There were at least four major protests this weekend targeting fracking, nuclear power, pollution, and mountaintop-removal mining. Here’s a quiz: How many of these protests did you know about?

There was Saturday’s banjo-festooned fracking protest in Washington, D.C. It was called “Stop the Frack Attack,” and it called on politicians to stop the frack attack. Some estimates suggest that 5,000 people participated in the action; UPI asked a pro-fracking guy how many were there and he said that he heard 1,500 from a cop, so UPI went with 1,500.

Anti-fracking protestors march in Washington, D.C. (Photo by TXsharon.)

There were also protests in Japan and China. Earlier this month, some 100,000 people rallied in Tokyo to try and prevent a nuclear generator from being turned back on. Over the weekend, tens of thousands more marched outside of Parliament with the same aim: calling on the prime minister to halt the use of nuclear power. (There were no reports of banjos.)

Police, in blue, clash with protestors in Qidong. (Photo via TeaLeafNation.)

In Qidong, China, a huge protest halted plans to run a wastewater pipeline from a paper plant into the ocean.

The pipeline that residents fear will pollute their water will not be built, the government promised on the Qidong police micro-blog and the website of Nantong city, which oversees Qidong.

This apparent victory for residents follows another one this month when protesters in the southwest city of Shifang, in Sichuan province, forced officials to scrap a planned copper refinery. A large demonstration halted a petrochemicals plant in Dalian, in eastern China, last year.

Environmental experts cheer the growing rights awareness among China’s citizens that forced the Qidong decision, but they caution that China will face many more such protests unless the government overhauls its opaque decision-making process and allows the public to participate.

Thousands of people overturned cars and stormed city hall to demonstrate their opposition. (There are more pictures here.) A massive police presence eventually restored order.

And finally: A protest in Lincoln County, W. Va. — in the region heavily impacted by mountaintop-removal mining — shut down one mine for three hours on Saturday. Twenty protestors were taken to jail. A press release from the group behind the action, RAMPS, explained what happened:

More than 50 protesters affiliated with the R.A.M.P.S. Campaign have walked onto Patriot Coal’s Hobet mine and shut it down. Ten people locked to a rock truck, boarded it and dropped banners: “Coal Leaves, Cancer Stays.” At least three have been arrested [Editor's note: This figure was preliminary] with another in a tree being threatened by miners with a chain saw. Earlier in the day, two people were arrested at Kanawha State Forest before a group of protesters headed to the state capitol.

Patriot Coal, the parent company of the mine, recently filed for bankruptcy. So that’s good news, anyway.

And that was your “What Protests Happened Over the Weekend?” quiz. How many of those protests had you heard about? One? None?

Now ask yourself this: Did you hear that people were upset that NBC tape-delayed the Olympics?

This is what corn futures have done over the summer. I know it looks like the same graph we’ve shown you before, but it isn’t. The key difference is the number at the top right. It used to be a high of $7.50. Now corn is predicted to sell for more than $8.00 per bushel in December — an increase of 60 percent since spring.

Corn futures from CME Group. Click to embiggen.

The reason for the price spike, at the risk of sounding like a broken record: the drought. Less corn production, higher corn prices. We’ve noted that these price increases (and, in fact, expectations of higher prices) will impact other foods over the short- and long-term. But the meat industry is already feeling the pinch this summer — both because of concerns about corn prices and because animals have less of an appetite during a drought. Smithfield Foods is hedging against increased prices by importing corn from Brazil, a “highly unusual” step.

Politicians from meat-producing states are also banding together to try and increase the supply of corn for animals by challenging the amount of the grain that is used for ethanol. From Reuters:

At least one of four states hoping to ease requirements on adding grain-based ethanol to gasoline is expected to petition the [Environmental Protection Agency] as soon as Monday as the worst drought in 50 years spikes corn prices and lowers profits for livestock producers. …

The [Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS] was signed into law by former President George W. Bush to help cut dependency on foreign oil by requiring that increasing amounts of ethanol be blended into gasoline each year. President Barack Obama has also embraced ethanol as part of his “all of the above” energy strategy.

But politicians in agricultural states that do not grow large amounts of corn worry the mandate raises the costs of animal feed for meat producers. About 40 percent of the corn crop is used to make ethanol, although distillers do recycle some byproducts to make animal feed.

If that 40-percent figure is reduced, more corn can be used for other things (like feeding animals) — increasing supply and dropping the price. The EPA, however, is unlikely to budge — meat producers have opposed the RFS since long before the start of the drought.

Photo by Tom Woodward.

Even if producers get more, cheaper corn for their animals, it’s possible that the animals won’t want to eat it. The impact of the drought is literally visible in animals being brought to state and county fairs. From Fox News:

The dozen pigs Greg Marzahl and his 15-year-old daughter are bringing to the Wisconsin State Fair are smaller than those he’d normally show. Marzahl, who had three grand champion pigs last year, said his pigs are around about 15 pounds smaller than the normal 275 pounds. The heat is affecting their virility and appetites, he said. …

David Laatsch, an agriculture agent with the University of Wisconsin Extension, said he’s judged several poultry contests for county fairs this summer and has seen fewer exhibitors and smaller animals. The heat also causes narrower and fewer feathers on poultry, he said.

Smaller animals mean less meat — and therefore higher prices.

We’ll close with some (sorta) good news about the drought: It could be worse. If this year’s drought isn’t sustained into next, it possibly won’t even have been the worst drought this century. The one that evaporated the western U.S. from 2000 to 2004 was determined to have been the worst drought in 800 years — since well before Europeans discovered the New World, or had even heard of corn.

That giddy squeal that echoed across America this weekend was from environmentalists who’d opened up The New York Times and read an opinion piece by Richard Muller. (Well, opened the website, anyway; it wasn’t in the actual paper.) Muller, a professor at UC-Berkeley, had long argued against human-caused climate change. His piece in the Times? “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.“

Call me a converted skeptic.

Okay, you are a converted skeptic.

Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

Muller argues that the results from his research are even more alarming than existing projections.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. …

Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. …

How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does.

Responds Joe Romm of ThinkProgress: “Well, in fact, to be seriously considered, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as does CO2 — and it must offer some mechanism that counteracts the well-known warming effect of CO2. Not bloody likely.”

Romm, in March of last year, first broke the story that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) had confirmed warming. Romm called this latest development a “bombshell.”

The Times’ own Andy Revkin throws a little cold water on Muller, noting that the research hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed. He also asked one of Muller’s former collaborators for her take. In an email response, she explains, “I gave them my review of the paper, which was highly critical. I don’t think this new paper adds anything to our understanding of attribution of the warming.” She goes on to critique the science behind Muller’s group’s finding.

But what makes this research interesting isn’t the data; it’s the context. Muller was a climate skeptic, and BEST was funded largely by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

If this hadn’t been a …

… study by a …

… almost no one would pay attention, environmentalists included.

Here’s another study that got some attention over the weekend: Turns out that climate “skeptics” are also “skeptical” about things like the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald and the moon landing.

In a survey of more than 1,000 readers of websites related to climate change, people who agreed with free market economic principles and endorsed conspiracy theories were more likely to dispute that human-caused climate change was a reality. …

What [researchers] found was remarkable. People who endorsed conspiracy theories such as “9/11 was an inside job” and “the moon landings were faked”, were also more likely to reject established scientific facts about climate change, such as “I believe that the burning of fossil fuels on the scale observed over the last 50 years has increased atmospheric temperatures to an appreciable degree.”

Remember that scene from Annie Hall?

Hide Richard Muller behind a plant in the lobby at a climate-denier convention and try to pull this trick. Have Muller explain the data himself. Think anyone will be convinced?

Point is this: In the great game of climate politics, our side scored a point. Cool! Now we’re only down by a billion.

Cities run hotter than the countryside. There are a number of reasons why: the predominance of concrete, exhaust from cars, the angry people yelling at each other. And the problem, like every other heat-related problem in America, is getting worse.

From Brad Plumer at the Washington Post:

On a hot summer afternoon, a large city can easily run 5°F to 18°F hotter than surrounding rural areas, enough to turn an unpleasant heat wave into a deadly calamity.

And as global warming pushes up temperatures around the country, this urban heat island effect is only getting stronger. A new study in the journal Landscape and Research Planning finds that many large U.S. cities are warming twice as fast as the rest of the country. Between 1961 and 2010, rural areas in the United States heated up at a rate of roughly 0.29°F per decade. Yet three-quarters of the biggest U.S. metro areas were heating up at an average rate of 0.56°F per decade, thanks in part to increased sprawl.

As part of their research, the team from Georgia Tech put together this map, showing how much the heat island effect had changed for various U.S. cities.

Click to embiggen. (Image courtesy of the Urban Climate Lab.) 

Among the most affected, cities in the Southwest. Cities in the Northeast, particularly along the Great Lakes, saw some reductions. (It would be interesting to see this data correlated with economic activity.)

Here’s what the data for New York City and nearby rural areas looks like.

Click to embiggen.

It’s clear that, over time, temperatures in the city and in the surrounding area are moving higher together. Of course, the “rural” areas near New York City are not terribly rural.

Compare that with Phoenix.

Click to embiggen.

Here, you can see a widening gap between the city and its surroundings.

Plumer notes some steps cities can take.

More plants can cool a town down — both New York City and Los Angeles are trying to plant one million trees, for instance. Cities can also try to use more reflective material for their roofs and pavements, in order to reflect more sunlight rather than absorbing it. (Rooftop solar panels could help, as well.) Improved energy efficiency could reduce the amount of waste heat from buildings and factories. On average, [Georgia Tech's Brian] Stone says, an aggressive strategy could cut the urban heat island effect in half, shaving 5°F to 7°F off temperatures on a hot summer afternoon for a large city.

Excessive heat is brutal, unpleasant, and deadly. The death toll from this summer’s heat waves in the U.S. already tops 100; in 2003, a heat wave in Europe was blamed for over 71,000 premature deaths.

Used to be, many New Yorkers got out of town for the weekend, escaping into the cooler temperatures in their rural surroundings. That’s not really practical for most people any more. So we ought to do our best to bring the cooler temperatures into the city.

Remember that big hole in the ozone over the South Pole? Beginning in the 1980s, we plugged it up. And we often look to that success as a guide for how to save the environment. Identify the problem, develop a solution, enact international policies that address it. By severely limiting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), we preserved the ozone layer, which is critical to blocking harmful ultraviolet radiation.

We didn’t actually eliminate all CFCs from the atmosphere. There are still CFCs up there, combining with oxygen in the ozone layer and breaking it down. But the combination has generally been stable.

Until climate change came along. From The New York Times:

Strong summer thunderstorms that pump water high into the upper atmosphere pose a threat to the protective ozone layer over the United States, researchers said on Thursday, drawing one of the first links between climate change and ozone loss over populated areas.

Good thing there haven’t been any strong summer thunderstorms lately!

A loss of ozone means that far more ultraviolet radiation could blanket the United States during summer months, increasing incidences of skin cancer. Here’s how researchers believe storms lead to depletion:

… Harvard University scientists reported that some storms send water vapor miles into the stratosphere — which is normally drier than a desert — and showed how such events could rapidly set off ozone-destroying reactions with chemicals that remain in the atmosphere from CFCs, refrigerant gases that are now banned. …

While there is conclusive evidence that strong warm-weather storms have sent water vapor as high as 12 miles — through a process called convective injection — and while climate scientists say one effect of global warming is an increase in the intensity and frequency of storms, it is not yet clear whether the number of such injection events will rise.

“This problem now is of deep concern to me,” said one researcher. “I didn’t believe it at first,” said another. “The rate of these reactions was shocking to us,” said the first one, followed by, “It’s irreversible.”

Our efforts to protect the ozone layer over the poles were largely successful. If this research is accurate, it’s not clear how we might once again ward off ozone depletion — this time, directly over our heads.

Dire fire conditions, like the inferno of heat, turbulence, and fuel that recently turned 346 homes in Colorado Springs, Colo., to ash, are now common in the West. A lethal combination of drought, insect plagues, windstorms, and legions of dead, dying, or stressed-out trees constitute what some pundits are calling wildfire’s “perfect storm.”

They are only half right.

This summer’s conditions may indeed be perfect for fire in the Southwest and West, but if you think of them as a “storm,” perfect or otherwise — that is, sudden, violent, and temporary — then you don’t understand what’s happening in this country or on this planet. Look at those 346 burnt homes again, or at the High Park fire that ate 87,284 acres and 259 homes west of Fort Collins, Colo., or at the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire in New Mexico that began in mid-May, consumed almost 300,000 acres, and is still smoldering, and what you have is evidence of the new normal in the American West.

For some time, climatologists have been warning us that much of the West is on the verge of downshifting to a new, perilous level of aridity. Droughts like those that shaped the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the even drier 1950s will soon be “the new climatology” of the region — not passing phenomena but terrifying business-as-usual weather. Western forests already show the effects of this transformation.

If you surf the blogosphere looking for fire information, pretty quickly you’ll notice a dust devil of “facts” blowing back and forth: Big fires are four times more common than they used to be; the biggest fires are 6.5 times larger than the monster fires of yesteryear; and owing to a warmer climate, fires are erupting earlier in the spring and subsiding later in the fall. Nowadays, the fire season is 2.5 months longer than it was 30 years ago.

All of this is hair-raisingly true. Or at least it was, until things got worse. After all, those figures don’t come from this summer’s fire disasters but from a study published in 2006 that compared then-recent fires, including the record-setting blazes of the early 2000s, with what now seem the good old days of 1970 to 1986. The data-gathering in the report, however, only ran through 2003. Since then, the western drought has intensified, and virtually every one of those recent records — for fire size, damage, and cost of suppression — has since been surpassed.

New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains are a case in point. Over the course of two weeks in 2000, the Cerro Grande fire burned 43,000 acres, destroying 400 homes in the nuclear-research city of Los Alamos. At the time, to most of us living in New Mexico, Cerro Grande seemed a vision of the apocalypse. Then, the Las Conchas fire erupted in 2011 on land adjacent to Cerro Grande’s scar and gave a master class in what the oxygen planet can do when it really struts its stuff.

The Las Conchas fire burned 43,000 acres, equaling Cerro Grande’s achievement, in its first 14 hours. Its smoke plume rose to the stratosphere, and if the light was right, you could see within it rose-red columns of fire — combusting gases — flashing like lightning a mile or more above the land. Eventually the Las Conchas fire spread to 156,593 acres, setting a record as New Mexico’s largest fire in historic times.

It was a stunning event. Its heat was so intense that, in some of the canyons it torched, every living plant died, even to the last sprigs of grass on isolated cliff ledges. In one instance, the needles of the ponderosa pines were not consumed, but bent horizontally as though by a ferocious wind. No one really knows how those trees died, but one explanation holds that they were flash-blazed by a superheated wind, perhaps a collapsing column of fire, and that the wind, having already burned up its supply of oxygen, welded the trees by heat alone into their final posture of death.

It seemed likely that the Las Conchas record would last years, if not decades. It didn’t. This year the Whitewater Baldy fire in the southwest of the state burned an area almost twice as large.

Half now, half later?

In 2007, Tom Swetnam, a fire expert and director of the laboratory of tree-ring research at the University of Arizona, gave an interview to CBS’s 60 Minutes. Asked to peer into his crystal ball, he said he thought the Southwest might lose half its existing forests to fire and insects over the several decades to come. He immediately regretted the statement. It wasn’t scientific; he couldn’t back it up; it was a shot from the hip, a WAG — a wild-ass guess.

Swetnam’s subsequent work, however, buttressed that WAG. In 2010, he and several colleagues quantified the loss of southwestern forestland from 1984 to 2008. It was a hefty 18 percent. They concluded that “only two more recurrences of droughts and die-offs similar or worse than the recent events” might cause total forest loss to exceed 50 percent. With the colossal fires of 2011 and 2012, including Arizona’s Wallow fire, which consumed more than half a million acres, the region is on track to reach that mark by mid-century, or sooner.

But that doesn’t mean we get to keep the other half.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast a temperature increase of 4 degrees C for the Southwest over the present century. Given a faster-than-expected buildup of greenhouse gases (and no effective mitigation), that number looks optimistic today. Estimates vary, but let’s say our progress into the sweltering future is an increase of slightly less than 1 degree C so far. That means we still have an awful long way to go. If the fires we’re seeing now are a taste of what the century will bring, imagine what the heat stress of a 4-degrees-C increase will produce. And these numbers reflect mean temperatures. The ones to worry about are the extremes, the record highs of future heat waves. In the amped-up climate of the future, it is fair to think that the extremes will increase faster than the means.

At some point, every pine, fir, and spruce will be imperiled. If, in 2007, Swetnam was out on a limb, these days it’s likely that the limb has burned off and it’s getting ever easier to imagine the destruction of forests on a region-wide scale, however disturbing that may be.

More than scenery is at stake, more even than the stability of soils, ecosystems, and watersheds: The forests of the western United States account for 20 percent to 40 percent of total U.S. carbon sequestration. At some point, as western forests succumb to the ills of climate change, they will become a net releaser of atmospheric carbon, rather than one of the planet’s principle means of storing it.

Contrary to the claims of climate deniers, the prevailing models scientists use to predict change are conservative. They fail to capture many of the feedback loops that are likely to intensify the dynamics of change. The release of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost, an especially gloomy prospect, is one of those feedbacks. The release of carbon from burning or decaying forests is another. You used to hear scientists say, “If those things happen, the consequences will be severe.” Now they more often skip that “if” and say “when” instead, but we don’t yet have good estimates of what those consequences will be.

Ways of going

There have always been droughts, but the droughts of recent years are different from their predecessors in one significant way: They are hotter. And the droughts of the future will be hotter still.

June temperatures produced 2,284 new daily highs nationwide and tied 998 existing records. In most places, the shoe-melting heat translated into drought, and the Department of Agriculture set a record of its own recently by declaring 1,297 dried-out counties in 29 states to be “natural disaster areas.” June also closed out the warmest first half of a year and the warmest 12-month period since U.S. record keeping began in 1895. At present, 56 percent of the continental U.S. is experiencing drought, a figure briefly exceeded only in the 1950s.

Higher temperatures have a big impact on plants, be they a forest of trees or fields of corn and wheat. More heat means intensified evaporation and so greater water stress. In New Mexico, researchers compared the drought of the early 2000s with that of the 1950s. They found that the 1950s drought was longer and drier, but that the more recent drought caused the death of many more trees, millions of acres of them. The reason for this virulence: It was 1 degree C to 1.5 degrees C hotter.

The researchers avoided the issue of causality by not claiming that climate change caused the higher temperatures, but in effect stating: “If climate change is occurring, these are the impacts we would expect to see.” With this in mind, they christened the dry spell of the early 2000s a “global-change-type drought” — not a phrase that sings but one that lingers in a foreboding way in the mind.

No such equivocation attends a Goddard Institute for Space Studies appraisal [PDF] of the heat wave that assaulted Texas, Oklahoma, and northeastern Mexico last summer. Their report represents a sea change in high-level climate studies in that they boldly assert a causal link between specific weather events and global warming. The Texas heat wave, like a similar one in Russia the previous year, was so hot that its probability of occurring under “normal” conditions (defined as those prevailing from 1951 to 1980) was approximately 0.13 percent. It wasn’t a 100-year heat wave or even a 500-year one; it was so colossally improbable that only changes in the underlying climate could explain it.

The decline of heat-afflicted forests is not unique to the United States. Global research suggests that in ecosystems around the world, big old trees — the giants of tropical jungles, of temperate rainforests, of systems arid and wet, hot and cold — are dying off.

More generally, when forest ecologists compare notes across continents and biomes, they find accelerating tree mortality [PDF] from Zimbabwe to Alaska, Australia to Spain. The most common cause appears to be heat stress arising from climate change, along with its sidekick, drought, which often results when evaporation gets a boost.

Fire is only one cause of forest death. Heat alone can also do in a stand of trees. According to the Texas Forest Service, between 2 percent and 10 percent of all the trees in Texas, perhaps half a billion or so, died in last year’s heat wave, primarily from heat and desiccation. Whether you know it or not, those are staggering figures.

Insects, too, stand ready to play an ever-greater role in this onrushing disaster. Warm temperatures lengthen the growing season, and with extra weeks to reproduce, a population of bark beetles may spawn additional generations over the course of a hot summer, boosting the number of their kin that that make it to winter. Then, if the winter is warm, more larvae survive to spring, releasing ever-larger swarms to reproduce again. For as long as winters remain mild, summers long, and trees vulnerable, the beetles’ numbers will continue to grow, ultimately overwhelming the defenses of even healthy trees.

We now see this throughout the Rockies. A mountain pine beetle epidemic has decimated lodgepole pine stands from Colorado to Canada. About 5 million acres of Colorado’s best scenery has turned red with dead needles, a blow to tourism as well as the environment. The losses are far greater in British Columbia, where beetles have laid waste to more than 33 million forest acres, killing a volume of trees three times greater than Canada’s annual timber harvest.

Foresters there call the beetle irruption “the largest known insect infestation in North American history,” and they point to even more chilling possibilities. Until recently, the frigid climate of the Canadian Rockies prevented beetles from crossing the Continental Divide to the interior where they were, until recently, unknown. Unfortunately, warming temperatures have enabled the beetles to top the passes of the Peace River country and penetrate northern Alberta. Now a continent of jack pines lies before them, a boreal smorgasbord 3,000 miles long. If the beetles adapt effectively to their new hosts, the path is clear for them to chew their way eastward virtually to the Atlantic and to generate transformative ecological effects on a gigantic scale.

The mainstream media, prodded by recent drought declarations and other news, seem finally to be awakening to the severity of these prospects. Certainly, we should be grateful. Nevertheless, it seems a tad anticlimactic when Sam Champion, ABC News weather editor, says with this-just-in urgency to anchor Diane Sawyer, “If you want my opinion, Diane, now’s the time we start limiting manmade greenhouse gases.”

One might ask, “Why now, Sam?” Why not last year, or a decade ago, or several decades back? The news now overwhelming the West is, in truth, old news. We saw the changes coming. There should be no surprise that they have arrived.

It’s never too late to take action, but now, even if all greenhouse gas emissions were halted immediately, Earth’s climate would continue warming for at least another generation. Even if we surprise ourselves and do all the right things, the forest fires, the insect outbreaks, the heat-driven die-offs, and other sweeping transformations of the American West and the planet will continue.

One upshot will be the emergence of whole new ecologies. The landscape changes brought on by climate change are affecting areas so vast that many previous tenants of the land — ponderosa pines, for instance — cannot be expected to recolonize their former territory. Their seeds don’t normally spread far from the parent tree, and their seedlings require conditions that big, hot, open spaces don’t provide.

What will develop in their absence? What will the mountains and mesa tops of the New West look like? Already it is plain to see that scrub oak, locust, and other plants that reproduce by root suckers are prospering in places where the big pines used to stand. These plants can be burned to the ground and yet resprout vigorously a season later. One ecologist friend offers this advice: “If you have to be reincarnated as a plant in the West, try not to come back as a tree. Choose a clonal shrub, instead. The future looks good for them.”

In the meantime, forget about any sylvan dreams you might have had: This is no time to build your house in the trees.

The rest is after the jump (click to embiggen).

Scientists have largely pinned down the cause for the huge loss in Arctic ice volume over the past 40 years. And guess what? It’s because of climate change.

I mean, you already knew that. But scientists like to be thorough.

Researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading used a computer model to look at how much of the ice loss could be attributed to natural cycles (specifically, the “Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation,” or AMO). From The Guardian:

“We could only attribute as much as 30% [of the Arctic ice loss] to the AMO,” [the researcher] said. “Which implies that the rest is due to something else, and this is most likely going to be man-made global change.”

Previous studies had indicated that around half of the loss was due to man-made climate change and that the other half was due to natural variability.

Please note: as much as 30 percent. It could be as little as 5 percent — meaning that between 70 and 95 percent of ice loss is attributable to human carbon emissions.

On the plus side, our giant refrigerators can still produce as much ice as we want. Sorry about your luck, seals/polar bears/future humans! Go buy your own Sub-Zero™s!

Science fiction author William Gibson, who knows from the future (he’s the guy who invented the word “cyberspace,” in 1982 mind you), explained yesterday on Twitter that he’s concerned our descendants will hate us.

It’s clear that climate change isn’t one of Gibson’s usual talking points (he got a bit of a shaky start, fishing for the word “anthropogenic”). He’s concerned not because he’s a soapboxer, but because he’s a thoughtful, intelligent person with an interest in how humanity will think and act in years to come. You don’t need to be a hippie to give a shit about climate change — you can just be a cyberpunk with a realistic outlook.

“We’re expecting another year of tough food prices, bad news for consumers,” said United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) food economist Richard Volpe.

“The difference between normal and higher than normal in this case is 100 percent attributable to the drought,” Volpe said. The food price index data is released by USDA each month; it is a set of numbers that indicates how much an average shopper is likely to pay at the supermarket.

Normal food inflation has been between 2.5 and 3.5 percent in recent years, Volpe said, and is calculated to include a variety of pushes and pulls on the economy, including fuel prices and the state of the American dollar. That so-called normal inflation rate will largely play out for the rest of this year, all things being equal, he said. The drought will surface in food prices next year.

Click to embiggen. (Image by James West/Climate Desk.)

Climate Desk has illustrated a handful of basic groceries in the graphic above, comparing the average prices for the last full year of data, 2011, with USDA’s projected prices for 2013. While price increases may not seem too severe on the surface, they add up for a family on a budget across a year.

Climate Desk approached the USDA to ask whether food assistance programs like WIC or SNAP will increase to help families meet their budgets. USDA spokesperson Alyn Kiel said via email that price fluctuations are taken into account:

USDA accounts for changes in food prices and the number of WIC participants when calculating the total budget request for WIC. The level of funding is set by Congress. USDA’s food plans … are updated monthly and reflect fluctuations in food prices.

One estimate says that the U.S., the biggest player in the world corn market, could slash world corn supply by 60 billion tons as a result of the drought. Looking further afield, food prices in the U.S. have a big impact not only on prices around the world, but also on the potential for social unrest in developing countries.

Animal-based perishable foods will be hardest hit. The USDA projects that poultry products will rise 3 to 4 percent next year, compared to this year’s average. The biggest rises are seen in beef and veal, rising 4 to 5 percent from 2012 averages (Volpe says structural problems play a role in this sector, alongside the drought). Dairy products will take a hit too, rising up to 4.5 percent.

There is a lag in food prices because it takes time for the effects of a drought to ripple across the food system. Many food manufacturers lock in long-term prices with primary producers. Consumers are likely to see price hikes once the contracts are up, said Joe Parcell, director of Agriculture and Applied Economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia. “We’re going to start feeling the impact from September onwards,” he said.

More than 60 percent of America’s farms are located in areas experiencing drought. Two-thirds of all crops and two-thirds of livestock are produced in areas experiencing at least moderate drought.

This story was produced by Mother Jones as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.