Climate Climate & Energy

Lomborg’s a real Nowhere Man

In Cool It, Lomborg writes about global warming -- but the globe he is writing about certainly isn't Earth. We've already seen in Parts I and II that on Planet Lomborg, polar bears can evolve backwards and the ice sheets can't suffer rapid ice loss (as they are already doing on Earth).

On Planet Lomborg, the carbon cycle has no amplifying feedbacks -- even though these are central to why warming on Earth will be worse than the IPCC projects. I couldn't even find the word "feedback" or "permafrost" in the book [if anyone finds them, please let me know].

On Planet Lomborg, free from the restrictions of science, global warming is kind of delightful (p.12):

The reality of climate change isn't necessarily an unusually fierce summer heat wave. More likely, we may just notice people wearing fewer layers of clothes on a winter's evening.

On planet Earth, a major study in Nature found that if we fail to take strong action to reduce emissions soon, the brutal European heat wave that killed 35,000 people will become the typical summer within the next four decades. By the end of the century, "2003 would be classed as an anomalously cold summer relative to the new climate."

Lomborg's entire book takes place in a kind of fantasy land or Bizarro world. Aptly, on the last page is "A Note on the Type" that begins:

This book was set in Utopia ...

Irony can be so ironic. Utopia is from the Greek for "no place," or "place that does not exist." Lomborg is the nowhere man!

Second-warmest U.S. August ever

Let's look at some of the records for the month:, according to the National Climatic Data Center, a division of NOAA:

• For the contiguous U.S., the average temperature for August was 75.4°F (24.1°C), which was 2.7°F (1.5°C) above the 20th century mean and the second warmest August on record.
• More than 30 all-time high temperature records were tied or broken, and more than 2000 new daily high temperature records were established.
• Raleigh-Durham, N.C., equaled its all-time high of 105°F on August 21, and Columbia, S.C., had 14 days in August with temperatures over 100°F, which broke the 1900 record of 12 days. Cincinnati, OH, reached 100°F five days during August, a new record for the city.
• The warmest August in the 113-year record occurred in eight eastern states (West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida) along with Utah.
• Texas had its wettest summer on record.
• This was the driest summer since records began in 1895 for North Carolina, and the second driest for Tennessee.
• At the end of August, drought affected approximately 83 percent of the Southeast and 46 percent of the contiguous U.S.

Coincidence? I think not!

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Climate change skeptics try to seduce us to inaction

Every once in awhile, I'm struck by something that makes me realize how the ancient storytellers were terrifically acute observers of the human condition, and used metaphor brilliantly to convey their observations.

Perhaps the most salient example these days is the song of the sirens, the beauties whose songs would lure sailors toward them until they grounded their ships on the rocks and drowned. The modern-day sirens, Avery and Singer, are taking up the cause by trying to lure the world away from any action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Their song is that this is all just a natural cycle, and the skyrocketing CO2 concentrations can just be ignored.

Discover Brilliant: Renewables and buildings

Now it’s "Moving the Technology Frontier," about technologies that are going to create "tectonic shifts" in the cleantech space, with Stan Bull, head of R&D at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Steve Selkowtiz, Building Technologies Program Leader at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Bull is first up. Says NREL’s budget is $200-$250 million. That seems […]

New York state investigates power companies’ emissions on behalf of shareholders

New York state used a new tactic last week to try to prompt coal-fired power plants to clean up their climate changing emissions: concern for shareholders. State attorney general Andrew Cuomo sent letters and subpoenas to five coal-lovin’ power companies on Friday requesting internal documents and questioning if investors had been given adequate information on […]

With more ‘zero-zero’ buildings, maybe we could still have cake now and then

This story appeared on my birthday (a prime number year). I'll consider it my present.

Lomborg misrepresents possible sea-level rise

Lomborg is a champion cherry-picker when he isn’t just getting his facts wrong, as I argued in Part I. He has a deceptively misleading — and outright erroneous — discussion of sea-level-rise projections in Cool It. Let’s start with a few all-too-typical howlers: Antarctica is generally soaking up more water than Greenland is shedding, as […]

Freelance writer embarks on biodiesel tour of sporting events

Freelance sports writer Joe Connor is embarking this fall on a four-month-long Green Power Sports Tour (holy neon website!), visiting more than 100 football, hockey, and basketball venues — in a biodiesel car, natch. Hey ladies … he’s self-described “very, very single” …

Rates of black lung disease double in a decade

Rates of black lung disease have doubled in the last decade, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The disease, which is caused by inhaling coal dust, now occurs in almost 10 percent of coal miners who work 25 or more years underground, as opposed to about 4 percent a decade ago. […]

A must-read article from Science on the underestimation of climate change impacts

The new issue of Science has a terrific article that underscores many of the points I have been making here. Its central argument is that the scientific consensus most likely underestimates future climate change impacts, especially in the crucial area of sea-level rise and carbon-cycle feedbacks.

The authors are highly credible, led by Princeton's Michael Oppenheimer, one of the most widely published climate experts. I will excerpt the article here at length ($ub. req'd):