Articles by Joseph Romm

The biggest GHG offenders will suffer the least from climate change

The United States is an awfully wealthy nation, as is the United Kingdom. It shows in our lifestyles and it shows in our carbon dioxide emissions -- we are energy rich, not necessarily in production but in consumption.

The BBC recently ran an article (opening paragraphs below) highlighting some research from a development organization, and the numbers tell a stunning yet very real story:

2007: A record-setting U.S. drought year

The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) just issued its September report -- and the West and Southeast continue to scorch:

About 43 percent of the contiguous U.S. fell in the moderate to extreme drought categories (based on the Palmer Drought Index) at the end of September.

Here is the U.S. Drought Monitor (darker = drier):

Here are some of the drought records being set around the country:

Nobel Prize award and Clinton highlight importance of climate science

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

It has been a good month so far for climate science, and a bad month for climate cynics. It has been an especially bad month for those on the Irrational Right who, for whatever reason, cannot stand the thought that Al Gore has emerged so gloriously from the grave in which they thought they had buried him forever.

"So now 'Algore' will join Yasir Arafat among the list of noble Nobel peace laureates," Rush Limbaugh lamented. By awarding Gore the prize, Limbaugh said, the Nobel committee has "rendered themselves a pure, 100 percent joke."

A week earlier, Hillary Clinton issued her "Agenda to Reclaim Scientific Innovation." As president, Sen. Clinton says, she would ban political appointees from "unduly interfering with scientific conclusions and publications," tell agency heads to resist political pressure that threatens scientific integrity, and protect whistleblowers who tattle on ideologues who mess with science.

Thus, the Bush Administration suffered two loud and public slaps in the face for its suppression of science at a time when the world needs it like never before.

E.O. Wilson, John Updike, and others on climate change

So we've seen much of the so-called intelligentsia ignore the global warming issue when asked by the Atlantic Monthly to consider the greatest challenges to the American idea. But not all of those asked were so short-sighted.

You would expect the one environmentalist they asked, Edward O. Wilson (essay below) to get it right. But what about a Harvard constitutional law professor and his policy analyst/linguist wife?

Lawrence H. Tribe and Carolyn K. Tribe: "Our greatest national challenge is to reverse the profoundly misguided course the last two presidential elections have set, while doing three things ... Third, cooperating with the international community before it is too late to restore the degraded health of our fragile planet and to protect the well-being of all its inhabitants."

Who else got it right, or partially right? John Updike, Anna Deavere Smith, and even Stephen Breyer:

John Updike: "The American idea, as I understand it, is to trust people to know their own minds and to act in their own enlightened self-interest, with a necessary respect for others ... The challenges ahead? A fury against liberal civilization by the world's poor, who have nothing to lose; a ruinous further depletion of the world's natural assets; a global warming that will change world climate and with it world geopolitics. The American idea, promulgated in a land of plenty, must prepare to sustain itself in a world of scarcity."

My point exactly!