Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

I was on an energy panel today at a conference sponsored by Technology Review. The panel made it into the blog Responsible Nanotechnology. The summary of my remarks need clarification:

Romm predicts that the US space program will be essentially abandoned by 2025 because we will recognize that every available dollar must be put into combatting the effects of global climate change.

I believe that, thanks to the refusal of this administration to take any concrete action to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, come 2009, the next President — and every subsequent President — will have to make action on climate a larger and larger priority in the federal budget. And if we don’t follow the advice of NASA’s James Hansen and aggressively deploy GHG-reducing technologies in the next decade, then, come the 2020s, we will be so desperate to deal with global warming that we will divert funds from many discretionary areas of the budget, such as the space program.

A NASA scientist came up to me afterwards to make sure that I was not speaking about abandoning NASA’s terrific work on Earth sciences, which has helped make everyone aware of the climate problem. Not at all. Though, sadly, again, the Bush administration has been busy cutting back that valuable research in order to fund the manned space program, including its plans to put humans back to the Moon and Mars. And yet, ironically, thanks to the Bush administration, it is increasingly doubtful we will put humans on Mars this century, at least.

This may well be a suprising point for many Americans — and I count myself as a space enthusiast — but on our current path of reckless disregard for the climate, the manned space program faces the certainty of slashed budgets.

We have passed the point at which avoiding catastrophic warming can be done easily. When the country final does confront the reality that business-as-usual energy policy risks 80-foot sea level rise as NASA itself warned this week, we will dramatically realign our priorities. At that point, which will almost certainly come by 2025, it is inconceivable we would ever spend the many tens of billions of dollars needed to put humans on Mars.

I will post a link to the video of this talk when it is available.

When a major science journal publishes a major climate article led by our top climate scientist–and is wise enough to make it an open access article — you MUST read it. I reviewed an early draft of “Global Temperature Change,” by James Hansen et al in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and consider it one of the most important articles published this year — or any year — worth reading a few times.

The article is already making headlines for showing that by 2050 the Earth will be warmer than it has been for a million years, thanks to human emissions of greenhouse gases. If we take strong actions to limit further emissions starting today — what the authors call the AS [alternative scenario] — we can limit total warming from preindustrial levels to about 2°C, but even that risks sea level rise of one meter per century.

Failing to act, the authors warn, ensures far higher temperature rise, “which could yield sea level rise of several meters per century with eventual rise of tens of meters, enough to transform global coastlines.” That is “the disastrous BAU [business as usual]” case.

Equally worrisome is that “species loss under BAU has the potential to be truly disastrous, conceivably with a majority of today’s plants and animals headed toward extermination.”

The paper notes that the alternative scenario limits the severe but difficult-to-quantify risks of melting tundra and other serious carbon cycle feedbacks that Climate Progress has discussed. Yet even one more decade of inaction is likely to render that scenario “infeasible.”

The time to act is now.

Two other highlights are worth noting. First, the article sets the record straight on recent warming trends and how climate models have accurately predicted them. NASA’s press release points out, “the Earth is now reaching and passing through the warmest levels seen in the last 12,000 years. And the warming is accelerating:

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The Aspen Skiing Company for launching their anti-global warming “Save Snow” campaign.

The Natural Resources Council of Maine, for releasing probably the most comprehensive depiction of how global warming would devastate Maine’s coastline – “President Bush’s family home on Walker’s Point could be completely submerged.” Note to self: Look up cosmic irony in Wikipedia to see if there is a link to this study.

Billionaire Richard Branson for making a pledge of $3 billion for climate solutions at the Clinton Global Initiative.

The Economist magazine for the kind of in-depth coverage of global warming that is all-too-rare in major general-interest magazines (other than Time magazine).

Katie Couric and CBS News, for running a story on global warming and arctic melting that doesn’t give precious airtime to misinformation from global warming Deniers.

James Hansen, for telling it like it is to CBS: “I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change, no longer than a decade at the most.”

The media keeps getting suckered by Bush on climate the way Charlie Brown keeps getting suckered by Lucy.

Let’s get this straight: A technology-only strategy cannot solve the global warming problem. So how can the Washington Post publish a basically favorable article about Bush’s technology-only “plan” — and do so the same week both the Congressional Budget Office and Senate Environment Committee explained that such a strategy can’t do the job?

The answer is that technology has sex appeal, and it is actually part of the answer. And that is precisely why conservative strategist Frank Luntz recommended making technology the cornerstone of the climate strategy for conservatives who want to appear as if they care about global warming but don’t actually want to do anything about it. This strategy is so good that Bush can get favorable PR for his plan even though he is cutting funding the most cost-effective technology strategy–energy efficiency.

The famous 2002 Luntz memo is available on the web–you MUST read this if you want to understand why U.S. climate politics at the national level is so divorced from reality — but many people and most of the media seem unaware of it. Heck, even smart people like Rafe Pomerance and William Fulkerson are cited in the Post praising the Bush plan.

That’s why I spend a chapter in my forthcoming book, Hell and High Water: The Solution and The Politics (William Morrow, January 2007) on this subject, which I call the Technology Trap. If we follow the Bush strategy, we doom the planet to catastrophic climate change. It is that simple.

We must have a price for greenhouse gases, as the CBO explains, and that means market-oriented regulations, like Bush’s father put in place for air pollution. But W follows the Luntz razzle-dazzle strategy: “We need to emphasize how voluntary innovation and experimentation are preferable to bureaucratic or international intervention and regulation.” Delay. Delay.

To sum up: As Climate Progress predicted earlier this week, Bush’s “astonishing U-turn on global warming” was a Double-U Turn. We are back where we started, taking no serious action to stop sea level rise of 20 to 80 feet. AAUGH!

UPDATE: Link to Luntz memo has been fixed. My apologies.

1. Al Gore’s terrific speech at New York University on what this country must do now to avert catastrophic global warming. Gore offers the key starting point that has so far eluded our President and the conservative Congress: “We should start by immediately freezing CO2 emissions and then beginning sharp reductions.”

2. A new report, “American Energy: The Renewable Path to Energy Security,” by the Center for American Progress and the Worldwatch Institute. The authors notes, “If the U.S. is to join the world leaders in renewable energy — among them Germany, Spain, and Japan — it will need world-class energy policies based on a sustained and consistent policy framework at the local, state, and national levels.”

3. An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, “Evaluating the Role of Prices and R&D in Reducing Carbon Dioxide Emissions,” that concludes “Relying exclusively on R&D funding in the near term… does not appear likely to be consistent with the goal of balancing costs and maximizing benefits or the goal of minimizing the costs of meeting an emissions reduction target.”

What an amazing world we live in that you actually need a CBO report to make the case that the only plausible climate strategy for the country must include both R&D and a carbon price.