Articles by Joseph Romm

Climate skeptics claim no warming since 1998

Honestly, if anyone tells you "For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming" -- as this Boston Globe columnist has -- they simply are not interested in seriously trying to understand and deal with the gravest problem facing humanity. They deserve the label "global warming denier" for willfully trying to confuse the public debate.

Let's look at the data, from NASA, presented last month (PDF):

Through the first 11 months, 2007 is the second warmest year in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean has entered the cool phase of its natural El Niño -- La Niña cycle.

Yes, in some global datasets -- not NASA's, however -- 1998 is still the peak year because that year we had global warming plus the warm phase of the natural El Niño-La Niña cycle. But guess what, deniers? Climate change is about a change in the "climate." A single year doesn't make the climate, that's why people use a running average -- in order to show the trend. Duh!

NASA points out:

Obama is in no way ‘George Bush Lite’

I am a big fan of the climate website, DeSmogBlog. So I was shocked when, the day after his unprecedented victory in Iowa, DeSmogBlog gave Barack Obama "the inaugural 2007 SmogMaker Award for blowing smoke on global warming."

Gimme a break. How could anyone win that award any year -- let alone in its inaugural year -- when George W. Bush is still president? [Not to mention a year in which Lomborg and Inhofe continue their influential disinformation compaigns!]

After all, the "Prize honors those who sow confusion and delay on Climate Change." Seriously. Bush is easily the confuser and delayer of the year ... and the decade ... and he surely will be on the short list for the entire century. Yet DeSmog says Obama is "looking like George Bush lite." How can they make that claim? By misreading -- or failing to read -- Obama's terrific climate plan. DeSmogBlog claims:

But he is campaigning on a greenhouse gas reduction "target" that the U.S. won't have to meet for 42 years ...

While the world's leading scientific bodies tell us we need to act immediately to avoid catastrophic climate disruption, Obama has set his own target date at 2050, long past any opportunity for voters to hold him accountable.

Uh, no. In fact, his plan (PDF) explicitly states:

Obama will start reducing emissions immediately in his administration by establishing strong annual reduction targets, and he'll also implement a mandate of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Based on the links in their post, DeSmogBlog's research on Obama's climate apparently consists of reading a one-paragraph story on BusinessWire with Obama's statement on Bali -- which they link to not once, but twice! They claim he is an unrepentant coal supporter, based on a June 2007 Washington Post article about his support for his state's coal industry. And yet in his climate plan he bluntly commits:

An effective climate plans needs to incorporate intelligently regulated energy efficiency standards

Andy Revkin at the NY Times has given a lot of ink to the cap-and-dividend plan (see here and here) by Peter Barnes, a founder of Working Assets. Revkin says Barnes "has long studied various bills and proposals for cutting emissions of carbon dioxide to limit global warming. He sees fatal flaws in every one."

I don't see any fatal flaws in either Obama's plan or Mrs. Clinton's -- they are both terrific and comprehensive, unlike Barnes'. His goal is the same as theirs -- to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050. But his solution is fatally incomplete:

He proposes a "cap and dividend" system that charges a rising fee on sources of greenhouse-gas emissions (to propel a long-term shift away from such pollution) and returns the revenue to citizens, rich or poor, through a direct payment not unlike the checks that Alaska residents get every year from fees paid to the state by oil companies.

That's pretty much it. What caught my attention in Revkin's piece is Barnes' answer to the last question posed:

What about laws such as better efficiency standards? (Nancy Anderson)
N.Y. Times columnist Tom Friedman has made a crucial distinction between incremental policies and transformative ones. Cap-and-dividend is transformative. It will get us to 80% emission reductions and create a clean energy infrastructure in the process. Raising efficiency standards for autos, appliances and buildings is a good thing to do, but it won't transform our economy or cut emissions 80%.

That is, ironically, almost exactly backwards. Barnes apparently thinks plans like Obama's and Clinton's are loaded up with things like much tougher fuel economy standards and utility decoupling and federal clean-tech programs because the senators just love regulations and government spending (I know many of you conservatives out there think that). In fact, trying to stabilize at 450 ppm only using a price for carbon, as Barnes proposes, is wildly impractical and a political non-starter.

That's because, at its most basic level, a price for carbon most directly encourages fuel-switching (especially from coal), but does not particularly encourage efficiency. That's why most traditional economic models require a very high (read "unduly brutal" and "politically unacceptable") price for carbon to get deep reductions.

What will it take to make 2008 great?

The following guest post is by Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), originally published on Climate Progress. He is the co-author of Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy.

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Now that our New Year's Eve party hats are put away, it's time to look to the next year in the battle against global warming. In the year 2007, some good things did indeed happen on this front. Measures significantly improving car mileage standards and promoting the growth of renewable fuels were signed into law. But if 2007 was a year that could be considered in some ways good, then 2008 needs to be a year that will be great.

Nothing else will do. The cataclysms of one million square miles of ice melting in the Arctic, a several-fold increase in the rate of melting tundra, and the acceleration of melting in Greenland, foretell possible feedback mechanisms that demand a faster and more aggressive clean energy revolution than we even envisioned a year ago. Whatever we thought necessary on New Year's Day 2007 needs to be doubled in 2008.

So what will it take to make '08 great? Three things will do the trick.