to real people, including Randy Olson’s Don’t Be Such a Scientist, Cornelia Dean’s Am I Making Myself Clear?, and my own (co-authored) Unscientific America.

It was the year in which scientists captured the first ever images of an exoplanet—a planet orbiting another star far from our own solar system.

It was the year that Russian scientists upped the ante on the increasingly prominent subject of geoengineering. They did so by running a small-scale field trial that blasted sulfate aerosols out of the back a helicopter and then measured their effect on diffusing sunlight at ground level. On a vastly larger scale, such an intervention could cool the planet.

It was the year that several groups across the country celebrated the 50-year anniversary of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture. There was general agreement that those cultures are as divided as ever, if not more so—but also that a newer and more important rift may like not between scientists and humanists, but rather, between scientists and intellectuals on the one hand, and everybody else on the other.

It was the year of the “largest single investment in clean energy in American history” in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The government put $80 billion into clean energy across a range of sectors, ranging from the construction of a smart grid to the weatherization of homes, as a means to jumpstart economic growth and create jobs.

Sadly, and finally, it was the year for the rebirth of what is now a wide-ranging war on science. Some of us may have thought it ended with the previous administration; but we underestimated the momentum that crusaders against the Obama administration, and against climate change action, could gain on this front. With “ClimateGate,” a smear against climate researchers so damaging that it may even have impelled a measurable drop in public trust of environmental researchers, we enter a new stage for political conflicts over science—one in which the gloves are off as never before.

But if that’s a sobering note to end on, we can make a more uplifting new years’ resolution. As the push to defeat global warming continues to eke out small bits of progress (most recently in Copenhagen), it is time to recognize that our scientists need aid and defending—which includes helping them help themselves through better public communication efforts.

The battle to restore scientific integrity isn’t over. It has only begun.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Something big.

There’s just one small problem. Over recent years, as scientists have continued to iterate their climate and economic models—attempting to factor human population changes, economic growth, and national policies into an exceedingly complex and contingent picture of the atmospheric and planetary future—a distressing theme has emerged. It is very possible that warming is now moving so fast that today’s politically viable policies simply can’t avert a serious risk of catastrophic climate impacts occurring, or suffice to keep climate change within a clear “safe zone.” In other words, whatever Copenhagen achieves, it may not be enough. That’s especially the case for low-lying island nations beset by sea level rise, and other developing countries whose calls for climate justice, and the strongest possible precautionary policies, have engendered much sympathy here.

To see the nature of the conundrum, consider the analyses provided by Climate Interactive, a consortium of scientists and modelers who have developed a very useful way of analyzing the science and policy nexus of the climate debate, which can otherwise seem like a confusing quicksand of information. The Climate Interactive model merges scientific projections of how bad global temperatures could be by the year 2100 with the expected impacts of various national and international policies upon those temperatures. As of the most recent analysis, the model presents the following information: On a business-as-usual trajectory, we can expect a cataclysmic 4.8° Celsius of warming by 2100. Meanwhile, the currently confirmed climate policies embraced by nations worldwide—without a Copenhagen agreement—only get us down to around 3.9°C.

So where do the current Copenhagen proposals fit in between these two markers? Well, that’s the real trick. The summit could always surprise us, but as one of the Climate Interactive collaborators, MIT’s John Sterman, recently observed to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, “the negotiations must deliver the high end of current proposals and stretch beyond them, if the world is to have a reasonable chance of containing warming to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, or the 1.5°C goal of many developing nations.”

It’s important to note the truly insidious way in which risk manifests itself in these discussions. Really, we don’t know how bad global warming is going to be in 2100; we only have estimates of the sensitivity of the climate to various carbon dioxide emission levels, surrounded by bars of uncertainty. But fundamentally, the climate system—and especially its potential feedbacks—is incompletely understood. So if all of our projections understate the climate sensitivity, there’s a risk of undershooting even with relatively strong policies, and still failing to reach a safe zone.

This line of thinking necessarily argues for ever-tougher, more precautionary policies—and runs smack into messy political realities. One is that the powerhouse countries at Copenhagen, such as China, India, and the United States, are setting 2°C as the target, and not something stronger, like 1.5°C. Another is that whatever approach heads of states agree upon at Copenhagen, getting the U.S. Congress to support such goals in legislation is something else altogether.

Yet at precisely this time, a growing movement argues that 2° Celsius—which corresponds to roughly 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—simply isn’t “safe.” Famed NASA climate scientist James Hansen and the 350.org movement are pushing the boundaries of the conversation by calling for a return to levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations that we have already passed (we are currently at 390 parts per million), and that correspond to something more like 1.5°C. And in Copenhagen, a bloc of developing nations has also coalesced around this goal, citing the threats of submerged Pacific islands, a scorched Africa, and much else.

Certainly, not all scientists think the situation is as bad as Hansen does, although the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chairman Rajendra Pachauri has also opined in the past that 350 ppm is really the safe level. (Interestingly, Pachauri seemed unwilling to reiterate that view when asked at a press conference here today.) But in the end, picking a scientific winner in such a debate misses the point: The risk of being wrong ought to be too much to be tolerated when the planet itself is at stake. Precaution is really the only thing that makes any sense.

And that’s the anguishing thing about watching the Copenhagen climate negotiations evolve: If you really, really care about planetary risk avoidance, you can’t like the way things are going.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Back in 2006, the year of the release of An Inconvenient Truth, it felt as though serious and irreversible progress had finally been made on the climate issue. The feeling continued in 2007, when Al Gore won the Nobel and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that global warming was “unequivocal” and “very likely” human caused. Mega-companies like General Electric were burnishing new green identities, and the Prius was an icon. The Bush administration was widely suspected of having deceived the public about the urgency of the climate issue, and journalists were backing away from their previous penchant for writing “on the one hand, on the other hand” stories about the increasingly indisputable science.

Then came the election of Barack Obama, boasting a forward-looking policy agenda to address global warming and a stellar team of scientists and environmentalists in his cabinet and circle of advisers, including climate and energy expert John Holdren and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu. The United States, it seemed, would finally deal with global warming—and just in the nick of time.

Who could have known, at the time, that the climate deniers and contrarians had not yet launched their greatest and most devastating attack? Certainly, it was hard to imagine how they might pull off such a strike: They had virtually nothing going for them, no raw scientific materials to work with. All the science pointed to a greater-than-ever urgency of addressing the climate issue and a quickly closing window of opportunity for action. Within scientific circles, it was even becoming commonplace to discuss planetary modification, or geoengineering, as an alternative last ditch solution if we couldn’t stop runaway greenhouse warming in time.

But the skeptics were lying in wait. They didn’t need good science to make another sally: Their strength has always been in communication tactics anyway, and not scientific exactitude or rigor. And the U.S. public, never overwhelmingly sure about climate change, has long been susceptible to their smokescreens and misinformation campaigns.

The new skeptic strategy began with a ploy that initially seemed so foolish, so petty, that it was unworthy of dignifying with a response. The contrarians seized upon the hottest year in some temperature records, 1998—which happens to have been an El Nino year, hence its striking warmth—and began to hammer the message that there had been “no warming in a decade” since then.

It was, in truth, little more than a damn lie with statistics. Those in the science community eventually pointed out that global warming doesn’t mean every successive year will be hotter than the last one—global temperatures be on the rise without a new record being set every year. All climate theory predicts is that we will see a warming trend, and we certainly have. Or as the U.S. EPA recently put it, “Eight of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.” But none of them beat 1998; and so the statistical liars, like George Will of the Washington Post, continued their charade.

The public was quite vulnerable to such messages: Americans don’t know climate science very well, and the notion that temperatures aren’t actually “rising” after all must have spurred many doubts. Indeed, I suspect the “no warming since 1998” line of attack helped contribute to an alarming finding released in October by the Pew Research Center: the proportion of Americans agreeing there is “solid evidence the earth is warming” had declined to 57 percent, from 71 percent a year and a half earlier. And those attributing warming to human activities—the robust scientific consensus view—had dwindled from 47 percent to 36 percent over the same time period.

This blow, however, was nothing compared to the “ClimateGate” saga of November, in which a bevy of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom were illegally obtained and exposed, thus generating a dramatic scandal over the climate scientists’ alleged attempts to silence skeptics and thwart freedom of information requests. The truth is that, analyzed in their proper context, there isn’t very much that’s damning about the emails (though some of the scientists may have some things to answer for). But even taken at their worst, the emails do not change one whit the urgency of addressing global warming.

Scientists have pointed this out repeatedly, but to no avail: “ClimateGate” generated a massive wave of media attention, blending together the skeptics’ longstanding focus on undercutting climate science with a new overwhelming message of scandal and wrongdoing on the part of the climate research establishment. This story was not going to go away, and even as scientists put out statements (most of them several days late) explaining that the science of climate remains unchanged and unaffected by whatever went on at East Anglia, the case for human-caused global warming was dealt a blow the likes of which we have perhaps never before seen.

Whether we will recover some necessary momentum in Copenhagen—a formal United Nations venue for deliberation where scientific expertise is respected, and where misinformation will likely have less power—is up in the air. Nevertheless, there’s an important lesson here, for the climate issue and beyond.

In our mass media age, on any politicized scientific topic, there is no reason to assume a correlation between increasing scientific certainty about a problem and increasing public awareness, acceptance, or willingness to take action to address that problem. If anything, the two might well become anti-correlated, as in the global warming case. And that is because—to speak in a language that scientists will certainly understand all too well—the state of the science is only one variable affecting public opinion. And in the global warming debate, there has been an utter failure to control for any of the others.

If scientists, their allies, and their supporters want to better ensure the translation of scientific knowledge into action than we’ve seen in the global warming case, there is simply no choice but to work much, much harder to influence public opinion, and anticipate and thwart the skeptics before they can bring about another “ClimateGate.”

[Clarification: This post originally indicated that climate contrarians seized upon 1998 as the "hottest year in the global temperature record"; it has been changed to indicate that this is the hottest year in some temperature records.]

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Speaking today with reporters during a press call organized by the Center for American progress, Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, emphasized that despite the uproar, nothing changes about the scientific conclusions on climate change:

From my point of view, the most important issue is whether anything has been added to or subtracted from the scientific picture of global warming that’s emerged gradually over several decades of careful analysis by thousands of experts. The answer is simple. From a scientific point of view, nothing has changed. It remains true that Earth has warmed more than 1 degree Fahrenheit  over last century largely due to the buildup of human-made greenhouse gases…it remains the case that the projections of future climate change are every bit as discouraging as they were before the recent flap began. [Full audio and a transcript of the call are available here.]

Denialist arguments like the one offered in the WSJ are remarkable in that they ignore basic measurable facts about how climate change is altering the planet at this very moment. Global warming is currently melting 18,000 Himalayan glaciers. Wildfires stoked by increased temperatures are burning 7 million acres of the American west every year. Changes in precipitation patterns in the continental United States caused up to $8 billion in agricultural loses last year.

Simply put, we don’t need to wait and see if our planet’s climate will change as a result of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. The change is already happening. As Chris Mooney put it in June, when the United States Global Change Research Program released its updated assessment of the impact of climate change on the country: “We have every reason to expect that these regionally variable changes will steadily worsen, with resulting severe threats to coastal communities, water supplies, agriculture, human health, and more.”

Henninger’s claim that “science is dying” is merely the latest iteration in the continuing conservative war on science, in which naysayers trash the research enterprise without engaging the scientific facts or mounting any credible response to the avalanche of evidence from multiple fields that underpins the work on climate change. As the editors of the journal Nature wrote yesterday:

Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

As for other facts of recent and distant history, Henninger dismisses the significance of 2007 Nobel Prize writing that it “was bestowed (on a politician),” neglecting to mention that the other half of the prize went to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body comprising 2,000 scientists from around the world. He goes on to compare the exchanges in the hacked emails to the Catholic church’s attempt to silence Galileo. Alas, as Mooney points out, the comparison is off-base: “The people who dissented in the history of science, but were overwhelmingly wrong, tend to be forgotten. Galileo dissented and he happened to be overwhelmingly right.” Moreover, like today’s climate change deniers, it was the Catholic church that rejected scientific facts that didn’t fit into its worldview.

The WSJ editorial section would like you to believe that “science is dying,” but the claim proves only one thing: that in the face of climate change science, some conservatives will continue their efforts to ensure the death of reason itself.

And now, the climate change deniers will claim a scalp.

Yesterday, climate researcher Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in the UK—which is responsible for one of three important datasets tracking global temperature trends—announced he would be stepping aside pending an independent review of allegations that have emerged in the scandal variously referred to as “ClimateGate” and the “SwiftHack.” It’s just the latest development in a saga that began when a boatload of CRU emails and documents, obtained through an illegal computer hacking, made their way into the public arena last month. The files were instantly seized upon by climate change skeptics and deniers, who touted them—with a combination of glee and histrionic outrage—as evidence of mainline scientists conspiring to quash legitimate dissent, and to conceal problems with the data and analyses used to demonstrate human-caused global warming.

The truth, however, is that while the CRU emails don’t always look very good—and not all of them can necessarily be defended—in the end this saga amounts to little more than a distraction from the real and burning issues in climate science and climate policy. Moreover, its suspicious timing—coming just weeks before the U.N. Copenhagen climate conference—suggests a strategic attempt to undermine those international deliberations by once again casting doubt on the scientific basis for concern about climate change—a tried, true, and seemingly unending political strategy.

Unfortunately for climate skeptics, the CRU hacking incident fails to support the burden that they have placed upon it. Whatever behavior was revealed in these emails, even its most salacious interpretation can scarcely undermine the global edifice of knowledge about the causes of ongoing climate change—which may be bolstered by, but certainly does not rely solely upon, CRU’s research and analyses. Mainline scientists fully recognize this; thus, following the CRU hacking, the American Meteorological Society reaffirmed its longstanding statement on the human causation of climate change, remarking that “Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true—which is not yet clearly the case—the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.”

In truth, of course, few if any of the CRU emails could legitimately be called scandalous. True, the files show scientists carrying on in a far less guarded fashion than they would in public, and some of them do appear suspicious—but in each individual case, we must also understand the context. Typically, the email-zipping scientists now under massive scrutiny are reacting in the communications to various controversies and scandals in the field—most of which are, in turn, the result of systematic attacks on climate research by conservative think tanks, politicians, and a small group of “skeptic” scientists.

Take, for instance, a rather innocent email from the year 2003 that has been made much hay of, in which climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University opines that “I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” This has been depicted as evidence of some systematic attempt to suppress dissent or manipulate the scientific process, but the conclusion is unwarranted. Mann is referring to an episode in which this little-known journal published a wildly controversial paper on historic temperature trends that was widely attacked and picked apart by mainstream researchers; in the wake of its publication, several editors at the journal actually resigned. No wonder scientists like Mann were upset with Climate Research. That’s especially so given that, despite its flaws, the controversial Soon & Baliunas paper was instantly and inappropriately thrust into political debate at the highest level via a Senate hearing convened by Oklahoma global warming denier James Inhofe, who claimed that the paper “shifts the paradigm” away from the conclusion that global warming is human caused. (Not.)

Or take another email that has been much touted, one in which Phil Jones writes, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The word “trick,” and the phrase “hide the decline,” have been treated as smoking guns by climate skeptics, but once again, the conclusion is unwarranted. As the bloggers at RealClimate.org (including Mann) note, “trick” here is simply a methodological device or innovation, in this case for merging and presenting data. “Hide the decline” might seem more problematic when taken out of context, but what this actually means is the exclusion of one set of climate records (based on tree rings) that do not show warming after 1960, and are known to be problematic for this reason and not considered reliable. Far from being scandalous, then, this is good scientific practice.

Perhaps the most troubling document in the CRU cache is one that shows Phil Jones actively emailing other climate researchers, telling them to “delete any emails” subject to a Freedom of Information request. Jones now claims he didn’t actually delete any; Mann, who received the email in question, says likewise; and CRU itself says that “No record has been deleted, altered, or otherwise dealt with in any fashion with the intent of preventing the disclosure of all, or any part, of the requested information.” It is understandable that climate scientists under such intense and often politically driven scrutiny would bristle at the prospect of having skeptics selectively reanalyze their data with an ax to grind (indeed, such a qualm about selective interpretation is fully borne out by responses to the CRU emails). Still, such an email is troubling, and the inquiry just launched will understandably probe how CRU has responded to a “deluge of Freedom of Information requests.”

But whatever that inquiry shows, this core fact remains: Just because a group of scientists were found to have behaved like imperfect human beings in emails they thought would remain private does not mean that we don’t have to worry about global warming. Anyone arguing otherwise is making a stunning leap based on the most scanty and inappropriate of evidence—and the willingness of climate skeptics to do this has always been, and will remain, the real scandal.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Geoengineering proposals are usually divided into two categories. The first category, solar radiation management, or SRM, is a variety of techniques that decrease the absorption of incoming solar short-wave radiation. This is possible by either increasing the reflectivity of the Earth, an approach called albedo enhancement, or by diverting the incoming solar radiation. The most prominent techniques proposed so far are stratospheric aerosol injections, cloud-albedo enhancement, space-based sunshields, and increasing of the reflectivity of the environment. The second category, carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, aims to reduce the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases by removing them from the atmosphere. The most-discussed methods so far are improvements in land use and afforestation—the process of creating or rebuilding forests—as well as carbon capture from ambient air and ocean fertilization. Some of these methods, for instance reforestation, are already in use although not currently seen as geoengineering. The American Meteorological Society recently added a third category of geoengineering proposals, which includes vertical ocean pipes that increase downward heat transport.

Geoengineering shares with standard climate policies the aim to diminish the risks of climate change. Whereas adaptation activities increase our capacity to cope with the effects of climate change and mitigation measures reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, geoengineering differs from them as it is a deliberate attempt to exercise control over atmospheric phenomena. Geoengineering techniques do not detract all of the serious consequences from increasing GHG emissions and therefore cannot moderate climate change alone without proper mitigation and adaptation strategies. As well, the climate modification proposals do not approach the root of the problem: the ever-growing greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, solar radiation management methods would allow ocean acidification to continue unchecked, and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations would not diminish any way.

Geoengineering proposals can be loosely grouped into “soft” and “hard” proposals, both of which fall into solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal categories. While soft proposals might have less long-term effects, their implementation could be terminated more easily and the uncertainties are minor in comparison with hard proposals. Soft proposals include, for instance, land use management, afforestation, and albedo enhancement by painting some parts of urban areas white. The hard proposals involve termination problems, environmental, legal, and ethical issues, and a vast array of uncertainties and risks with regard to implementation, control, side-effects, and research. Hard proposals include albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulphur injections, space-based mirrors, and large-scale ocean fertilization. A report from the United Kingdom’s Royal Society, Geoengineering the Climate, which was released in September 2009, elicits a whole range of open questions with regard to the subject. For instance, a hard radiation management proposal, stratospheric sulphur injection, would have adverse effects on stratospheric ozone and would have a negative impact on the biological productivity, including food production. In this case, the cure could be at least as bad as the disease.

These are just some of the reasons for being cautious about geoengineering, even in the early phases of research and development. Another point of concern is the risk that the public might have unrealistic expectations about the plan B and consider it an easy technological fix to control climate change. Furthermore, its attractiveness increases the perception that, if there is a technological fix, then there is no need to transform carbon-intensive lifestyles in the affluent countries and elsewhere. Geoengineering can also obtain some support from those who believe that mitigation strategies have largely failed although investments in clean energy production might turn out to be fruitful in the long run.

However, most opinions on geoengineering proposals present mitigation and geoengineering proposals combined. One proposed compromise is to bring together mitigation and geoengineering undertakings in order to buy time with stratospheric sulphur injections.[2] On top of this we must consider the governance of geoengineering implementations since for the time being, there is neither an authority with appropriate global oversight, nor have the fairness issues been thoroughly scrutinized. If these projects actually made the planetary thermostat adjustable, major disagreements could arise. Even if some of the proposals could be implemented unilaterally the effects exceed national borders and require fair international agreements on the common means and targets of geoengineering.

It is inevitable that this plan B would give a rise to numerous controversies that are extremely difficult to solve. Further relevant questions include the reversibility of the methods, compensation, and fairness in the face of environmental, legal, political, ethical, social, economic, and technological consequences. Finally, we must consider national security concerns under geoengineering implementations, and especially the potential for global conflicts without proper international agreements on the appropriate use of geoengineering methods.

The general tone of Royal Society’s report is cautiously positive. Although it recognizes a number of uncertainties, it does not see them entirely as obstacles to carrying out various experiments or conducting a research program. All the geoengineering alternatives we have at hand are risky, particularly the hard proposals. The problem with the soft proposals, more than being unsafe, is that they are insufficient for working our way out of the climate change problem. Our understanding about the climatic system is far from complete, which restrains our ability to predict the outcomes. Even though it is possible to detect signals of climate change the question of planetary control is wholly separate—reading the signs is distinct from dominating them.

Professor Andrew Feenberg, a philosopher of technology, raised this point in his keynote speech at the conference of Society for Philosophy and Technology in July 2009 in the University of Twente, the Netherlands, when he was asked about the feasibility of geoengineering.[3] He replied that although it might be possible to implement some of the proposals and have the desired effects for a while, the side effects are unpredictable because of the incomplete understanding about the climatic system. It would be the height of human hubris to imagine that the immensely complicated systems we don’t fully understand would obey our will. Feenberg’s comment suggests that the bigger the intervention into nature, the more we should worry about our own ignorance. Even if we could buy some time with hard proposals, the side effects could turn out to be even more detrimental than the outcome of runaway climate change. Therefore, the idea of a plan B focused on planetary control through geoengineering might turn out to be nothing but a mistaken notion.

Sanna Joronen, Master of Social Sciences, is a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Turku, Finland. Her thesis focuses on the ethical implications of geoengineering. Dr. Markku Oksanen is currently an academy research fellow, based at the University of Turku. He is also a university lecturer in philosophy at the University of Kuopio, Finland.

Notes

[1] Keith, David. Annual  Review of Energy and the Environment 25(2000): 245-84.

[2] Wigley, Tom. “A Combined Mitigation/Geoengineering Approach to Climate Stabilization.” Science 314(2006): 452-454.

[3] Feenberg, Andrew. “Ten Paradoxes of Technology and the Transhuman Illusion.” Keynote speech at the conference of Society for Philosophy and Technology 9 July, 2009, The University of Twente, the Netherlands.

The young Bernard could little have imagined that his early experiments in cloud seeding were laying the groundwork for a far more ambitious project to affect not just the weather, but to radically reshape the earth’s climate. Earlier this summer scientists and policymakers gathered at a National Academy of Sciences meeting to discuss a suite of options and technical solutions to the climate problem. One of those options was ocean fertilization, a geoengineering technology aimed at grabbing the climate reins from their feckless trajectory and steering atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations back down to historical levels.

There are many compelling scientific arguments both for and against geoengineering via ocean fertilization, which is probably why it was discussed in earnest at the National Academy of Sciences. But even if our best science indicates that ocean fertilization will succeed, there are clear ethical reasons to rule it out, as it can never meet with the scrutiny that most of us take to be emblematic of justified, right action.

The proposal, first advanced in the 1980s by Woods Hole oceanographer John Martin, is to dump several tankers of iron filings into the sea in order to manufacture a mid-ocean algae bloom. Researchers project that such an algae bloom might then suck carbon out of the atmosphere, much like a ShamWow^® sucks soda from the moldy underbelly of your basement carpet. All of this sounds mighty enticing when you consider the unpleasant climatological upheaval that is slowly unfolding and that will fundamentally change the world in which our children live. On the other hand, given the complexity of ocean ecosystems and humanity’s reasonably embarrassing failure rate with ambitious engineering projects—the Panama Canal mosquito eradication project, the Everglades restoration project, the Project Stormfury attempt to weaken tropical cyclones by seeding them with silver iodide, to name just a few such failures—there’s plenty of reason to worry that tinkering with nature in this way may be ill-advised.

Rainmakers like Vonnegut were mere redistributive Robin Hoods, stealing rain from the rich and giving it to the poor. But the latter-day heirs to such research propose no simple redistributive deckchair shuffling. They aim to fix one mess not by straightforwardly cleaning it up, but by introducing another mess. In doing so, they threaten either to sink or to save our ship. Fertilizing the oceans runs a real risk that the citizens of this planet could fall victim to the same fate that eventually nailed the old lady who swallowed a fly: we could get caught up in an endless chain of curatives, repairing one problem only to introduce another. But that’s only if we blow it. If we get the science right, we could break the chain. We might have at our fingertips a relatively cheap way of reversing the atmospheric concentrations of carbon that the past hundred years of industrialized recklessness have left hanging over our heads.

Enticing though this gamble may be, focusing strictly on risk to the oceans and the planet is shortsighted. In a recent paper that I co-authored with my colleague Lisa Dilling, we pointed out that most of the arguments against ocean fertilization only paint half the picture: by focusing so strongly on risk, they underemphasize the extent to which rights and respect are in play. Their shortcomings stem from their openness to the possibility that getting the science right means that the technology is a “go.”

Sure, risk is a major concern with these technologies. We should all be worried about the implications of our actions, about the risks of destroying, or at least dramatically altering, the oceans and the climate. If ocean fertilization will create a scenario in which the oceans become uninhabitable to most fish and wildlife, this is clearly an unacceptable outcome and we ought not to proceed. But the science is unclear on this outcome, and there is strong evidence to suggest that we can fertilize the oceans without making a mess of things.

We argued instead that even if ocean fertilization were to yield a far more palatable outcome—say, perhaps, by producing enough algae to generate a banner fish harvest, thereby not only reversing climate change, but also feeding the world’s hungry—there are still strong ethical reasons not to use it as a method for reducing greenhouse gas pollution.

Consider, for starters, how slippery the term “pollution” is. It depends on your perspective whether it should be considered pollution at all. To most farmers, for instance, increased organic compounds are a gift from the gods, dramatically improving crop growth and foliage. Too many of these compounds however, and uh-oh, the crops die. In one case they’re essential; in the other, they’re a pollutant. The reason for this terminological slipperiness is that pollution is typically framed in terms of harms and benefits, making its categorization entirely contingent upon whether the affected party will be made better or worse off. Carbon dioxide is the same way: essential to plant life, but when enormous concentrations of it invade the atmosphere, it has the undesired effects that we are witnessing now.

Problem is, we don’t really know how welcome these harms and/or benefits will be. One farmer may need more of one compound for some future undisclosed project; another may need less. It is presumptuous and morally suspect to make assumptions about the extent to which those harms and benefits are really what is good or right for them. Moreover, it is flat wrong to assume that just because a particular action may confer overall benefits, that therefore that action is ethically permissible.

Consider: If I wake from knee surgery to a smiling surgeon who enthusiastically informs me that—“While you were asleep, we went ahead and added a pacemaker to your heart, just to be on the safe side”—I might have great reason to feel that I have been wronged, even if the pacemaker is 100 percent safe, and even if I am physically better off. Or consider this: If I return from vacation to learn that my neighbors—college students—have repaired the walls and furniture in my house, perhaps after they and 100 friends of theirs have had a raucous party during which my property was damaged, I may again feel wronged. Perhaps my neighbors have made me better off than I was before, maybe even by making improvements to my property. One would think I’d be grateful for such free labor. But there is a strong sense in which I would feel that they have heaped one wrong on top of another.

What makes an action right is not just whether that action makes the world better, but also whether those affected can agree to having their world made better by others. If my house was trashed due to this party, perhaps there are other remedies that I would like to explore that would be more appropriate for me, my family, and my property. If my neighbors take the initiative to repair my belongings without consulting me, they usurp my control over these possibilities, and in doing so, disrespect me and violate my right to do otherwise. They suddenly bear the responsibility for having changed something in my house that may have been reversible in another, more palatable way.

Just so with many geoengineering technologies: even though ocean fertilization might in fact make the world better, we need to ensure that the people who will be affected by these improvements could all agree to them. If, say, this giant algae bloom generates enough food to spark wonderfully delicious and nutritious new fisheries, that may be very good for the world, insofar as it may yield extraordinary benefits; but there are still strong rights- and respect-related ethical objections to aquaforming our oceans in this way.

What it would take for ocean fertilization to be justified, it seems to me, is that all affected parties, including non-human populations of animals and plants, could or would assent to allowing such a thing. This is a pretty tall order in the case of ocean fertilization, since the number of affected beings, human and non-, just about fills the set of all existing living things. We’re talking about engineering the climate, after all. We’re not just removing rain from one bucket and putting it in another.

It is my view that such a requirement is inordinately steep—so steep as to make such technical fixes ethically impermissible, particularly when there are other options available to us. Far better, for instance, would be to reduce our emissions, to find non-polluting energy sources, and/or to remove carbon and other greenhouse gasses through reversible means, like air capture or other secure sequestration methods. These projects have a much lower threshold of justification. The smaller the scale of a project, the fewer number of affected parties, and therefore, the fewer channels through which the project stands to trample the rights of those affected.

Perhaps you object. Maybe you think that we’ve already altered the climate such that many humans and non-humans will be affected by climate change against their wills. Most of those affected couldn’t or wouldn’t (or at least, didn’t) assent to the current changes that we’re experiencing now. Maybe because of this, we should be less concerned about what future generations can assent to and instead just focus on digging ourselves out of this hole. This is all compelling. But the way in which humans have altered the climate has been willy-nilly. It hasn’t been deliberate. Billions of people have acted independently, according to their own interests, to force the climate away from stability. Anthropogenic climate change is a colossal tragedy of the commons, a major failure of governance. We can’t point the finger at any one individual, or even at any very large group of individuals, and say that they’ve done something impermissible or disrespectful.

By contrast, geoengineering is very deliberate. For us to move forward with a technology that will orchestrate and steer our climate away from this tragedy, to a—fingers crossed—better outcome, is not simply for us to act on our planet, but to react—to react to the negative impacts of an uncoordinated and chaotic multitude. It is to accept the tragic transformation of the climate and to patch it over with a collective curative. It is to inject climate change with our collective culpability. Whatever happens after that point, after we have dramatically altered the flora, fauna, and chemical composition of our oceans, we will collectively be to blame.

If we move forward with projects to geoengineer the climate away from the mistakes of our predecessors, then the engineers of such a mammoth project will have to accept responsibility for the outcome. They (we) as a collective will be to blame. They (we) as a collective will have to own up to it. They (we) as a collective will really have to apologize to our children if we trash the earth for good. I think that’s unacceptable. We need to do something about climate change, yes; but we need to do something that only reverses what we’ve done, not that puts us on an uncharted climate path, forever lashing our collective responsibility to a policy that cannot possibly meet with the agreement, hypothetical or actual, of the billions that it will affect.

Benjamin Hale is assistant professor of philosophy and environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, resident faculty at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, and affiliated faculty at the Center for Values and Social Policy.

Energy companies, food suppliers, and numerous other industries expend substantial sums of money each year attempting to ascertain how climate change might affect their financial stability and profitability. Many insurance companies, for example, now utilize forward-looking catastrophic risk models to assess areas of vulnerability and estimate potential liabilities resulting from individual extreme weather events and long-term environmental change. The information yielded helps to shape an insurer’s decision regarding whether or not, and to what extent, it will provide coverage for a particular region. All of this data can provide a clear picture of corporations that are preparing to adapt in the face of climate change and those that are not. Consequently, there is an opportunity to develop carefully tailored disclosure requirements that protect sensitive data but provide enough information for investors to make informed decisions about where to put their money while simultaneously encouraging businesses to address climate change using the best resources available.

Although the accuracy of data regarding the effects of climate change continues to improve, we have not reached the point of being able to predict exactly when and where a cataclysmic event will occur. Nor can we fully assess the financial implications of climate change with complete accuracy. Nevertheless, this uncertainty should not preclude the government and private sector from taking a responsible approach to mitigating the potential effects of climate change. The devotion of substantial financial resources to fund internal research analyzing how climate change affects a company’s operations is clear evidence that many businesses and industries are particularly concerned about the magnitude of its consequences. Investors, who are also devoting significant financial resources to the company, should also be privy to such material information in order to make an adequately informed decision where to invest.

If a company is not analyzing future impacts of climate change and taking proper steps to mitigate potential loss, an investor may think twice before investing or choose to invest elsewhere. Similarly, consumers who do not want to conduct business with companies that are not environmentally responsible should have the opportunity to make an informed choice as well. By requiring transparency, those companies that have failed to adjust their behavior to reflect climate change will also have a greater incentive to develop a more responsible approach that minimizes risk while encouraging investment.

Certainly, companies should not be required to reveal trade secrets, proprietary information, or other sensitive data. Insurers should not be required to provide the public—and in turn, competitors—with the data provided by catastrophic risk models. To do so would undoubtedly generate a free rider problem, inhibit competition, and discourage companies from investing in this type of technological research. However, requiring a company to state whether it uses such risk models or provide general information about how the business is adapting to climate change tells investors and the public that the company is addressing climate change concerns and working to manage risk. Not only will this disclosure be an excellent marketing tool for environmentally responsible businesses, but it will also encourage them to continue to analyze and proactively adapt to the effects of climate change on their operations.

Environmental groups, investors, and consumer groups have been at the forefront of increased efforts to require public disclosure regarding the role climate change is playing in company operations. During the 2008 proxy season, a record number of climate-related shareholder resolutions were filed, most of them demanding information about how publicly traded companies are affected by climate change and how they are responding. Nearly half of the proposals were later withdrawn after the companies agreed to devote increased attention toward addressing climate change issues. Meanwhile, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, an organization composed of state insurance regulators whose duty is to protect the interests of insurance consumers, recently approved the creation of a Climate Risk Disclosure Survey designed to increase the information provided by insurers associated with financial risks of climate change. If adopted by the states as expected, the eight-question survey will require insurers with annual premiums exceeding $500 million to annually disclose information such as anticipated climate change-related risks, mitigation plans, whether the company utilizes computer modeling, and the impacts of climate change on the company’s investment portfolio. The survey is the first industry-wide climate risk disclosure requirement of its kind and has the potential to be used as a model for federal disclosure regulations.

State and local governments have begun to act as well. In 2007, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo subpoenaed five energy companies in the state, seeking to determine whether investors were adequately informed of potential liabilities resulting from increased carbon emissions associated with the building of five coal-fired power plants. In an agreement with Cuomo in August of 2008, Xcel Energy became the first energy company to enter into an enforceable agreement to publicly disclose financial liabilities resulting from climate change. More states are expected to follow New York’s lead and expand their inquiries into other industries as well.

Even though prior legislative efforts at mandatory disclosure have been unsuccessful at the federal level, the current environment appears ripe for the issue to be readdressed. The recent White House report re-emphasizes the seriousness of climate change; Congress and the SEC are under pressure to increase their regulatory oversight; and the public is demanding greater corporate responsibility. Proper disclosure can inform investors, boost the image of responsible corporations, and incentivize action for companies that have not properly addressed climate change.

Kevin Weigand is a third-year student at William and Mary School of Law and the Managing Editor of the Environmental Law and Policy Review. This column draws on his article, “Climate Change Disclosure: Ensuring the Viability of the Insurance Industry While Protecting the Investor,” which will be published in Volume 34 of ELPR in early 2010.

Since many drainage systems and water treatment facilities are outdated in the Northeast, research suggests that New York, Chicago, Washington, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia are likely to be at a greater risk of water-borne diseases. Increased downpours that result from shifting weather patterns may also trigger contaminating sewage overflows in these cities, the USGCRP reports.

A World Bank report on climate change in Europe and Central Asia likewise forecasts greater risks of water contamination due to weak infrastructure in the former Soviet Bloc. If changing weather patterns increase flooding as forecasted, old toxic waste dumps may release dangerous substances into the water supply. As well, the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s most recent report projects that Middle Eastern coastal aquifers will be similarly overwhelmed and contaminated with salt water as sea levels rise around Lebanon. Increased flooding in the Pacific Islands, including Hawaii, may also foster water pollution and endanger drinking water quality, the USGCRP says.

The saga began on June 26, when CBSNews.com’s Declan McCullagh—the journalist responsible for launching the infamous Al Gore/Internet story—breathily reported that the Obama administration Environmental Protection Agency “may have suppressed” a scientific report skeptical of human-caused global warming. Based on internal emails provided by the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, McCullagh’s story highlighted the work of a longtime EPA employee named Alan Carlin, an economist at the agency’s National Center for Environmental Economics. Carlin, it turned out, had prepared a 98 page report questioning the mainstream scientific understanding of climate change on multiple fronts. The scandal, McCullagh suggested, was that Carlin’s dissent was not adequately considered in the process leading up to the agency’s recent proposed endangerment finding on greenhouse gases.

Conservatives pounced on the “news”—here was an apparent science whistleblower story that closely paralleled many alleged Bush era scandals. “Are we witnessing the Democrat war on science?” asked Ben Domenech at the New Ledger. The leading global warming skeptic blog, Watts Up With That, soon posted the “censored” internal EPA document, claiming it had been obtained “courtesy of our verified contact at the EPA, who shall remain anonymous”—real cloak and dagger stuff. And Senator James Inhofe (R) of Oklahoma, who has long been the leading congressional enemy of accurate science on climate change, promptly called for a “criminal investigation” into EPA’s malfeasance—on Fox News, of course.

In their zeal to find a “war on science” episode to claim as their own, however, these conservatives forgot one essential matter: substance. If the claims about climate science in Carlin’s report—co-authored with another EPA employee from the same office, John Davidson—aren’t plausible; if leading climate scientists do not accept them; if they lack all credibility; then where there’s smoke there’s no fire. For not only would the EPA be correct to reject Carlin’s claims on substantive grounds, but indeed, as an expert scientific agency it would be bound by its mandate to do so.

Here’s where conservatives’ claims absolutely falls apart. Carlin is, as has constantly been pointed out in the aftermath of McCullagh’s article, an economics expert, not a climate scientist. And as climate scientists have considered his claims, they have withered.

Climate researcher Gavin Schmidt of NASA, for example, has written a very devastating analysis of the claims made in Carlin’s paper, calling it “a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at.” For instance, much like Washington Post columnist George Will notoriously did earlier this year, Carlin’s report claims the globe is in a cooling trend. This is an egregious misreading of the last 10 or so years of global temperatures, and is based quite literally on a trick: If you begin with the hottest year on record—1998—then of course it looks like we’ve been cooling since then.

The Carlin report also contains numerous other climate science canards, including suggestions that the temperature trends we’ve seen are better understood as a result of solar variability than of human activity—a claim that flies in the face, as Gavin Schmidt puts it, of mountains of peer-reviewed research undertaken to detect climate change and attribute its causes. On a scientific level, this just won’t cut it.

Alan Carlin is simply not James Hansen, arguably the most famous of many scientists who claimed to have had their work suppressed or in some way interfered with during the Bush administration. You will recall that the Bush administration had taken a stance critical of mainstream climate science; Hansen felt compelled to defend it; and then NASA underlings interfered with his access to the media. That’s a vastly different story from the present one: The Obama administration has taken a stance aligned with mainstream climate science; Carlin is criticizing it; and his scientific claims are not standing up very well. Of course the Environmental Protection Agency can’t use them to help make policy. According to the EPA, Carlin’s claims were, in fact, considered—and rejected.

All of which is not to discount the possibility that a real science scandal could emerge under the Obama administration. I rather doubt it will happen on global warming, but surely there could be a scientific issue where a dissenter within the administration advances scientific claims with quite a great deal of merit to them, only to find these claims disregarded or, worse, interfered with in some way. If that happens, I and many others will criticize the administration for it. But first there will have to be some scientific substance to the whistleblower’s case; the claims should be, at minimum, seriously arguable based on the latest and best science. That’s something conservatives have flagrantly failed to understand in the present instance.

It’s precisely that disregard for scientific substance, of course, which explains why they could perpetrate a “war on science” in the first place.

Finally, it’s worth adding that even if they were documented to have occurred, one or a few instances of real scientific suppression by the Obama administration would still not render this administration somehow equivalent to the last in its nefariousness. The core point about the Bush administration is that abuses of science were systematic and legion in number, as documented by myself, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and many others. And this overwhelming assault on science was unprecedented in modern American politics. Thus far the Obama administration has done nothing remotely comparable.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Heat Waves

Heat waves will become more frequent and intense in both the lower and higher emissions scenarios described by the USGCRP report. In fact, by the end of the century, the average U.S. temperature will increase by between 4 and 11ºF, depending on emissions. Heat waves similar to the 1995 Chicago heat wave that claimed over 700 lives are estimated to occur every other year in Chicago by 2100 in a lower emissions scenario and as many as three times a year in a higher emissions scenario. As a result, annual heat-related deaths in Chicago are expected to increase from about 175 deaths in 1980 to over 400 by 2090 in a lower emission scenario. In the higher emissions scenario, heat-related deaths are projected to reach 1,200. By the 2090s, annual heat-related deaths in Los Angeles may increase by two to seven times the baseline of 165 deaths observed in the 1990s. The report also predicts that the Southeast will suffer more heat-related illness and death in summer months.

Declines in Human Health

Climate change threatens public health. Insects that carry diseases, such as ticks and mosquitoes, will survive winters and produce larger populations, the report warns. In addition to insect vector diseases like West Nile virus, water-borne diseases will become more prevalent as pathogens thrive in warmer Midwestern climates. More frequent heavy downpours that overwhelm drainage systems are expected to increase the risk of water-borne disease in the Northeast. The report also forecasts more shellfish-borne disease outbreaks in the Southeast since coastal water temperatures will rise significantly in both emissions scenarios.

Costs for Coastal Economies

Fisheries that contribute to the economies of coastal regions will be jeopardized if emissions are not reduced. The report predicts smaller harvests of marine species in Alaska due to changes in ice edge extent and location. As a result, commercial fisheries are expected to be farther from existing fishing ports, requiring relocation or greater investment in transportation time and fuel costs. The current overfishing problem in Hawaii and other U.S. islands in the Pacific Ocean is expected to intensify because of an accelerated decline in live corals that sustain fisheries. Fish populations in the continental United States will also suffer from climate change. Since rising water temperatures influence the time and location of spawning, the growth and survival of North Atlantic cod and wild trout will decline, the report projects. Salmon populations in the Northwest are predicted to fall below their already historically low population levels as winter rain replaces snow, clearing streambeds of incubating eggs and damaging spawning nests. A forecasted decline in dissolved oxygen in aquatic habitats will also damage ecosystem diversity in the Southeast.

There’s no doubt that a historic decision is coming this year on climate change, and this is the biggest marker yet along the way. Either the United States will tackle global warming for the first time in 2009—or it may fail for the last time when it really mattered.

As is to be expected, then, the rhetoric is flying. Consider this unforgettable bit from the “junk science” denouncer Steven Milloy:

The House of Representatives will vote Friday on the so-called “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” — a.k.a the “Waxman-Markey” global warming bill. But whatever you want to call this legislative atrocity, if enacted into law, it will go down in history as the death knell of the American standard of living and way of life. If you hate America, this bill is for you.

As these lines suggest, the right wing line of attack on climate legislation has always been economic in nature. Yet just as with House Minority leader John Boehner’s (R-OH) egregious exaggerations of the bill’s likely cost, the most rigorous economic analyses don’t support anything Milloy says.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s study of Waxman-Markey, which would set a price on carbon dioxide emissions and ratchet acceptable levels down over time, found that costs per household would be on the order of $80 to $111 per year. The Congressional Budget Office comes up with a slightly higher estimate, $175 per year by 2020, but also notes that this number breaks in favor of the less wealthy: The lowest income households would actually see a benefit of $40 in reduced energy expenses while the wealthiest would see an increased cost of $245. Phrased differently, the CBO’s estimate is that the bill’s cost would be just 0.2 percent of after-tax income. The number is kept low by provisions that would return much of the revenue generated by the new law to consumers to help them offset energy price increases.

For the past month or more since it left Rep. Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) Energy and Commerce Committee, the battle over the bill wonks are calling the “ACES” has focused either on such economic issues, or on legislative horse-trading. For instance, the legislation saw some tangible weakening as a result of concessions made to Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), who had pledged to oppose the law and bring a number of rural lawmakers along unless it was made more favorable to agricultural interests. A deal with Peterson on the environmental consequences of biofuels triggered much denunciation from environmentalists, but also unleashed the bill for this first full House vote.

The Peterson-induced weakening—along with a sense that the bill wasn’t tough enough on coal to begin with—has led some green groups, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, to take a critical stance on Waxman-Markey. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the bulk of the environmental community still supports the legislation’s passage. And for those who get sick to the stomach each time they see another compromise thrown into a bill that already isn’t absolutely ideal, here’s the thing: It could still get worse.

First there will be a flurry of attempted amendments in the House. And due to filibuster politics, the Senate will surely be far tougher place for this legislation. So if you don’t like what you see now, you’ll probably like it even less as time passes.

Yet there’s no question that all the most important pieces are in this bill: A price will, at long last, be set on carbon. Emissions will be ratcheted down over 80 percent by 2050. And the bill contains important requirements and incentives to promote a transition to renewable energy, including a national mandate that electricity suppliers obtain 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020.

Anyone who has paid very close attention to the climate issue, and contemplated what it would really take to solve it, recognizes that we’re dealing with perhaps most tangled scientific and economic hairball imaginable. With the global scope of the problem, the uncertainty inherent in any prediction of the rate and intensity of future global warming, and the magnitude of the economic and energy changes required to bring about real change—well, it remains an open question whether governments of the world are even capable of dealing with something so vast and difficult. And of course any solutions will also have an aspect of the hairball about them.

But that doesn’t mean that if and when we get them, they won’t be stunning achievements.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

A number of reports have identified the Colorado River basin as one of the areas most vulnerable to climate change, second only perhaps to Alaska, with its receding coastlines. The basin remains in a multi-year drought that began in 1999 and is only likely to become hotter and more arid as the impacts of climate change take hold. Already, the river’s two main reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are only 45 and 50 percent full, respectively. Unless current levels of consumption change soon, there is a 50 percent chance that their water levels could drop below the outlet pipes that as early as 15 years from now—effectively rendering the reservoirs dry.

But the convergence of unsustainable consumption and climate change just might push the water situation in western states around the proverbial bend. And a look at research from recent years underscores the stern warning in the U.S. Global Change Research Program report released by the Obama administration last week that, “Climate change has already altered, and will continue to alter, the water cycle, affecting where, when, and how much water is available for all uses.”

According to a 2007 report by the National Research Council, the basin has grown hotter than any other region in the country over the last three decades. Recent global climate model estimates now project temperature increases of 2 to 4°C by mid-century. The warming has cut into the river’s main input, the snow that falls in the mountains of Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado during the winter and is naturally stored in the form of snowpacks. Reports of below-average snowpack sizes have become more and more common over the last decade, with 2006 marking the advent of record or near-record lows in New Mexico, southern Colorado, and Arizona. Over 90 percent of reporting stations in Arizona were snow-free on January 1—easily the highest figure in the past 40 years. The basin’s snow has also begun to melt earlier in the spring, depriving users, particularly farmers, of the water when they need it most.

In a study detailed last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Tim P. Barnett and David W. Pierce of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, predicted that climate change could eventually reduce the flow of the river by 10 to 30 percent. Such a significant reduction would result in scheduled water deliveries that go missing 60 to 90 percent of the time by mid-century, potentially creating shortfalls that reach upwards of 1 billion cubic meters per year. That’s about four times the residential water use of the citizens of Denver in 2006.

Though the numbers seem large, Barnett and Pierce believe these delivery shortfalls can mostly be managed through conservation, reuse, transfers, and other measures. Population growth and natural climate variability could complicate these efforts, however, and they caution that the water budget model used by the United States Bureau of Reclamation to plan future deliveries could, by overestimating current river flows, give planners a false sense of complacency.

While the scientists have spoken clearly, it remains to be seen whether western policymakers will react in time and make the crucial reforms needed to avert disaster. Many of the thorniest issues—how to divide water use between municipal and agricultural users, for instance, or how to balance environmental concerns with industry needs—are unresolved, and current initiatives seem either too timid or too risky to succeed.

In California, proponents of desalination are aggressively pushing the process as a potential solution to the state’s worsening water deficits, with plans already in place to build up to 20 new plants. The proposed facilities have encountered stiff resistance from a range of environmental groups, which have assailed them as being too expensive, energy-inefficient, and dangerous to marine life. More cost-effective and practical measures, such as water reuse, water protection and conservation, should take precedence, they argue.

California’s dilapidated water delivery system recently received a $260 million boost from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as part of the federal stimulus package. The money will primarily be used to build a screened pumping plant, which will protect fish at a dam located on the Sacramento River and increase the amount of water it can dispense to about 150,000 acres of farmland, and to provide relief for the drought-wracked Central Valley.

Several cities have also been experimenting with water rationing and modified water pricing schedules. Los Angeles, which is entering its third year of drought, has just increased prices in an effort to coax residents into reducing their consumption by 15 percent. The city’s Department of Water and Power will also offer residents who replace their grass lawns with drought-resistant plants, mulch, or water-permeable hardscapes a small cash incentive: $1 per square foot. San Diego, for its part, will only allow its residents to water their lawns three days a week and only for ten minutes at a time.

Though promising, especially if planners can implement them on a larger scale, these measures will likely lack the oomph necessary to make a significant dent in the West’s water crisis. More promising is a major water protection initiative for the Colorado River recently proposed by Lake Havasu City Mayor Mark Nexsen at a House Natural Resources Subcommittee hearing. Nexsen called for a comprehensive, coordinated approach to water quality management that would bring together the relevant local and federal agencies that oversee the Lower Colorado River to tackle the threats posed by invasive species, nonpoint source pollution, pharmaceuticals, and wastewater discharge. With appropriate funding, the program would improve the Lower Colorado River’s ecology and increasing the amount of water available to be used.

Other proposed measures could involve the transfer of water between wet areas and dry ones. A study published last month in the Journal of Climate found that, while many of the nation’s rivers would see greatly reduced flows in the coming decades, some, particularly in the Midwest, would see increased flows, thanks to greater precipitation.

Ultimately, we will simply have to make do with less water. As we’re learning to manage our carbon footprints, we will also have to learn how to manage our water footprints, by consuming less and more intelligently.

Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is a contributing writer for Discover, Popular Mechanics, and DeSmogBlog.

Rising temperatures “will interact with many social and environmental stresses” the report says. In fact, temperature increases already inflict water challenges on the United States, especially in the West and Southwest regions. More frequent droughts, floods, and water quality problems limit the country’s water supply and distress the agriculture sector. The report predicts that “large reductions in spring precipitation” in the Southwest will increase competition for water supplies since the region is at the forefront of the nation’s population growth. In addition, Sarah Bates describes in her column this week how “climate change knits energy and water policy together” as western rivers and reservoirs diminish and various power generation methods consume considerable amounts of water.

Decreased precipitation is imminent in the Southwest whether the United States has low or high emissions, the report projects, but a higher emissions scenario will subject parts of the country to up to 40 percent reductions in precipitation in 2080-2099 compared to the period from 1961-1979. Damage to crop yields and quality are expected to increase along with droughts, according to CAP Senior Fellow Tom Kenworthy, who explains the daunting future climate change poses for American farmers. Moreover, worldwide productivity losses attributed to climate change cost farmers $4.8 billion in 2002 alone.

Furthermore, heavy downpours and floods accompany less frequent precipitation. Intense rains “delay spring planting while flooding fields during the growing season,” Kenworthy writes. In the spring of 2008, such downpours caused agricultural losses of up to $8 billion. These losses trended upward by 27 percent in the Midwest over the last 50 years, according to the new USGCRP report.

It is clear the agriculture industry is at risk for great losses if we don’t address climate change immediately, but Chris Mooney points out that the report’s release demonstrates that farmers have an ally in the current administration, which supports reducing emissions and moving the country to a clean energy economy: “This latest study tells us a lot about climate science—but the bigger story is that we have a government that’s finally managing that science on behalf of its citizens.“

The years in between were squandered on scientific suppression, misinformation, presidential disdain, and illegal behavior by the Bush administration, which failed to produce a subsequent study as required by law. You can learn more about the full sordid tale here, but in brief, it goes something like this:

Having inherited the Clinton-era report (the so-called “National Assessment”), the Bush administration promptly went about undermining and censoring it, refusing even to reference or cite it in government documents or deliberations. And rather than produce a new and updated study when the time came—they are required every four years under the 1990 U.S. Global Change Research Act—the last administration instead sought to run out the clock. Instead of producing a single, nationally relevant, and publicly oriented study, it began a series of 21 planned “synthesis reports,” treating various aspects of the vast climate problem in technocratic isolation.

The Obama administration’s approach couldn’t be more different. It has rolled out its new report with a full press conference and much fanfare. And rather than releasing a staccato of wonk documents, it has produced a single study in plain language that pulls all the information together and strives to make it relevant to individual communities of the United States and to specific economic sectors—perhaps most notably, transportation and energy.

For those familiar with climate science, the latest findings aren’t much of a shock: Since global warming is already happening everywhere, it is of course already afflicting the United States.  We’re seeing rising seas, glacial retreats, more incidents of extreme precipitation, and much else. We have every reason to expect that these regionally variable changes will steadily worsen, with resulting severe threats to coastal communities, water supplies, agriculture, human health, and more.

Yet we can still control how bad it gets, and how we respond. That’s a key message of the Obama report: Cutting emissions now will surely ease the changes we see later. This, in turn, means that so-called “mitigation” and “adaptation” measures shouldn’t be thought of as contradictory; rather, they’re complementary. The new Obama climate report suggests both that strong action can save us from the worst outcomes, but also that we have to prepare for changes already upon us—changes that can no longer be avoided.

The Obama study’s greatest significance is, inevitably, political. We now have, for the very first time when it actually mattered, a government that is putting its full weight, scientific and otherwise, behind the quest to achieve climate action. And just as the Bush administration ran from dealing with the problem and tried to obscure it, this administration can use its considerable resources to pull global warming down from the atmosphere and into our backyards, communities, and local economies.

For unlike a report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a regionally specific U.S. climate change impacts study like the one just released isn’t just about the science. It’s about whether the family business will still be viable thirty years from now, and whether the family home will have to be relocated. For this reason, it has the potential to reach and motivate the American public around climate change in an unprecedented way.

Expect, then, that the new Obama report will be cited constantly as deliberations continue on the Waxman-Markey climate bill. Expect senators and members of Congress to draw on the report to highlight specific consequences of climate change in their states, and perhaps even to relate personal stories from their constituents, highlighting the future they’re facing and how they’re beginning to grapple with it.

This latest study tells us a lot about climate science—but the bigger story is that we have a government that’s finally managing that science on behalf of its citizens.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Consider a couple of high-profile western water conflicts in which the Bureau is entangled:

• The Bureau of Reclamation serves as the water manager for the Colorado River Basin, which has the improbable capacity to store four times the river’s annual flow in Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and other storage facilities. Drought conditions over the past decade have dropped the two main reservoirs to about 50 percent of capacity, with annual river flows averaging about 66 percent of the normal levels, and recent studies project that such shortages will become the normal conditions as a result of climate change. Water scarcity combined with population growth have stressed the entire water delivery system and required the federal government to mediate shortage-sharing agreements among seven basin states (Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming). Water providers in Southern Nevada are in the process of building additional, deeper intake pipes to draw water from the shrinking Lake Mead.
• California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where the Bureau operates the enormous Central Valley Project to move water from the wet north part of the state to southern residents, has suffered catastrophic declines of native fish. Combined with low snowmelt in recent winters and accelerating demands for water exports, Delta water supplies have proven inadequate to meet all economic and environmental demands. In a report released earlier this year, an independent review panel concluded that federal water managers have consistently favored farmers over the needs of salmon in failing to implement the Central Valley Project Improvement Act of 1992, a law intended to overhaul the state’s water delivery system and improve the environment. The panel concluded that the Bureau has failed to embrace its mandate for water management (including recovery of anadromous fish) “with equal zeal to its core mission of water supply.” A Biological Opinion issued this month declared that water operations must be dramatically altered to protect the imperiled fish and the Delta ecosystem from imminent collapse.

The Bureau of Reclamation is one of the key water management agencies in the United States, created in 1902 to complete the vision of Manifest Destiny through water storage and delivery projects in the arid 17 states of the western United States. In the past century, the agency constructed more than 600 dams and reservoirs, including the iconic Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, as well as 58 hydroelectric powerplants associated with these projects. The Bureau is the largest wholesaler of water in the country and the second largest provider of hydroelectric power.

After decades focused on moving earth and pouring concrete, the ground shifted under the Bureau of Reclamation in the late 20^th Century. Mounting environmental concerns brought down some projects, while others foundered on more rigorous cost-benefit analyses. By the mid-1980s, the Bureau announced its new mission as a “water management agency” rather than the nation’s dam-builder.

As I described in a previous Science Progress column, former Bureau of Reclamation Area Manager (and Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Water and Science) Elizabeth Rieke said this about the changing mandate for federal water projects: “We can build them, operate them, modify them, re-operate them, we can make them safe and secure, and we can take them down.” Indeed, the Bureau has most recently spent a great deal of time studying and implementing dam removal and reoperation practices, reflecting broad public concerns for living rivers reflected in federal legal mandates such as the Endangered Species Act and associated litigation.

Into this imbroglio steps Michael Connor, who most recently served as Counsel for the U.S. Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee. In that position, he negotiated legislation to finalize Native American water settlements, provide incentives for energy and water efficiency, and support research into climate change impacts on water resources.

At his first public speech after being sworn in as Commissioner, Connor told an audience at the annual Natural Resources Law Center conference in Boulder, Colorado that the agency must take a lead role in climate adaptation, facing up to the dramatic challenges of reduced snowpack, earlier runoffs, and increased evaporation in a system largely dependent on large dams and reservoirs in arid western landscapes.

“Our water supply is going to be changing. The way that water comes to us is going to be changing. That’s absolutely one of the key challenges that we need to be preparing for,” Connor state, in a quote published in the Durango (Colo.) Herald on June 5, 2009.

Prior to his confirmation, Connor participated in a discussion of the interaction between federal policy and western water management, convened by the Carpe Diem Project in March, 2009. He emphasized the need to integrate energy and water, citing several efforts with which he was involved in the Senate. Connor repeated this theme in his Boulder speech, noting the enormous amount of energy consumed by pumping, moving, and treating water and the large water consumption of many electrical energy production practices. This relationship between water and energy use-nearly invisible to both policy makers and the public for decades of development-has finally started to receive the attention it deserves, thanks to recent publications by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Western Resource Advocates.

It would be a laughable understatement to say that Commissioner Connor has his work cut out for him. A friend responded to my initial summary of Connor’s Boulder speech with the observation that, “I would be puckered in that position.” Connor’s reputation as a calm but persistent problem-solver, his experience with complex federal water disputes, and his ever-present sense of humor will serve him well as he assumes the reins of an agency beset by the sorts of “wicked” problems that call for solutions shaped around uncertain future conditions and require cooperation of parties bearing scars of historical battles.

Sarah Bates, Senior Fellow at the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy at the University of Montana, previously served as Deputy Director for Policy and Outreach at Western Progress. Bates has written extensively on western water law and policy, and serves on the project team of the Carpe Diem Project on western water and climate change.

Here’s a look at some of the latest research on health impacts around the world plotted on the Science Progress interactive Human Toll of Climate Change map:

Scientific American’s review of the top ten places already affected by climate change reported that Europe’s first tropical disease epidemic in August 2007 resulted from climate change. More than 100 of 2,000 residents of a small village in Italy contracted a disease related to dengue fever because an abnormally mild winter allowed the Asian tiger mosquito, the disease vector, to breed early in India. A resident of the village visited India and introduced the disease to Italy.

The Centers for Disease Control discovered that a change to warmer, wetter weeks in the United States increased West Nile infections by up to 83 percent from 2001 to 2005. CDC scientists warn that increased rates of West Nile around the globe will lead to a significant number climate-change related dealths.

A study published in the journal Science found that there is a 90 percent chance that 3 billion people will be forced to choose between starving and moving to milder climates within 100 years because of climate change.

In a study released earlier this year, a Penn State entomologist emphasized that daily temperature fluctuations-not just changes in average monthly or annual temperatures-may alter malaria patterns. Whether the temperature fluctuations cause the incidence of malaria to increase or decrease depends largely on a region’s background conditions. Mosquitoes may fail to develop the malaria parasite before they die, or the parasite may develop faster, the study reports.

Image: AP/Lisa Poole