ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Scientists have concluded that Canada’s precious forests, stressed from damage caused by global warming, insect infestations and persistent fires, have crossed an ominous line and are now pumping out more climate-changing carbon dioxide than they are sequestering.

Canada’s 1.2 million square miles of trees account for more than 7 percent of Earth’s total forest lands. As the “lungs of the planet,” they could be depended upon to suck up and sequester vast quantities of carbon dioxide.

In a series of recent studies  scientists have concluded that Canada’s forests, stressed from damage caused by global warming, insect infestations and persistent fires, are now pumping out more carbon dioxide than they are sequestering. They’ve shifted from being a carbon sink to a carbon source.

This post is based on a story by Howard Witt in the Chicago Tribune that has been widely distributed and cited. The story referenced “a series of recent studies” but failed to identify or cite to any of them. I searched the web for them, hoping to provide a link to one or more of the actual studies that Witt refers to and supposedly relies on, to no avail.  Drives me nuts.

Professor James Hansen, head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s preeminant global warming scientist, has written a personal  letter to Barack and Michelle Obama, warning of the “profound disconnect” between the politics of climate change and the magnitude of the problem:

There is a profound disconnect between actions that policy circles are considering and what the science demands for preservation of the planet. . .

Science and policy cannot be divorced. It is still feasible to avert climate disasters, but only if policies are consistent with what science indicates to be required.

Hansen makes three recommendations for action:

• Moratorium and phase-out of coal plants that do not capture and store CO2.
• Rising price on carbon emissions via a “carbon tax and 100% dividend”.
• Urgent R&D on 4th generation nuclear power with international cooperation.

Hansen says focusing on “cap and trade” schemes not only wastes valuable time. Cap and trade generates special interests, lobbyists, and trading schemes, yielding non productive millionaires, all at public expense. He advocates instead a carbon tax with 100% dividend, we he argues “would spur our economy, while aiding the disadvantaged, the climate, and our national security.”

Insisting on a 100% return of carbon tax proceeds is a continuation of the anti-government, free market fundamentalism that has gotten us into the economic and environmental pickle we find ourselves in.

Hansen doesn’t ignore the radioactive waste and proliferation problems with nuclear power, but thinks they can be handled. He fingers cost as the primary hurdle. But here’s why nuclear will never be the answer to our energy needs. Hansen, while acknowledging that “there’s no such thing as clean coal at this time,” also thinks CCS deserves strong R&D support.  As the disaster in Tennessee demonstrates, there is and can never be any such thing as clean coal.

While Hansen may be one of the world’s top scientists, that doesn’t mean he’s one of the world’s top economists, philosophers, or historians.

While Hansen has done the world a great service in the realm of climate science, his ideas outside of the realm of science are warped by historicism. He is deeply enmeshed within the myth of progress, wedded to ever-increasing technological complexity which he believes will enable us to overcome the ecological limits that he was among the first to warn were approaching.

Telling people they can have it all - fix the climate and solve the energy crisis while continuing business-as-usual - is not the way to motivate people to insist on action. Instead, it sends out the message, “relax, everything’s going to be okay.”

Joseph Romm in a blog post lauds a McKinsey Global Institute report - “The carbon productivity challenge: Curbing climate change and sustaining economic growth” - for taking on the “myth” that addressing climate change “will hurt economic growth and force consumers to make unwanted changes in their lifestyle.”

The McKinsey Global Institute insists that “any successful program of action on climate change must support two objectives - stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) and maintaining economic growth.” Joseph Romm, by agreeing, is harming rather than advancing the mission of his blog undertaking, which is to foment prompt and effective action to stop climate change.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, economic growth has rested and continues to rest on increased energy consumption.  We are now seeing the results of that endeavor. As the size of the human economy has increased to take up and dominate an ever larger portion of the global ecosystem, it is bumping up against limits to both resource sources and sinks. Infinite exponential growth within a closed system is an absurd idea. Pursuing it will inevitably lead to collapse from one or a collection of system failures.

As Jim Kunstler warns, a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources.

Romm is not unaware of our fossil fuel predicament.  He’s outlined a road to a carbon-free future, so understands the scale of the problem.

Can we use energy more efficiently? Of course. Most of the energy we use is wasted, largely because of the unsustainable way we live now. We need more than a technological fix. We need to take a holistic approach to thinking about how society as a whole should be organized to achieve our goals. And where we live has more to do with the amount of energy we use - and the amount of energy we could save - than almost any other factor.

Can we transition to a way of living that is decent and satisfying while not dependent on fossil fuels? Yes - but not if we squander precious resources and time trying to hang on to the status quo.

The biggest myth in the way of adjusting to our new reality is that economic growth is necessary for and leads to increased human happiness. GDP was initially to serve as a proxy yardstick, an indirect measure of human well being. But like the broomstick in the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, the yardstick has taken over and is out of control.

We have become blinded by growth to the extent that in pursuing it, the ability of Earth to sustain humans and countless other species is being radically disturbed. It’s past time for the master to return, break the spell, and save the day - before it’s too late.

Dave Rutledge, chair of Caltech’s engineering and applied sciences division, says Earth’s coal reserves are far smaller than we think.  He estimates that humans will only pull up a total - including all past mining - of 662 billion tons of coal out of the Earth. That’s a lot less than the conventional wisdom.  The World Energy Council, for example, says that the world has almost 850 billion tons of coal still left to be mined.

If Rutledge is right, that’s good news for climate - but maybe not such good news for our grandchildren.  We’ll have squandered their energy inheritance in an orgy of self-indulgence.

This graph uses Rutledge’s estimates for coal reserves, along with oil and natural gas assessments from ASPO.

According to Rutledge, the world could burn all the world’s coal and other fossil fuels and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would only end up around 460 parts per million, which is predicted to cause a 2-degree-Celsius rise in global temperatures.

That’s far above the 350 ppm Hansen and others warn is the target we need to hit if we are to avoid passing tipping points, sending Earth into a spiral of catastrophic climate change, But it’s far short  of devastating scenarios laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There is more than enough coal to keep CO2 well above 350 ppm well beyond this century, even if Rutledge is right.

Whether Rutledge is right or not, the imperative to develop non–fossil-fuel energy sources remains.

Climate change is likely to produce significant new stresses and alterations to water quantity and quality, fish, wildlife, plant life, forests and fire regimes of the Rogue Basin.

So say the scientists who wrote Preparing For Climate Change in the Rogue River Basin of Southwest Oregon. The research team included Bob Doppelt and Roger Hamilton from the University of Oregon Climate Leadership Initiative, Cindy Deacon Williams from the National Center for Conservation Science & Policy, and Marni Koopman from the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station.

The team downscaled three climate models (CSIRO, MIROC, and Hadley) and incorporated a global vegetation change model (MC1) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They then assessed the likely risks posed by changing climate conditions to natural systems. Finally, they made recommendations for increasing the capacity of ecosystems and species to withstand and adapt to those stressors.

Expected impacts within the Rogue Basin include:

• An increase in annual average temperatures from 1 to 3° F (0.5 to 1.6° C) by around 2040 and 4 to 8° by around 2080, with summer temperatures increasing dramatically by up to 15° (8.3° C).
• Snowpack reduced 75% from the baseline by 2040, and another 75% from 2040 to an insignificant amount by 2080.
• Both deeper drought and more extensive flooding.
• Significantly more wildfire due to reduced snowpack and soil moisture, hotter temperatures, and longer fire seasons.
• Increased vulnerability of aquatic and terrestrial species.
• Increased disruption and direct damage to energy infrastructure, transportation systems, buildings, and real estate.
• Tougher times for agriculture, timber, and winter recreation.

The report cautions that even if efforts to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80% or more and other global efforts to restabilize the climate are realized (fat chance!), it will take fifty years or more for this to occur because of the residence time of emissions already built-up in the atmosphere.  These consequences of climate change are already built in to the system.

In other words, we’ve already screwed the pooch.

Climate Feedback reports that new research presented at the AGU conference last week finds that the entire Antarctic continent has warmed significantly over the past 50 years.

The study suggests that warming is not limited to the Antarctica peninsula region. As well as uncovering evidence of warming over a wider region than previous studies have shown, the researchers found that warming occurred throughout all of the year and was greatest in winter and spring. In contrast, cooling over east Antarctica was restricted to autumn.

This week the American Geophysical Union has been holding its fall conference in San Francisco. Here are some highlights.

While many of the scientists presenting work dithered with whether stabilizing at 450ppm – or even higher – is economically and technologically feasible, James Hansen called for atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations to be restricted to 350ppm. Hansen has said that we lower our target from 2°C to a 1°C increase above pre-industrial levels.

Olive Heffernon reports at Climate Feedback:

What is striking about the discussions on climate stabilization here this week is the overwhelming acceptance that we’ll overshoot even the 2°C target.

Dr. Eric Rignot, one of the world’s top ice sheet and sea-level rise experts, told attendees that one meter sea level rise by 2100 is “very likely” if the rate of ice melt just stays the same. What he didn’t address is what will happen if the rate of melt increases - as is expected.

Prof. David Rutledge of Caltech told the press that the fate of Earth’s climate hinges on the size of the world’s coal reserves - but how much coal remains is highly uncertain. Rutledge has estimated that coal reserves are much less than assumed in the IPCC scenarios and combustion of all remaining conventional oil, gas, and coal reserves would produce an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide of approximately 470 ppm in 2100, not too much above the 450 ppm that many climatologists argue we must achieve to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Of course that doesn’t consider feedback effects or other carbon sources such as methane. University of Alaska, Fairbanks scientists reported alarming news:

A team led by International Arctic Research Center scientist Igor Semiletov has found data to suggest that the carbon pool beneath the Arctic Ocean is leaking. . .

The new data indicates the underwater permafrost is thawing and therefore releasing methane. Permafrost can affect methane release in two ways. Both underwater and on land, it contains frozen organic material such as dead plants and animals. When permafrost thaws, that organic material decomposes, releasing gases like methane and carbon dioxide. In addition, methane, either in gas form or in ice-like methane hydrates, is trapped underneath the permafrost. When the permafrost thaws, the trapped methane can seep out through the thawed soil. Methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, is thought to be an important factor in global climate change.

Incredibly, scientists, industry leaders and governments throughout the world are looking to methane to replace depleting oil and natural gas (Japan has a methane hydrate program and a state-backed drilling company has managed to extract industrial quantities of the gas). The amount of methane trapped as hydrates globally exceeds by many times the total combined oil, coal and natural gas reserves that have ever existed on earth. Release of methane  correlates with previous rapid global warming events in Earth’s history.

Tar sands, oil shale development, deepwater oil extraction, the ongoing proliferation of coal-fired power plants, now methane hydrates.  Methane hydrates - what are they thinking? Are humans as a species truly suicidal?

Today marks the release of the ‘meteorological year’ (December - November) averages for the surface temperature records (GISTEMP, HadCRU, NCDC).

RealClimate advises looking at 5-year averages, as this cuts through the “noise” in the annual numbers. What do we see?

More robustly, the most recent 5-year averages are all significantly higher than any in the last century. The last decade is by far the warmest decade globally in the record.

NOAA has posted a summary of 2008 highlights. NCDC, using a calendar year, ranks 2008 as ninth warmest if expected trends continue through December. A similar NASA analysis indicates that the January – November global temperature was 0.76 degree F (0.42 degree C) above the 20th century mean.

NOAA reports that the global land surface temperature for 2008 was the fifth warmest on record, with an average temperature 1.44 degrees F (0.80 degree C) above the 20th century mean of 48.1 degrees F (9.0 degrees C). Looking at the land data alone filters out the cooling impact of the La Niña that impacted the Pacific in the first half of the year.

Arctic sea ice extent in 2008 reached its second lowest melt season extent on record.

The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season was the third most costly on record in current dollars, after 2005 and 2004, and the fourth most active year since 1944.

The United States Geological Survey has published a new report titled Abrupt Climate Change. Peter Clark and Edward Brook, both of whom are in the Department of Geosciences at Oregon State University, were contributors to the report.

Chapter 2, “Rapid Changes in Glaciers and Ice Sheets and their Impacts on Sea Level,” observes that our current models can’t predict the changes in ice sheets and glaciers that we’re already seeing. The report reviews the new data accumulating about ice flow processes and concludes that “Inclusion of these processes in models will likely lead to sea-level projections for the end of the 21st century that substantially exceed the projections presented in the IPCC AR4 report (0.28 ± 0.10 m to 0.42 ± 0.16 m rise).”

During the last interglacial period (~120 thousand years ago) with similar carbon dioxide levels to pre-industrial values and Arctic summer temperatures up to 4° C warmer than today, sea level was 4-6 meters above present. The report points out the obvious: with sufficient time at elevated atmospheric CO2 levels, sea levels will continue to rise to historic levels as ice sheets continue to lose mass.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress point out that the recent post-IPCC literature has been quite consistent in warning of sea level rise of one meter or more by 2100. There’s a 2008 Science study  (“Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100”), a 2007 Science article (A Semi-Empirical Approach to Projecting Future Sea-Level Rise) projecting that sea levels could be up to 5 feet higher in 2100 and rising 6 inches a decade, and another 2007 study from Nature Geoscience (“Sea levels may rise 5 feet by 2100“) that came to the same conclusion.

Chapter 3, “Hydrological Variability and Change,” concludes that subtropical aridity is likely to intensify and persist due to future greenhouse warming. This projected drying extends poleward into the United States Southwest, potentially increasing the likelihood of severe and persistent drought there in the future. If the model results are correct, this drying may have already begun.

The U.S. Southwest could see a permanent drying by the mid-21st century similar to the historic “megadroughts” that occurred from about A.D. 900 up to about A.D. 1600 - even though the cause of these previous droughts was not similar, as they occurred in a climate system “that was not being perturbed in a major way be humans.”

A new study from scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) says that Arctic ice is in its death spiral.

The UK Independent reports:

Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen.

Climate-change researchers have found that air temperatures in the region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean. The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover.

The Arctic is considered one of the most sensitive regions in terms of climate change and its transition to another climatic state will have a direct impact on other parts of the northern hemisphere, as well more indirect effects around the world.

Scientists’ models have predicted totally ice-free summers in the Arctic sometime in the last half of this century, but many scientists now believe that the first ice-free summer could occur within the next 20 years.

The loss of Arctic ice has serious consequences for amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks, as the accelerated warming signal penetrates up to 1500 km inland. Joseph Romm sums it up at Climate Progress:

Once the Arctic sea ice goes, it becomes much harder to save the defrosting of the tundra, which contains as much carbon as the atmosphere, much of which is likely to be released as methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

New NASA satellite data reveals more than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland,  Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003.

Bill McKibben reports from Poznan that we’ve been pretending that the process to do something about global warming is working. The real problem with the process is that’s no longer consistent with the science of global warming.

These interminable talks are designed to build a machine that would halt the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 to 550 parts per million. They’re so loaded with loopholes, and the timetables are so slow, that they probably wouldn’t accomplish even that, but that’s the goal. The theory is that the world we need is a 450 world, based on the science from five and 10 and 15 years ago. But a year ago, our leading scientific authority on climate change, NASA’s James Hansen, said that was wrong. All the data that he and his team assembled suggested that 350 parts per million was the maximum possible if we wished to keep “a planet similar to that on which civilization developed, and to which life on earth is adapted.” They pointed to not just the Arctic melt, but the shocking thaw of sub-tropical glaciers, the shifting of monsoonal rain patterns, and the rapidly developing fear that Greenland and the West Antarctic could raise sea levels much more quickly than we’d previously imagined. They said — in the context of these talks — that the sun does not in fact revolve around the Earth.

As McKibben puts it, we’ve been engaged in saving the treaty, not saving the world. We need to save the world. Meanwhile, the talks drag on, increasingly irrelevant.

The only course of action left is to change the political reality.

Both Hansen, the leading scientific authority on climate change, and Gore, the leading political voice, have endorsed the idea of 350 as the only rational target. They’ve said the world circles the sun. Now we have to proceed on that understanding. It won’t be easy - “political reality” says it’s impossible. But political reality is easier to change than scientific reality. Since we can’t change the laws of physics, we’re going to have to try and change the laws of man.

Stanford professor Mark Jacobson has published a study which compares the global warming consequences of different energy alternatives.

Joseph Romm has posted this chart at Climate Progress.  Wind and concentrated solar power are the best, hands down. CCS (carbon capture and storage, or the oxymoronic “clean coal”, is by far the filthiest)

In addition to global warming, the paper looks at other factors, too: air pollution mortality, and energy security, water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition. As this chart (posted at Gristmill) shows, cellulosic ethanol is the worst, with corn ethanol right behind:

The study, “Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security“, was published in Energy and Environmental Science.

Last Thursday (December 11) the California Air Resources Board approved a plan to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 while, as the press release promises, “growing” the economy in “a clean and sustainable direction.”

The state’s emissions account for about 1.5% of the world’s emissions.

California’s plan is to use a “balanced mix” of strategies to cut emissions by approximately 30%. A cap-and-trade program covering 85% of the state’s emissions, developed in conjunction with the Western Climate Initiative comprised of seven states and four Canadian provinces, is a key component. Environmental organizations want participants to buy the credits in an auction, while affected businesses and organizations such as the California Taxpayers Association want them for free.  The Board pledged to “gradually move” toward a system to auction 100% of greenhouse gas permits. Energy analysts predict the auctions could bring in $1 billion at the outset and up to $340 million per year by 2020 - revenue which could be used to transit to a “green economy.”

The plan will require local governments to reduce sprawling development. Increased efficiency standards for new and existing buildings are also proposed.

The plan proposes full deployment of the California Solar Initiative, which would require utilities to produce 33%t of their energy from renewable sources.

Other components of the plan include high-speed rail, water-related energy efficiency measures and a range of regulations to reduce emissions from trucks and from ships docked in California ports, and measures to lower methane levels in landfills and encourage high levels of recycling and zero trash in landfills. The plan would also reduce or recover a range of refrigerants and other industrial greenhouse gases that are many times more potent than carbon dioxide.

The Scoping Plan and all appendices are available here.

The spinners are working overtime:

Europe secured the world’s broadest agreement yet to battle global warming on Friday after helping east European states pay for changes that will punish their heavily polluting power sectors and industries.

The Reuters article quotes French President Nicolas Sarkozy:

This is quite historic. You will not find another continent in this world that has given itself such binding rules.

The sad truth is, the whole package was decided based more on the self-interests of industry than on the need to actually reduce emissions and save the planet.

On a lighter note, NGOs made fun of President Sarkozy’s “impotent package.”

The passive house could play a major role in cutting energy consumption and stopping global warming. All it would take is radically altering our building practices.

A Passive House is a very well-insulated, virtually air-tight building that is primarily heated by passive solar gain and by internal gains from people, electrical equipment, etc. Energy losses are minimized. Any remaining heat demand is provided by an extremely small source. Avoidance of heat gain through shading and window orientation also helps to limit any cooling load, which is similarly minimized. An energy recovery ventilator provides a constant, balanced fresh air supply. The result is an impressive system that not only saves up to 90% of space heating costs while also providing excellent indoor air quality.

To be called a “passive house,” a building must meet the passive house performance standards which are set by the Passive House Institute in Germany. The basic standard is that a building must consume no more than 15 kilowatt-hours per square meter in heating energy per year (equivalent to 4746 BTU per square foot per year). This is achieved by constructing a building envelope, (floors, walls, ceilings, and a roof) that is extremely well insulated and air tight. This means R40 in the walls and R60 in the roof and floor. The building must not leak more air than 0.6 times the house volume per hour at 50 pascals of pressure. The result is a building that uses 90% less heating and air conditioning energy than a typical building according to the Passive House Institute US.

If all new houses were to be passive and existing homes were fully retrofitted to the passive house standards, we would be far along the road to stabilizing our climate.

Buildings are responsible for almost half of U.S. energy consumption.

Warning that the survival of human civilization is at risk, Al Gore exhorted delegates at the international climate to overcome the paralysis that has prevented us from acting and focus clearly and unblinkingly on the climate crisis - and to aim for a new target of 350 parts per million co2.

Even a goal of 450 parts per million, which seems so difficult today, is inadequate. [We] need to toughen that goal to 350 parts per million.

Gore said that old targets for fighting global warming have been made obsolete by new science.

For the science behind the 350 ppm target see the study by Hansen et al, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” in The Open Atmospheric Science Journal.

The Energy Information Administration has just released its final report for 2007. Guess what? Greenhouse gas emissions are up.

Total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2007 were 1.4 percent above the 2006 total. . .

Total emissions growth . . was largely the result of a[n] . . . increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. There were larger percentage increases in emissions of other greenhouse gases, but their absolute contributions to total emissions growth were relatively small . . .

The increase in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2007 resulted primarily from two factors: unfavorable weather conditions, which increased demand for heating and cooling in buildings; and a drop in hydropower availability that led to greater reliance
on fossil energy sources (coal and natural gas) for electricity generation, increasing the carbon intensity of the power supply.

U.S. emissions were about 21 percent of the world total. OECD country emissions - the developed countries of North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia/New Zealand - are estimated at 48 percent of the world total.

The report projects that U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will continue to increase at an average annual rate of 0.5 percent from 2005 to 2030, with emissions from the non-OECD economies growing by 2.5 percent per year.

That’s not good news for those of us concerned about global warming. We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, steeply and beginning immediately. But it’s not happening.

Ralph Nader is calling for a global carbon tax. Nader argues a tax on CO2 emissions - not a cap-and-trade system - offers “the best prospect of meaningfully engaging China and the U.S., while avoiding the prospect of unhinged environmental protectionism.” Nader argues that cap-and-trade proposals won’t work in the real world, comparing them to “Swiss cheese”; and that we need the same price on carbon everywhere, or schemes to control carbon won’t work anywhere.

Both carbon tax and cap-and-trade schemes aim to put a price on the externalities of fossil fuel use. Underlying this approach is the faith that market-based mechanisms are superior to any regulatory approach. You’d think our faith in free markets would be wavering a bit by now.

What’s really needed if we are to minimize the danger of dangerous and irreversible climate change is to leave coal (and unconventional oil) in the ground. This requires that we stop building coal plants and phase out the use of coal within a time certain. This situation is tailor made for a regulatory, not a market-based, solution. Tax or cap-and trade policies can be effective, not to bring the use of coal and unconventional oil to a halt, but to make room for and encourage the development of alternative, renewable sources of energy.

Even as international climate talks are beginning in Poznan, Poland, the world’s top climate scientists are warning that Earth’s climate is changing more quickly and deeply than the benchmark IPCC report predicted just last year.

New studies are showing that human activity may be triggering powerful natural forces that may be nearly impossible to reverse and that could push temperatures up even further. At the top of the list is the rapid melting of the Arctic ice cap. When the reflective ice surface retreats, the Sun’s radiation is absorbed by open water rather than bounced back into the atmosphere in a positive feedback loop of heating.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has a great summary of  why scientists are running around with their hair on fire:

Joe Romm passes along the news today that Himalayan glaciers are melting faster than anyone has previously predicted. You can add this to Romm’s list of other climate change impacts that are happening faster than most climate models predict, including the canonical IPCC models:

• “The recent [Arctic] sea-ice retreat is larger than in any of the (19) IPCC [climate] models” [PDF] — and that was a Norwegian expert in 2005. The retreat has accelerated in the past two years.
• The ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.” That was Penn State climatologist Richard Alley in March 2006. In 2001, the IPCC thought that neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.
• Sea-level rise from 1993 and 2006 — 3.3 millimetres per year as measured by satellites — was higher than the IPCC climate models predicted.
• The ocean carbon sink is saturating sooner than expected.
• The subtropics are expanding faster than the models project.

This op-ed by Elliot Diringer, Pew Center on Global Climate Change illustrates why cap-and-trade schemes are a waste of precious time and political energy. They simply can’t accomplish what is necessary to accomplish within the time frame necessary to avert climate catastrophe.

What’s needed is an international agreement to not build any more coal-fired power plants (without carbon capture and storage, which of course is not feasible) and to phase out existing coal plants within 20 years.