Quote of the day comes from Tove Maria Ryding, of Greenpeace, talking about the depressingly futile latest round of climate talks in Bonn.

"It's absurd to watch governments sit and point fingers and fight like little kids while the scientists explain about the terrifying impacts of climate change."

More here.

From IPS:

The results from 19 different state-of-the-art climate models project extreme and persistent drought conditions (colored dark red-brown on the maps) for almost all of Mexico, the midwestern United States and most of Central America.

If climate change pushes the global average temperature to 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era levels, as many experts now expect, these regions will be under severe and permanent drought conditions.

Future conditions are projected to be worse than Mexico's current drought or the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s that forced hundreds of thousands of people to migrate.

These are some of the conclusions of the study "Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico", which was published in the December 2011 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Hydrometeorology and has gone largely unnoticed.

"Drought conditions will prevail no matter what precipitation rates are in the future," said co-author Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. government research centre in California.

...The 19 models used in the study show that the increased heat will dry soils more than any additional rain can replenish soil moisture levels. Ever warmer air temperatures will cause greater evaporation, drying out soils.

I know I've written about this before, but I'm going to keep repeating the message because this is the biggest danger of climate change to Americans, who need to realise this is coming. American-produced apathy and denialism is one of the biggest drags on world-wide climate change opinion, and thus on action. Maybe this, a disaster for the bulk of America's heartland, will convince Americans to get their collective heads out of their asses.

Chuck Hagel pens an oped on "The Challenge Of Change" for the US:

The great challenges facing the world today are the responsibility of all peoples of the world. They include cyber warfare, terrorism, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, prosperity and stability, and global poverty, disease and environmental degradation."

I'm assuming that "environmental degradation" doesn't just mean pollution but is code for global warming/climate change in case Republicans reading get upset by the actual words*.

It's one thing to ignore an elephant, it's entirely another to avoid a tornado.

* At least I hope so, because the alternative - that the Chair of the Atlantic Council and co-Chair of Obama's Intelligence Advisory Board has written such a piece without mentioning climate change at all - is just too horrible a possibility to contemplate.

The first big wildfires of the season in Arizona have struck.

Hundreds of firefighters battled several Arizona wildfires on Monday that charred more than 7,000 acres of parched Ponderosa forest, brush and grassland over the weekend, consuming half a dozen buildings and threatening a small town, authorities said.

The Sunflower Fire, the largest of at least four blazes in central and eastern Arizona, burned 3,100 acres in the Tonto National Forest, about 40 miles north of Phoenix, destroying two homes, a business and two outbuildings over the weekend, the Southwest Coordination Center said.

About 350 residents in the nearby community of Crown King were under mandatory evacuation on Monday after the human-caused Gladiator Fire burned 3,000 acres of ponderosa pine, brush and chaparral in the Prescott National Forest and destroyed three buildings.

With over half of the US still in a state of drought, the weather forcasts are "not optimistic".

Quite a few rightwing commentators are making waves today about a Government Accountability Office statement which says (PDF) that:

The Green River
Formation—an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming—contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale. USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions. The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered. At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.

There reactions are all along the same lines: this shale-oil reserve could "by itself supply domestic oil consumption for more than 200 years", and "will Obama, in a possible second term, block the development of the resources that can assure America’s economic supremacy for generations?"

Typically simplistic. If only it were that easy.

350.org organized "Connect the Dots" on Saturday May 5, 2012. People all over the world generated local events to connect the dots between climate change and extreme weather. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, seasonal change, etc. are a function of accelerating and damaging climate change.

Charles Manson or Osama bin Laden? Nothing at all, suggests the (tobacco, oil and motor industry funded) denialist Heartland Institute in a new set of billboard ads in the Chicago area. No, seriously.

The resident denialist nutter at The UK's leading newspaper for old paleoconservative duffers and young neocon crazies, The Dully Torygraph, complains that "greens" (when not capitalized and thus referring to the political party, always intended by the Torygraph as a euphemism for "Dirty Fucking Hippies") did it first and asks:

judging by today's fracas, where it is okay to compare climate-change sceptics to mass murderers, it is not okay to compare greens to mass murderers. Is that right?

Yes, it is. Because denialism will actually cause the deaths of millions.

Update GOP Rep. Sensenbrenner is the first to pull out of Heartland's up-coming climate denial conference over the billboards.

Scientists shocked to find greenhouse gas 70 times more potent than CO2 bubbling from deep ocean

A new source of methane – a greenhouse gas many times more powerful than carbon dioxide – has been identified by scientists flying over areas in the Arctic where the sea ice has melted.

The researchers found significant amounts of methane being released from the ocean into the atmosphere through cracks in the melting sea ice. They said the quantities could be large enough to affect the global climate. Previous observations have pointed to large methane plumes being released from the seabed in the relatively shallow sea off the northern coast of Siberia but the latest findings were made far away from land in the deep, open ocean where the surface is usually capped by ice.

Eric Kort of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that he and his colleagues were surprised to see methane levels rise so dramatically each time their research aircraft flew over cracks in the sea ice.

"When we flew over completely solid sea ice, we didn't see anything in terms of methane. But when we flew over areas were the sea ice had melted, or where there were cracks in the ice, we saw the methane levels increase," Dr Kort said. "We were surprised to see these enhanced methane levels at these high latitudes. Our observations really point to the ocean surface as the source, which was not what we had expected," he said.

"Other scientists had seen high concentrations of methane in the sea surface but nobody had expected to see it being released into the atmosphere in this way," he added.

Link Fixed: Click here to see 'The deadly depths - Methane release in the Arctic' graphic

Read more from Steve Connor at The Independent

A new survey shows that while Republican congresscritters, presidential candidates and media mouthpieces have all hewn to the GOP's climate denialism purity test, even the Republican rank-and-file have been moving in exactly the other direction. CS Monitor reports:

Three out of four U.S. voters favor regulating carbon dioxide as a greenhouse-gas pollutant, and a majority think global warming should be a priority for the president and Congress, a survey of American attitudes on climate and energy reported on Thursday.

The survey was released one day after Rolling Stone magazine published an interview with President Barack Obama in which he suggested that climate change would become a campaign issue this year.

In results often at odds with the political debate in Washington, the survey conducted for Yale and George Mason University also found most Americans would vote for a candidate who raised taxes on coal, oil and natural gas - fossil fuels that emit climate-warming carbon dioxide when burned - while cutting income tax, in a revenue-neutral "tax swap."

Imagine if we lived in a world where a US Republican Secretary of State could take to the op-ed pages, as UK Foreign Minister and conservative William Hague just has, to tell it like it is:

We are at the start of a global shift from a high- to a low-carbon economy. The shift will be driven by those countries that transform their own economies so as to better compete in rapidly expanding global markets.

...We have left behind an era in which energy, food, water, and other resources have been relatively cheap and plentiful. Rising demand is carrying us into an age of higher and more volatile prices for energy, food and raw materials. Political tensions in the regions traditionally supplying the world's oil have added to the uncertainties. Climate change is amplifying these stresses, and will do so increasingly.

These risks post a serious threat to growth, through price shocks and inflation. Their political consequences could be more serious still, with some tempted to see a zero sum competition for resources between consumers and between nations. That would be an historic mistake, triggering a spiral away from the cooperation based on agreed rules that is vital for a globally exposed economy like our own, towards a much more dangerous world of fragmentation, competition and greatly enhanced risks of conflict.

A core goal of British foreign policy must be to defend the open global economy against this threat. That will require a rapid global shift towards enhanced resource productivity and energy efficiency, and lower carbon intensity. Encouraging this transition, not least working through the strengthened bilateral partnerships that we have been building especially with the emerging economies, is a top priority for our diplomatic network.

Today the International Energy Authority's executive director, Maria van der Hoeven, warned that the world is barrelling towards catastrophic 6C warming by the end of the century. In a world where a Republican SecState could talk like William Hague there'd be hope that bipartisan consensus in the world's richest and most powerful nation might offer leadership to avert that disaster. Instead, the GOP has decided to shill for energy lobby campaign donations and play up the politics of denial and divisiveness for their own short-term gains and thus moved the Overton Window of US debate so that their Democratic party opponents are afraid to speak up as clearly and urgently as they should too.

It must be an election year, with the incumbent up against a denialist party who might say nasty things while simultaneously trying to pander to corporate campaign donors.

Can the Democratic Party just go change its name to the Spellunking Party, please?

Dr James Hanson is probably our greatest living scientist and the first to define the problems of climate change. This is a letter from him that explains most of what we need to know about the tar sands adventure. His website is here.

From: James Hansen

Alberta tar sands are estimated to be 240 GtC (gigatons of carbon); see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) Working Group 3 report. That is about seven times greater than the cumulative historical CO₂ emissions from oil use by the U.S. (36 GtC). U.S. oil use was 28% of global oil use for the cumulative amounts over the past 200 years. So Alberta tar sands contain about twice the total amount of carbon emitted by global oil use in history. Image hidden side

Yet some people argue that tar sands are not so great that we need to be concerned about their effect on climate. They argue that only about 40 GtC of the tar sands are presently economically extractable. However, if an addiction to tar sands is established, as it would be with big pipelines, you can be confident that the addiction would lead eventually to ways of cooking the oil out of most of the tar sands. Moreover, these numbers do not include the emissions from conventional fossil fuels used to mine and process the tar sands into useable fuel. Nor do they include the other greenhouse gas emissions produced by the mining and processing.

New Scientist has the disturbing news that, overall, phytoplankton levels in the world's oceans have been declining at a rate of roughly 1 percent a year for the last forty years according to satellite measurements. Bluer water means less, greener water means more and the oceans are becoming bluer, overall. This is important because these microscopic bacteria and algae which over millions of years have made almost all the oxygen we breathe also provide half of all the food bulk on which the planet's animal population (including, eventually, us) depend. less phytoplankton mean oceanic famines - and the effects knock on into land ecosystems too.

Let's get something straight - astronauts may well be heroes but they are definitely not climate scientists. Nor are any of the other 49 former NASA staff who have signed a letter to NASA championing climate denialism for the Exxon-funded SPPI group, which has close ties to the ALEC right wing pressure group (recently in the news as its funders bail out en masse).

And, in closely-related news:

Only nine states have taken precautionary measures deemed necessary by the National Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, to deal with climate change impacts — and Texas is not one of them.

The NRDC placed states under four categories, category one being states that are the most prepared and category four being states that are largely unprepared. The group placed Texas in category four, determining that Texas has yet to adequately recognize and and plan for water supply issues.

No surprises there, considering the same Koch and Big Oil funded think tanks and pressure groups inform Texas republican policies.

Further Reading: ALEC Exposed.

Tom Laskawy at Grist has a good piece on a new method of testing for nitrous oxide emissions in the atmosphere from synthetic ammonium fertilizers. Such fertilizers usually crop up in environmental news because of contamination of drinking water by run-off from fields, or because of oxygen-depleted oceanic "dead zones" like the one the size of new Jersey in the Gulf Of Mexico. However, this new science not only gives a test that will "fingerprint" different sources of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere, be they from natural or man-made sources but has already shown that a massive uptick in nitrous oxide which has contributed to global warming in recent decades is almost entirely due to evaporation from fetilizers used in intensive agriculture. Nitrous oxide is about three hundred times more affective a "greenhouser" than carbon dioxide.

The world produces around 140 megatonnes of ammonia annually, 80% of which is used for the production of ammonium fertilizers. There are a couple of small hydro-electric cracking plants using water to get the hydrogen they need but 70% of the world's production comes from using natural gas as a base and the rest comes from using coal. Both processes release carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere. Although the International Fetrilizer Industry Association acknowledges the part the making and using of ammonium fertilizers plays part in climate change, Laskawy notes that "it has been impossible to know just how much is coming from fertilizer use; and Big Ag has never been made accountable. But that may have all just changed."

NASA's Prof. Jim Hansen, the "father of climate science", says that doing something about human-induced climate change is a "great moral issue" on a par with slavery. Hansen is up for the prestigious Edinburgh Medal for contributions to science and, at his acceptance speech next Tuesday he will say what needs to be said - that the world is on the brink of disaster - and call for a global carbon tax.

Hansen will argue in his lecture that current generations have an over-riding moral duty to their children and grandchildren to take immediate action. Describing this as an issue of inter-generational justice on a par with ending slavery, Hansen said: "Our parents didn't know that they were causing a problem for future generations but we can only pretend we don't know because the science is now crystal clear.

"We understand the carbon cycle: the CO2 we put in the air will stay in surface reservoirs and won't go back into the solid earth for millennia. What the Earth's history tells us is that there's a limit on how much we can put in the air without guaranteeing disastrous consequences for future generations. We cannot pretend that we did not know."

Science Daily has a piece on a new study of data gleaned from Tahitian corals laid down during the Bølling warming event around 14,000 years ago. Then, high latitudes of the Northern hemisphere warmed as much as 15 degrees Celsius in a few tens of decades and the new study indicates that freshwater from melting ice shelfs contributed to a rise of over 14 meters (45 feet) in sea levels.

Meanwhile, over at New Scientist, there's worrying news about Artic ice melt.

The disappearance of Arctic sea ice has crossed a "tipping point" that could soon make ice-free summers a regular feature across most of the Arctic Ocean, says a British climate scientist who is setting up an early warning system for dangerous climate tipping points.

Think Progress has the details on another clarion call from climate scientists as "Scientists issue first ‘State of the Planet’ declaration at the world’s largest gathering of experts on global environmental and social issues in advance of the major UN Summit Rio+20 in June.":

Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the well-being of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk. Without urgent action, we could face threats to water, food, biodiversity and other critical resources: these threats risk intensifying economic, ecological and social crises, creating the potential for a humanitarian emergency on a global scale….

The defining challenge of our age is to safeguard Earth’s natural processes to ensure the well-being of civilization while eradicating poverty, reducing conflict over resources, and supporting human and ecosystem health….

As consumption accelerates everywhere and world population rises, it is no longer sufficient to work towards a distant ideal of sustainable development. Global sustainability must become a foundation of society. It can and must be part of the bedrock of nation states and the fabric of societies.

Let's not put too fine a point on it: civilization itself is at stake, within the lifetimes of many of the readers of this blog.

That's how a new report by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development paints life in 2050. The OECD, a forum of the world's 34 most developed nations predicts:

a world population of 9.2 billion people, generating a global GDP four times the size of today's, requiring 80 percent more energy. And with a worldwide energy mix still 85 percent reliant on fossil fuels by that time, it will be coal, oil, and gas that make up most of the difference, the OECD predicts.

Should that prove the case, and without new policy, the report warns the result will be the "locking in" of global warming, with a rise of as much as 6° C (about 10.8° F) predicted by the end of the century. Combined with other knock-on effects of population growth on biodiversity, water and health; the report asserts that the ensuing environmental degradation will result in consequences "that could endanger two centuries of rising living standards."

It's been a bad week for climate news. The OECD report follows on from a Reuters story that says we've reached the point where stopping catastrophic global warming is impossible and a study from the UK's Oxford University that found we'd be looking at a far larger warming by 2050 than we had previously anticipated.

Meanwhile, the US, world leader, is enmired in political shennanigans and selfish "top ask" gravy-making that make it impossible to pass any kind of serious legislation on climate change. Read the New Yorker's report "As The World Burns" and weep. (Seriously, read it now.)

"Fifty years from now no one’s going to know about health care...Everybody is going to be thinking about whether Barack Obama was the James Buchanan of climate change."

Today is World Water Day and a U.S. report by the office of the Director of National Intelligence marks the day by predicting wars over water. With the world expected to add another two billion people by 2030, the report says that global water demand is likely to outstrip current sustainable supplies by 40 percent by then. Climate change will of course have an accelerating impact throughout the century.

The report also claims that the U.S. will have a new avenue for global leadership in helping to mitigate the problem worldwide, as it has expertise in water management in both the public and private sectors. If that's so, the D.N.I. has to explain why American towns are running out of water as global warming bites, sending the entire SouthWest into years of drought.

To conserve what little water is left, the state of Texas restricted water use in 1,000 cities and towns last year. Of those, 17 are considered critical -- in danger of running out of water in six months or less.

A quick visit to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo yielded these links:

drought

rising seas

water infrastructure

water pollution

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia's national science agency, released its annual State of the Climate report yesterday.

CSIRO senior research scientist Dr Paul Fraser says the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has reached 390 parts per million.

"We find no evidence going back 800,000 years of CO2 levels above 300 parts per million," he said.

back to the drawing board, people.

Biological fuels are produced as an alternative fuel, intended to replace the burning of oil and gas and thereby reduce global warming. However, since the plants used in the production of biological fuels require fertilizer we cannot eliminate the emission of nitrous oxide; it is a by-product of the process, [] The end result is more or less zero gain. [] Nitrous oxide actually tips the balance in the direction of greater warming, undermining the promise of biological fuels as a means to effect cooling.

The real (albeit vigorously denied) solution is to consume less fuel. Why is that so hard to understand?

Fiona Harvey | Mar 9

The Guardian - The United Nations climate chief has warned that US voters risk ceding progress to China and Europe if they opt for a presidential candidate who denies climate change.

Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told an audience in London: "The one thing [the frontrunners for the Republican candidacy] have in common is saying they do not believe in climate change, so it's very much the decision of the US electorate.

"My concern on this has been: is the US electorate willing to let history progress in such a way that it is China and Europe that are going to produce and benefit from the clean technologies we are going to be using? Is the US electorate willing to let the competitive edge on technology go to China or Europe or would they prefer to be leaders in technology? That is the question they have to answer."

The remarks by Figueres, a self-described "daughter of a revolutionary from Costa Rica", are unlikely to go down well with the Republican candidates, who tend to take a hostile view to the UN as well as climate change. Last year, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives cut funding to the UN climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) says the Bible refutes climate change and it is "outrageous" for anyone to believe differently. "God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."

Yeah...