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Notes It's Gettin' Hot in Here: 'The Political Benefits of Taking a Pro-Climate Stand in 2012'From The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication:
… at the national level and among ten key swing states – taking a proclimate stand appears to benefit candidates more than hurt them with registered voters. Of course, the political dynamics in any given district may be an exception to this pattern, but it is important to note that the pattern is similar at both the national and swing-state scales.
A few highlights:
• A majority of all registered voters (55%) say they will consider candidates’ views on global warming when deciding how to vote.
• Among these climate change issue voters, large majorities believe global warming is happening and support action by the U.S. to reduce global warming, even if it has economic costs.
• Independents lean toward “climate action” and look more like Democrats than Republicans on the issue.
• A pro-climate action position wins votes among Democrats and Independents, and has little negative impact with Republican voters.
• Policies to reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels and promote renewable energy are favored by a majority of registered voters across party lines.
• These patterns are found nationally and among ten swing states.
Read the rest of the article here.
Related:
- ‘Our summer of climate truth’ (Project Syndicate)
- ‘Why climate literacy matters’ (Daily Kos)
- ‘Candidates clam up on climate’ (Columbia Journalism Review)
- ‘Climate science as culture war’ (Stanford Social Innovation Review)
- ‘Enviros want climate question at Obama-Romney debate’ (The Hill)
(Tom Toles editorial cartoon: Washington Post via Go Comics)
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Notes
“Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.”
~ Carl SaganRelated:
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Notes Extreme Weather: 'The Energy - Water Collision' (Infographic) -
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NotesIt’s Gettin’ Hot in Here: ‘2012 Drought Update’ (Video)
From The Yale Climate Media Forum via YouTube:
The Drought of 2012 rivals the Great Dust Bowl years of the 30s and is coming at a time of melting arctic ice, shrinking ice sheets, and extreme events across the planet, matching the projections of climate models for global warming.
Related:
- ‘U.S. Drought and Climate Change: Science Points to Link’ (Wired)
- Thomas Homer-Dixon: ‘Climate change’s costs hit the plate’ (Globe & Mail)
(Map source: US Drought Monitor)
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Notes"How should we think about the relationship between climate change and day-to-day experience? Almost a quarter of a century ago James Hansen, the NASA scientist who did more than anyone to put climate change on the agenda, suggested the analogy of loaded dice. Imagine, he and his associates suggested, representing the probabilities of a hot, average or cold summer by historical standards as a die with two faces painted red, two white and two blue. By the early 21st century, they predicted, it would be as if four of the faces were red, one white and one blue. Hot summers would become much more frequent, but there would still be cold summers now and then.
And so it has proved. As documented in a new paper by Dr. Hansen and others, cold summers by historical standards still happen, but rarely, while hot summers have in fact become roughly twice as prevalent. And 9 of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.
But that’s not all: really extreme high temperatures, the kind of thing that used to happen very rarely in the past, have now become fairly common. Think of it as rolling two sixes, which happens less than 3 percent of the time with fair dice, but more often when the dice are loaded. And this rising incidence of extreme events, reflecting the same variability of weather that can obscure the reality of climate change, means that the costs of climate change aren’t a distant prospect, decades in the future. On the contrary, they’re already here, even though so far global temperatures are only about 1 degree Fahrenheit above their historical norms, a small fraction of their eventual rise if we don’t act.
"A quote from Paul Krugman’s recent piece in the New York Times, ‘Loading the Climate Dice’. You can check out the rest of the article here and the James Hansen paper referred to in Krugman’s article here.
Related:
- ‘Record Summer Temperatures, By The Numbers’ (Climate Central)
- ‘Study: Many U.S. cities unprepared for future heat waves’ (Washington Post)
(Infographic source: Climate Central)
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Notes"Globally, June was 4th warmest on record, NOAA announced today. And over the Northern Hemisphere, for the second consecutive month, temperatures were as warm as they’ve been in 133 years of records. Notably, the Arctic experienced its largest June sea ice loss since the start of satellite records in 1979.
It was the 36th consecutive June and 328th consecutive month with temperatures warmer than the 20th century average, NOAA said…
The decline of Arctic sea ice is one of the more telling indicators of recent warmth in the Northern Hemisphere. The Arctic lost the equivalent of 1.1 million square miles of ice in June (most on record), its extent falling to 9.8 percent below average, second lowest on record (since 1979).
Snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere, another indicator of temperature, reached its lowest extent in 45 years of June records.
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A quote from the Washington Post article, ‘Northern hemisphere warmest on record, Arctic ice has biggest melt in June’.
Related:
- Report: ‘State of the Climate: Global Analysis June 2012’ (NOAA)
- ‘Scientists attribute extreme weather to man-made climate change’ (The Guardian)
- ‘Spurred by record heat, drought stretches across U.S. (Climate Central)
- ‘Drought in Central, Eastern Canada baking crops’ (CBC) (H/T Climate Adaptation)
- ‘Drought Worst In A Century For North And South Korea’ (Huffington Post)
- ‘Merkel warns of global warming if no climate accord’ (Reuters)
(Map source: NOAA)
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Notes Extreme Weather: 'Continental U.S. breaks heat record in first half of 2012'
From Reuters:
Scorching temperatures in June’s second half helped the continental United States break its record for the hottest first six months in a calendar year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Monday.
The last 12 months also have been the warmest since modern record-keeping began in 1895, narrowly beating the previous 12-month period that ended in May 2012.
Every state except Washington in the contiguous United States had warmer-than-average temperatures for the June 2011-June 2012 period.
The recent blistering heat wave broke records across much of the United States, threatening the Midwest’s corn crop and helping to fan destructive wildfires.
June was 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer in the lower 48 states than the 20th-century average, but still just the 14th hottest June in the record books, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center said in a statement.
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Such record-high temperatures are in line with a long-term warming trend in the 48 contiguous states, said Jake Crouch, a scientist at the National Climatic Data Center.
Climate change spurred by carbon dioxide emissions may not be the primary cause, but these extreme conditions are consistent with what scientists see as a “new normal,” Crouch said by telephone.
“It’s hard to pinpoint climate change as the driving factor, but it appears that it is playing a role,” he said. “What’s going on for 2012 is exactly what we would expect from climate change.”
Check out the rest of the article here.
Related:
- ‘Society not ready for heat waves coming with climate change’ (USA Today)
- ‘Corn growers in hell as Midwest heat spreads’ (Business Week)
- ‘Past 12 months warmest ever recorded in United States’ (CNN)
(Map credit: NOAA)
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NotesExtreme Weather in the USA: ‘Over 15,000 Records Broken as March 2012 Becomes Warmest on Record’
From NOAA Visualizations:
According to NOAA scientists at the National Climatic Data Center (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/), record and near-record breaking temperatures dominated the eastern two-thirds of the nation and contributed to the warmest March on record for the contiguous United States, a record that dates back to 1895. This animation shows the locations of each of the 7,755 daytime and 7,517 nighttime records (or tied records) in sequence over the 31 days in March.
(Graphic source: NOAA)
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Notes 'Wild weather worsening due to climate change, IPCC confirms'
From Yale e360:
A draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says there is a 2-in-3 probability that human-caused climate change is already leading to an increase in extreme weather events. The draft summary, obtained by the Associated Press, said that increasingly wild weather, such as the downpours that have caused recent extreme flooding in Thailand, will lead to a growing toll in lost lives and property damage, and will render some locations “increasingly marginal as places to live.” The report says that scientists are “virtually certain” that continued warming will cause not only an increase in extreme heat waves and drought in some regions, but also will generate more intense downpours that lead to severe flooding.
Check out the rest of the article here.
(Photo credit: The Boston Globe)
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Notes “White roofs” save energy, cool cities, create jobs, fight climate change and more!
From Reuters:
Painting black tar roofs with a white, solar-reflective coating is a low cost, quick and tangible way to reduce the risk of power grid ‘brown-outs’, save millions of dollars in energy costs, and curb climate change. The statistics are as simple as they are staggering: A roof covered with solar-reflective white paint reflects up to 90% of sunlight as opposed to the 20% reflected by a traditional black roof. On a 90°F day, a black roof can be up to 180°F. That heat has a major impact on interior building temperature, potentially heating your room to between 115 – 125°F. A white roof stays a cool 100°F. Plus the inside of the building stays cooler than the air outdoors, around 80°F in this example, reducing cooling costs.
White roofs also reduce the “urban heat island” effect in which temperatures rise in dense urban areas because of the proliferation of heat-radiating, black tar surfaces. For example, the Urban Heat Island effect causes New York City to be about 5 degrees warmer than surrounding suburbs and accounts for 5 to 10 percent of summer electricity use.
In New York City alone, 12% of all surfaces are rooftops. It’s estimated that implementing a white roof program in 11 metropolitan cities could save the United States 7 gigawatts in energy usage. That’s the equivalent of turning off 14 power plants, and a cost savings of $750 million per year.
Recently, former President Bill Clinton wrote in Newsweek, “Every black roof in New York should be white; every roof in Chicago should be white; every roof in Little Rock should be white. Every flat tar-surface roof anywhere! In most of these places you could recover the cost of the paint and the labor in a week.” The former president regularly touts the white roofs as one of those win-win scenarios that could also help create jobs and stimulate the economy.
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If we were to coat 5 percent of rooftops per year worldwide, we would be finished by 2030. This would save the U.S. 24 billion metric tons in CO2. That happens to be exactly how the world as a whole emitted in 2010. So, in essence, this would be like turning the world off for an entire year — while also saving some money on the energy bills while doing it.Check out the rest of the article here. You may also be interested in checking out the White Roof Project and Cool Roofs NYC; two efforts focused on “greening” New York’s rooftops.
(Photo credit: Beyond Oil NYC)
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Stephen Colbert salutes UVA’s Class of 2013 Followed by this.
FUCKING THANK YOU.
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“We are told “no,” we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. “Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.” And then you’re a player, you don’t want to...”
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Plant a Garden: Reason #9
Help someone out -
- Plant a row for the needy
- Drop off extra produce at the food bank
- Share food...
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Third Year of Drought Threatens Southwestern Oklahoma! Meanwhile … O.K. Sen. Inhofe still says global warming’s a hoax @ State Impact
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Young Monk! by Mardy Photography
Siem Reap, Cambodia
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As our numbers increase, so space for other animals and plants decreases. Our skills and technological ingenuity seem to know no bounds. Having...
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The New York rapper’s political and layered rhymes have been pegged as “conscious rap,” a label that has now become pejorative. His latest album...
