Good news: they rule out more than 2 meters of sea level coming from Greenland alone in the next century.

Bad news: they can’t rule out up to 2 meters in total.

Estimates for the number of people who would be affected by 1 meter of sea level rise is more than 100 million - mainly in Asia. Gustav’s storm surge in New Orleans saw waves lapping over the top of the levees.  Another little bit of sea level rise would have done New Orleans in, again.

Hmmm, and what about the West Antarctic ice sheet?

Note too, that sea level rise is very much a lagging indicator, and will continue for centuries past the time that atmospheric temperatures have stabilized - if they do.

This press release summarizes the report’s findings.

Key messages of the report include:

• Subsidies often lead to increased levels of consumption and waste, exacerbating the harmful effects of energy use on the environment.
• They can place a heavy burden on government finances, weakening the potential for economies to grow and reducing the potential to invest in social equity.
• They can undermine private and public investment in the energy sector, which can impede the expansion of distribution networks and the development of more environmentally benign energy technologies such as decentralized renewable energy technologies.
• They do not always end up helping the people who need them most.

The environmental damage includes irreversible and possibly catastrophic changes that could affect millions or even billions of people and lead to mass extinctions.

$300 billion is about 0.7% of the value of annual global goods and services. Of course that $300 billion doesn’t include the hundreds of billions the U.S. spends on military adventurism protecting our oil lifelines.

The cost of curtailing carbon emissions to meet scientific goals by 2050 has been estimated at 1% of gross world product.

What’s the cost of not curtailing carbon emissions? Runaway global warming could result in global ecosystem collapse.  Go figure the cost of that. What’s an Earth that supports life as we know it worth? Where would our “economy” be without it?

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The above graphic and a discussion of the paper are posted at RealClimate.

“ . . . global warming will significantly increase the intensity of the most extreme storms worldwide.“

“The maximum wind speeds of the strongest tropical cyclones have increased significantly since 1981 . . . And the upward trend, thought to be driven by rising ocean temperatures, is unlikely to stop at any time soon.”

The team statistically analyzed satellite-derived data of cyclone wind speeds and found a significant shift in distribution towards stronger storms that wreak the greatest havoc. Rising ocean temperatures are thought to be the main cause of the observed shift. The team calculates that a 1 ºC increase in sea-surface temperatures would result in a 31% increase in the global frequency of category 4 and 5 storms per year: from 13 of those storms to 17. Since 1970, the tropical oceans have warmed on average by around 0.5 ºC. Computer models suggest they may warm by a further 2 ºC by 2100.

Oil production in the Gulf has been in a multi-year and likely irreversible decline, due in part to impacts from storms including Katrina. We haven’t seen anything yet.  The Gulf will be increasingly threatened by severe storms that continue to grow in frequency and strength.

Says co-author Dr. Alice Bows:

“Every year that the emissions grow more than anticipated, as they have since 2000, the 2050 target will need to be adjusted. The less we take action now, the more we need to do in the future - and the focus on 2050 means we take our eye off the ball.”

The paper concludes:

“It is increasingly unlikely that an early and explicit global climate change agreement or collective ad hoc national mitigation policies will deliver the urgent and dramatic reversal in emission trends necessary for stabilization at 450 ppmv (parts per million by volume) CO2e.

“Similarly, the mainstream climate change agenda is far removed from the rates of mitigation necessary to stabilize at 550 ppmv CO2e. Given the reluctance, at virtually all levels, to openly engage with the unprecedented scale of both current emissions and their associated growth rates, even an optimistic interpretation of the current framing of climate change implies that stabilisation much below 650 ppmv CO2e is improbable.”

Recall, climate scientists including NASA’s James Hansen now things even 450 ppm isn’t good enough to stabilize Earth’s climate - we have to get back down to 350 ppm.

Some scientists are so freaked that they are beginning to “think the unthinkable.” They speculate humans may have no choice but to try to alter the global climate artificially with mega-engineering projects. Now, it’s not clear which of these geoengineering technologies might work, still less what environmental and social impacts they might have or whether it could ever be prudent or politically acceptable to adopt any of them.

Just how bad have we been doing in addressing the climate crisis? This graph published at Climate Feedback says it all.

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While we talk and talk, emissions continue to go up and up, faster and faster.

And what’s Oregon talking about? The Big Look Task Force is pimping “local control” - or to be open and honest, “open more land to more development.” In other words, business as usual - only more of it.

Here in Oregon we’re not even having a serious discussion.

“If the central role of journalism is to raise the difficult questions that citizens should confront in a democratic society, journalists are not doing their jobs.”

It’s hardly surprising that journalists fail to question technology or the dogma of progress and growth. After all, journalists are as much a part of our culture and are as blind to its underlying ideology as any other occupational group. It’s rare that anyone questions the core assumptions of their society, at any time.  Why would we expect today’s journalists to be any different?

Jensen cites the example of automobiles and the burning of petroleum in internal-combustion engines. While our car-based transportation system has given us the ability to travel considerable distances, this technology also has given us traffic jams and road rage, strip malls and the interstate highway system, horrific carnage and death as a routine and unremarked fact of life. Our high-energy lifestyle has contributed to unprecedented global warming which threatens to destabilize Earth’s climate and unravel Earth’s ecosystems, of which human economies are but a fragile and dependent part.

Jensen argues that the “common response” to the social and ecological pathology of the car culture has not been to rethink the reasons and ways we transport ourselves, but rather to figure out how to replace petroleum so we can continue to drive, leading to the manic quest for “alternative fuels.” But we don’t see the car culture as pathological. In fact, we don’t see the car culture as a “culture” at all. It’s like the air we breath. We are so immersed in it that we take it for granted. It’s simply the world in which we live. We can’t imagine it any other way.

Peak oil threatens to unravel the very fabric of our reality. And it’s our response to peak oil that’s pathological. Rather than change our ways, we try to keep the car culture going at any and all cost.

Our faith in technology is just one element of our broader devotion to economic growth.  We have defined the good life as synonymous with consumption and the ability to acquire more and more of increasingly sophisticated technology. So we continue to pursue progress and economic growth. We cannot see, we refuse to see, that this path leads to death and destruction.

Jensen points out that those who challenge this dogma are routinely ignored or dismissed as naïve. But, Jensen asks, who is really being naïve?

“Naïve, perhaps, but not as naïve as the belief that unsustainable systems can be sustained indefinitely, which is at the heart of the technological fundamentalists’ delusional belief system.”

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Until recently both had been blocked by ice since the beginning of the last Ice Age. In 2005, the northeast passage opened, while the western one remained closed, and last year their positions were reversed. Images gathered by NASA  show that the northwest passage opened last weekend and that the last blockage on the northeastern one – a tongue of ice stretching down to Russia across Siberia’s Laptev Sea – dissolved a few days later.

Arctic ice is now melting quickly and threatening to break last year’s record low. The ice has also been declining in thickness - thickness has dropped by half in just six years. Scientists observe that the region may be transitioning into a different climatic state where completely ice-free summers will become normal. Melting ice produces a positive feedback loop. As white ice is replaced by sea, the dark surface absorbs more heat, warming the ocean and melting more ice.

Örjan Gustafsson, the Swedish leader of the International Siberian Shelf Study, says:

“The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed.”

The tests were carried out in the Laptev and east Siberian seas and used much more precise measuring equipment than previous studies. Scientists fear that global warming may cause Siberia’s permafrost to thaw and thereby release vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times more efficient than carbon dioxide in trapping solar heat.

The Russia-Swedish expedition appeared to confirm a longer term trend based on readings by Russian researcher Igor Semiletov who first detected higher methane readings at several locations in the region in 2003.

The deep permafrost keeps the soil from decomposing, in North America alone, more than 98 petagrams (98 million billion grams) of carbon is stored in frozen soils - that’s one sixth the total in the atmosphere. The size and mix of landscapes in the northern reaches of Europe and Russia are about the same and probably contain a comparable amount of carbon-dioxide producing matter currently held in check only by the cold.

Adding even a fraction of the carbon dioxide or methane stored in Arctic soil to the atmosphere would have a significant impact on Earth’s climate. The climate change models relied upon by the IPCC do not include the potential impact of the gases trapped frozen Arctic soils.

Many transmission lines, and the connections among them, are simply too small for the amount of power companies would like to squeeze through them. The difficulty is most acute for long-distance transmission, but shows up at times even over distances of a few hundred miles. Today’s grid is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power across small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads. What we need, as FERC member Sudeen Kelley says, is “an interstate transmission superhighway system.”

But the grid is balkanized, with about 200,000 miles, or 322,000 kilometers, of power lines divided among 500 owners. States have traditionally exercised authority over the grid but have little incentive to push improvements that would benefit neighboring states. Big transmission upgrades often involve multiple companies, many state governments, and numerous permits. Construction costs are astronomical, and every addition to the grid provokes fights with property owners who do not want to look at a line of power pylons marching across their landscape.

Our rickety grid would have to be transformed if we are to ever achieve  an all-electric automobile fleet.  But that’s just one problem with the dream.

As Richard Heinman points out, cars are inherently inefficient. We can make them smaller and lighter. We can power them with renewable electrons instead of nasty old hydrocarbons. But in the final analysis, pushing a ton or three of steel down the highway just to move a two-hundred pound person to and from a shopping mall is both wasteful and plain stupid in a multitude of ways.

Heinberg consider just two: tires and asphalt.

“Tires are made largely of non-renewable petroleum, and after 40,000 miles or so they tend to wear out. Americans discard them at a rate of one tire per person per year.

“Then there’s the stuff that roads are made of. We build roads compulsively so as to give our precious cars more places to roam, but those roads also soon wear out, so we have to constantly repair them; this requires enormous amounts of asphalt (25 million tons annually in the US). But asphalt is, once again, a petroleum product, and as oil gets scarce the building and maintenance of roads becomes unmanageable.”

“Electric cars are a sparky idea if you consider only what they are designed to replace. But we really need to be thinking about how to reduce our need for motorized transport altogether by redesigning our cities and shortening our supply chains. And where something more than a scooter is necessary, we should move people and freight by rail or water rather than by highway.”

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“Sea ice extent is declining at a fairly brisk and steady pace. Surface melt has mostly ended, but the decline will continue for two to three more weeks because of melt from the bottom and sides of the ice. Amundsen’s Northwest Passage is now navigable; the wider, deeper Northwest Passage through Parry Channel may also open in a matter of days. The Northern Sea Route along the Eurasian coast is clear.”

NSIDC has posted a Quick Time animation of daily sea ice concentration over the past 90 days, pointing out the recent strong losses of ice north of Siberia.

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Sea ice thickness is a key measure of the health of the sea ice.

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“The overall number of traffic fatalities in 2007 reached its lowest level since 1994. The 2007 Annual Assessment of Motor Vehicle Traffic Crash Fatalities and People Injured shows a 3.9-percent decline in people killed in the United States, from 42,708 in 2006 to 41,059. This reduction in fatalities is the largest in terms of both number and percentage since 1992. . .

“Overall VMT decreased by 0.6 percent over 2006 VMT – from 3,014,116 million to 2,996,232 million. VMT data will be updated when FHWA officially releases the 2007 Annual Highway Statistics.”

Over 40,000 people are killed every year by cars? And we accept this as the normal order of things?

Let’s see, 2,752 people were killed on 9/11. We found that so horrific that we invaded two countries, at a cost the government admits is now approaching $600 billion.  More than 4,100 American military have died. In Iraq, civilian casualties are confirmed at around 90,000 and estimated by Johns Hopkins to be in the range of 600,000).

So over 40,000 people are killed every year by our transportation system, and we’re not shocked into demanding a drastic response from our government?

The bill would require each metropolitan region to adopt a “sustainable community strategy” to encourage compact development, designed to meet the greenhouse emissions targets set by the California Air Resources Board which is charged with commanding the state’s fight against global warming.

Here’s the enforcement mechanism: transportation projects that were part of the community plan would get first dibs on the annual $5 billion in transportation money disbursed by Sacramento (projects approved before 2010 would be grandfathered in.)

The development community is bought off by “more certainty” - an exemption from much of the environmental review for projects within the community plan. Local governments also would be required to expedite zoning and allow the builders to actually build.

State Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), who is slated to be the next Senate leader and is the bill’s champion, touts the bill as “smart growth”:

“One issue everyone has been afraid to touch is land use. Everyone understands about using alternative fuel. But land use has been the third rail. AB 32 changed the equation because now land use has to be part of the solution to global warming. You can’t meet our goal just with alternative fuels. You have to reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled.

“If people are going to drive - and they are going to drive - we need to plan in ways to get them out of their cars faster. That means shrinking - not the amount of housing, not economic development, not growth - but shrinking the footprint on which that growth occurs.”

Reality check: we’re not going to grow our way out of our energy and climate crisis. God forbid that the California development machine - which has irretrievably despoiled the state I recall from my youth as embodying paradise - should be derailed.

Growth, population and economic alike, is the problem, not the solution. Progressives and conservatives alike have drunk the growth Kool-Aid. By the time they wake up from the trip,  let’s pray it’s not too late.

OptiSolar, a company that has just begun making a type of solar panel with a thin film of active material, will install 550 megawatts in San Luis Obispo County. The SunPower Corporation, which uses silicon-crystal technology, will build about 250 megawatts at a different location in the same county.

The plants will cover 12.5 square miles with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant.

The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants, which will use photovoltaic technology to turn sunlight directly into electricity, to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants, which use the sun’s heat to boil water.

I’ve pulled out a couple of tidbits:

“Much of our current failing infrastructure was built between the early 1930s and the mid-1960s—an era of vast public works projects that dammed rivers, raised skyscrapers, and laced the nation with interstate highways. The things our parents and grandparents built and the policy choices they made expressed the cultural values, economic and social priorities, and new technologies that dominated their era. Cheap energy allowed them to replace the streetcars and railroads—considered urban wonders by their own grandparents—with the speed and convenience of cars, trucks, and airplanes. It fueled the construction of big single-family houses and vast freeway networks, which in turn encouraged suburban sprawl. In an era when people believed that humans were put on earth to dominate and tame nature, and defined “quality of life” by the quantity of goods consumed, the suggestion that any of this might be permanently damaging the earth—or that it might cause problems down the road that would seriously threaten human existence—was simply absurd.

“Fast forward 60 years, and we’re now in a very different place. It’s all too clear that our grandparents’ technologies, economic priorities and ideas about what comprises a satisfying way of life are creating serious, planet-wide ecological trouble. These days, we realize that we live on a finite planet, and that we’re finally bumping up against its limits. In particular, we don’t have the vast reserves of cheap energy that will allow us to sustain the all the power-hungry systems our ancestors bequeathed to us. Those sprawling post-war cities made perfect sense in their time; but increasingly, they don’t make sense in ours. But because all this stuff is already built—at a tremendous cost in money and material—it’s also daunting to consider just how much of it will have to be rebuilt, refitted, or simply scrapped and replaced (or not) in order adapt to the new realities. . .

“It’s not enough to merely restore what’s already there. We need to take an entirely fresh look at our assumptions about how cities and towns should be built, and put sustainability at the core of all our planning decisions. We might decide to reclaim what our 19th century ancestors knew about building pedestrian-friendly cities, where families lived above shops on lively neighborhood streets; and cozy small towns where everyone lived just a few blocks from Main Street. We might follow the example of Europe, which has closed most of its historic old downtowns to traffic, increased density, and connected its cities with fast electric trains. (The average European maintains a comfortable middle-class lifestyle with an ecological footprint that’s less than half that of the average North American.) And we might rewrite our building and planning codes to encourage the use of green technology, and to reflect the new understandings about sustainable living that our urban planners have been refining over the past 40 years.

The last monthly numbers from the EIA seem to confirm an increase in supply of about 2 mbpd compared to the same month last year. The years 2008 and 2009 should see reasonable supply growth after 2 years of negative growth. A decline is foreseen starting in 2010-2011.

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Possible future supply capacity scenario for crude oil and NGL based on the Wikipedia Oil Megaproject database. The resource base post-2002 decline rate is a linearly increasing rate from 0% to 4.5% between 2003 and  2008 then constant at 4.5% afterward. The decline rate for each annual addition is 4.5% after first year. The observed data points are the monthly crude oil + NGL estimates from the EIA.

The summit produced a long list of recommendations for federal action - most of which are excellent - and a shorter list of recommendations for states, which are pretty tepid and unimaginative. The complete list is below the fold.

Two recommendations are especially troubling. One would “fund research into carbon capture and storage technology.” Clean coal is an oxymoron. Never forget: coal is the enemy of the human race - not a solution to climate change, not a fix for energy independence, and not the logical first step to abandoning petroleum. It’s neither cheap nor clean. It’s environmentally devastating. It destroys human life.

The other troubling recommendation is to subsidize hybrid fuel and plug-in hybrid vehicles. This recommendation parallels one that came out of the recent “Meeting of the Minds” conference in Portland, to which 250 of Oregon’s “most influential” policy and business leaders were invited for “brainstorming and recent research about cities, transportation funding and climate change.”

Governor Kulongoski had earlier appointed a committee of business leaders and government transportation officials which has spent months coming up with ideas for Kulongoski and the Legislature to take up in January. At the conference Kulongoski said:

“The committee will recommend that state tax credits for gas-electric hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius be phased out. They would be replaced with credits targeting the all-electric cars and plug-in hybrids the industry is testing, which could run at 100 miles or more per gallon.”

A subsidy of $1500 is being floated. That’s $1500 out of the pockets of walkers and bicyclists into the pockets of car owner to encourage driving. Jim Kunstler has long warned that we’ll squander what remains of our precious and dwindling resources trying to keep our happy motoring republic rolling at all costs. He’s proving to be prescient.

The consensus recommendations are:

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For example, today I came across this screed asserting that people are wrong to worry about peak oil and climate change. Human ingenuity and the laws of economics will bail us out. All that’s needed is more investment and more technology to assure abundant fossil fuel supplies, that carbon can be safely squirreled away, and that new energy sources will emerge to bail us out anyway. Same old faith-based gibberish, not worth the effort of a response.

Contrast this article at The Oil Drum: Europe: Should EROEI be the most important criterion our society uses to decide how it meets its energy needs? It’s refreshing for its clear, hard thinking.

Energy returned on energy invested (EROEI or EROI) is a concept that mirrors the financial metric return on investment (ROI). In order to make an energy gain or “profit”, energy or work must be consumed or exerted. The energy gain or profit is referred to as “net energy”. EROEI is usually expressed as a ratio, or occasionally as a percentage.

Adam Dadeby argues that society’s key decision-making mainstream – financial markets, governments, legislative bodies, and civil service and policy-making and lobbying bodies – show little evidence that the concept and significance of EROEI is grasped or accepted.

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Alaska has already experienced the largest regional warming of any U.S. state - an average 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) since the 1960s and about 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.5 degrees Celsius) in the interior of the state during winter months. Climate change will lead to droughts, forest fires, and infestations of tree-killing insects like spruce beetles and spruce budworm moths.

So even as forests spread to areas where trees couldn’t grow before, our changing climate threatens existing forests with destruction. And new research shows that temperate forests play a much more important role in carbon sequestration than we thought. An article in New Scientist reports:

Pristine temperate forest stores three times more carbon than currently estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and 60% more than plantation forests, according to research in Australia.

The effects of climate change are being felt around the world. Researchers in France have found that the delicate balance of wildlife in different ecosystems is changing up to eight times more quickly than previously suspected, with potentially severe consequences for some species.

One problem is desynchronization. If birds and the insects upon which they depend do not react to climate change in the same way, there’s an upheaval in the interaction between species.

The study showed that the geographic range of 105 birds species in France - accounting for 99.5 percent of the country’s wild avian population - moved north, on average, 91 kilometers (56.5 miles) from 1989 through 2006. Average temperatures, however, shifted northward 273 kilometers (170 miles) over the same period, nearly three times farther. While birds are responding to climate change, the gap with rising temperatures is big and getting bigger.

International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that world production of total liquids increased by 890,000 barrels per day in July from June, resulting in total world liquids production of 87.84 million b/d. Average global production in 2007 was 85.41 million b/d.  2008 average production was 87.08 million b/d from January to July. US Energy Information Administration (EIA) data differs significantly, showing average global 2007 production at 84.44 million b/d and average production in the first five months of 2008 at 85.49 million b/d.

Oil demand is down, due almost entirely to declining consumption in the U.S.

The Oil Drum: Europe has posted a summary and this chart:

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But spare capacity is still shrinking, and finite supplies will never be able to meet the infinite future demand that our ideology of growth requires.

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Energy expert Matt Simmons says that all fundamentals remain in place for energy prices to resume their skyward climb to levels quite beyond records of a month ago - in fact, the supply-demand fundamentals that drive oil prices “have actually gotten worse”: (more…)