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Scientists find bigger than expected polar ice melt

GENEVA — Icecaps around the North and South Poles are melting faster and in a more widespread manner than expected, raising sea levels and fuelling climate change, a major scientific survey showed Wednesday. The International Polar Year survey found that warming in the Antarctic is “much more widespread than was thought,” while Arctic sea ice […]

Kathleen Merrigan is a progressive's dream pick for the USDA

I guess this whole "activism" thing sometimes works. To have Kathleen Merrigan, one of Food Democracy Now's Sustainable Dozen, named deputy secretary of agriculture is, as Tom Philpott suggests, a huge win for progressives. Say what you will about the USDA Organic program, but Merrigan, as its author and later its enforcer, has been without question battle-tested.

In his post, Tom linked to Samuel Fromartz's perspective on Merrigan from back in November. But it's worth digging in to the comments as well. There you'll find none other than Frank Kirschenmann (another Sustainable Dozener about whom I've written) giving Merrigan his hearty endorsement.

Further down is evidence in the form of a WaPo profile from 2000 (now behind a firewall) that Merrigan didn't shy away from battles. I was particularly struck by her conflicts with the various agricultural advisory committees -- a bunch of guys who clearly lacked both social graces as well as a sense of humor:

After Merrigan was appointed in June, she immediately launched a controversial crusade to diversify those white-male-dominated advisory committees, forcing them to establish outreach plans to recruit women, minorities and disabled people. In many cases, she refused to forward their nomination slates to Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman until she was satisfied with their commitment to diversity.

After she blocked nominations to the Florida Tomato Committee, complaining that it hadn't made a "significant effort" to attract women and minorities, the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, lampooned her in an article titled "Attack of the Tomato Killers." The Packer, an agricultural publication, described her crusade as "Beltway Blindness." In a nasty letter to Glickman, committee manager Wayne Hawkins said he was resigning and going into business: "I plan to find a female Afro-American who is confined to a wheelchair to be my partner. This way I will meet all of the government diversification requirements."

Sebelius mum on whether she’s leaving Kansas for the Obama team

“I’m going home tomorrow and I’m going to keep fighting some Kansas battles.” — Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, responding to an inquiry about whether she’s planning to join the Obama administration. In the meantime, Sebelius continues to battle two coal-fired power plants in her state.

Georgetown Law opens new climate center with support from governors

Georgetown Law celebrated the opening of its Climate Resource Center on Monday with an event featuring several green luminaries. Govs. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kan.) and Chris Gregoire (D-Wash.), as well as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Council on Environmental Quality chief Nancy Sutley were on hand for the inauguration of the center, created to help connect […]

China’s environment problems serious: minister

SHANGHAI — China’s environmental problems remain serious with local governments not putting enough pressure on businesses to control pollution, the nation’s environment protection minister has said. Efforts to toughen environment laws have not done enough to fix the widespread problems for China’s air, lakes and rivers, Zhang Lijun said Tuesday, according to the official Xinhua […]

The problem with climate-model criticism

I have a paper [PDF] in this week's Science discussing the water vapor feedback. It is a Perspective, meaning that it is a summary of the existing literature rather than new scientific results. In it, my co-author Steve Sherwood and I discuss the mountain of evidence in support of a strong and positive water vapor feedback.

Interestingly, it seems that just about everybody now agrees water vapor provides a robustly strong and positive feedback. Roy Spencer even sent me email saying that he agrees.

What I want to focus on here is model verification. If you read the blogs, you'll often see people say things like "the models are completely unvalidated." What they mean is that no one has produced a 100-year climate run with a model, then waited a hundred years, and evaluated how the model did. There are many practical problems with doing this, but the biggest is that by the time you determine if your model was right or not, it would be too late to take any meaningful action to head off the problem.

Louisiana governor talks energy in his response to Obama’s address

America needs a comprehensive new energy plan, and that plan should include more drilling for oil and gas. That’s the message Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal delivered in the official Republican response to President Obama’s address to Congress on Tuesday night. “To strengthen our economy, we need urgent action to keep energy prices down,” said Jindal, […]

Obama puts climate and energy atop his priorities list in his first address to Congress

President Barack Obama devoted a significant portion of his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night to energy and environmental concerns, talking up the need for energy investments and calling on legislators to send him a cap-and-trade bill this Congress. “To truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet […]

Let's mend, not end, ag subsidies

"It's a dead end to try and eliminate subsidies, because then you get all of America's farmers, who have political power out of all proportion of their number, unified against change. Right now the incentives are to produce as much as possible, whatever the costs to the environment and our health. But you can imagine another set of assumptions, so that they're getting incentives to sequester carbon. Or clean the water that leaves their farm, or for the quality, not the quantity, of the food they're growing."

-- Michael Pollan, reflecting a growing consensus

Despite lower gas prices, driving is still down — but perhaps not for long

I keep looking for signs that the collapse in gas prices has started to have an impact on how much people drive. In a normal economy, you'd expect that as gas got cheaper, people would drive a bit more -- the reverse of the trend we saw last summer, when gas prices were reaching record highs and people were cutting way back on car travel.

But this simply isn't a "normal" economy. Just as gas prices fell, family incomes started taking a beating too. So, sure, it costs a lot less to fill a tank now than it did last summer, but people also had less money to spend on gas. And the two contradictory trends leave me scratching my head: will gas consumption continue to dip, stay flat, or start to trend upwards again?

The latest federal numbers on vehicle travel may offer some hints. As the Contra Costa Times notes, gasoline consumption fell in December 2008, compared with the previous December. But looking at the numbers, the year-over-year decline was actually the smallest since the previous February -- suggesting, perhaps, that low prices are beginning to subtly boost driving.