Taxpayers Billed Nearly $100 Billion for Extreme Weather in 2012

by Dan Lashof, Natural Resources Defense Council, May 14, 2013

With all the debate on the federal budget in Congress, climate change rarely gets mentioned as a deficit driver. Yet dealing with climate disruption was one of the largest non-defense discretionary budget items in 2012. Indeed, as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) shows in Who Pays for Climate Change?, when all federal spending on last year’s droughts, storms, floods, and forest fires are added up, the U.S. Climate Disruption Budget was nearly $100 billion, equivalent to 16 percent of total non-defense discretionary spending in the federal budget—larger than any official spending category.

That means that federal spending to deal with extreme weather made worse by climate change far exceeded total spending aimed at solving the problem. In fact, it was eight times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s total budget and eight times total spending on energy.

Overall the insurance industry estimates that 2012 was the second costliest year in U.S. history for climate-related disasters, with more than $139 billion in damages. But private insurers themselves only covered about 25% of these costs ($33 billion), leaving the federal government and its public insurance enterprises to pay for the majority of the remaining claims. As a result, the U.S. government paid more than three times as much as private insurers did for climate-related disasters in 2012.

That reflects a major shift in liabilities with respect to climate change away from private insurers to public alternatives that began in earnest following the $72 billion hit the industry took in 2005 from hurricane Katrina.

Federal spending related to climate disruption falls into two major categories: storms and droughts.

Spending related to storms includes appropriated funds for the Federal Emergency Management Agency as well as emergency supplemental appropriations following major disasters, such as Superstorm Sandy. It also includes the National Flood Insurance Program, which is supposed to be self-supporting, but is increasingly under water.

Drought-related spending includes the federal crop insurance program as well as the government’s share of higher food costs.

The figure below shows how the federal climate disruption budget breaks down.

While some of these federal programs—such as forest fire prevention, crop insurance, flood coverage and disaster preparedness—offer wider benefits to the country, it should be noted that these liabilities have largely been assumed by the public sector due to a lack of private sector alternatives. The true scorekeepers of climate risk—the insurance industry—realizes it can’t win when the dice are increasingly loaded with carbon pollution, so it’s walking away from the table, leaving taxpayers holding the bag. Last year that cost amounted to over $1100 per taxpayer, and we can expect to see even higher costs in future as carbon dioxide concentrations continue to soar past 400 parts per million.

Even as the budget to clean up climate disruptions hit a record high in 2012 and is expected to continue to grow, the budget for programs to fight climate disruption—such as environmental enforcement, energy efficiency, clean energy vehicle research and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy—suffered cuts of more than $100 million the “sequester” that went into effect in March and remain under continued pressure from the budget-cutting process.

Our climate plan is, in effect, to cut critical investments now for the sake of small short-term deficit reductions and send our children the tax bills to clean up the mess.

That’s colossally short-sighted, even by Washington’s standards. 

http://ecowatch.com/2013/taxpayers-billed-100-billion-extreme-weather-2012/

Read More

NYT: For Insurers, No Doubts on Climate Change

Photo: Master Sgt. Mark Olsen/U.S. Air Force, via Associated Press

Damage in Mantoloking, NJ, after Hurricane Sandy. Natural disasters caused $35 billion in private property losses last year.

by Eduardo Porter, The New York Times, May 14, 2013

If there were one American industry that would be particularly worried about climate change it would have to be insurance, right?

From Hurricane Sandy’s devastating blow to the Northeast to the protracted drought that hit the Midwest Corn Belt, natural catastrophes across the United States pounded insurers last year, generating $35 billion in privately insured property losses, $11 billion more than the average over the last decade.

And the industry expects the situation will get worse. “Numerous studies assume a rise in summer drought periods in North America in the future and an increasing probability of severe cyclones relatively far north along the U.S. East Coast in the long term,” said Peter Höppe, who heads Geo Risks Research at the reinsurance giant Munich Re. “The rise in sea level caused by climate change will further increase the risk of storm surge.” Most insurers, including the reinsurance companies that bear much of the ultimate risk in the industry, have little time for the arguments heard in some right-wing circles that climate change isn’t happening, and are quite comfortable with the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is the main culprit of global warming.

“Insurance is heavily dependent on scientific thought,” Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America, told me last week. “It is not as amenable to politicized scientific thought.”

Yet when I asked Mr. Nutter what the American insurance industry was doing to combat global warming, his answer was surprising: nothing much. “The industry has really not been engaged in advocacy related to carbon taxes or proposals addressing carbon,” he said. While some big European reinsurers like Munich Re and Swiss Re support efforts to reduce CO₂ emissions, “in the United States the household names really have not engaged at all.” Instead, the focus of insurers’ advocacy efforts is zoning rules and disaster mitigation.

Last week, scientists announced that the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 400 parts per million — its highest level in at least three million years, before humans appeared on the scene. Back then, mastodons roamed the earth, the polar ice caps were smaller and the sea level was as much as 60 to 80 feet higher.

The milestone puts the earth nearer a point of no return, many scientists think, when vast, disruptive climate change is baked into our future. Pietr P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told my colleague Justin Gillis: “It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem.” And it raises a perplexing question: why hasn’t corporate America done more to sway its allies in the Republican Party to try to avert a disaster that would clearly be devastating to its own interests?

Mr. Nutter argues that the insurance industry’s reluctance is born of hesitation to become embroiled in controversies over energy policy. But perhaps its executives simply don’t feel so vulnerable. Like farmers, who are largely protected from the ravages of climate change by government-financed crop insurance, insurers also have less to fear than it might at first appear.

The federal government covers flood insurance, among the riskiest kind in this time of crazy weather. And insurers can raise premiums or even drop coverage to adjust to higher risks. Indeed, despite Sandy and drought, property and casualty insurance in the United States was more profitable in 2012 than in 2011, according to the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.

But the industry’s analysis of the risks it faces is evolving. One sign of that is how some top American insurers responded to a billboard taken out by the conservative Heartland Institute, a prominent climate change denier that has received support from the insurance industry.

The billboard had a picture of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who asked: “I still believe in global warming. Do you?”

Concerned about global warming and angry to be equated with a murderous psychopath, insurance companies like Allied World, Renaissance Re, State Farm and XL Group dropped their support for Heartland.

Even more telling, Eli Lehrer, a Heartland vice president who at the time led an insurance-financed project, left the group and helped start the R Street Institute, a standard conservative organization in all respects but one: it believes in climate change and supports a carbon tax to combat it. And it is financed largely with insurance industry money.

Mr. Lehrer points out that a carbon tax fits conservative orthodoxy. It is a broad and flat tax, whose revenue can be used to do away with the corporate income tax — a favorite target of the right. It provides a market-friendly signal, forcing polluters to bear the cost imposed on the rest of us and encouraging them to pollute less. And it is much preferable to a parade of new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency.

“We are having a debate on the right about a carbon tax for the first time in a long time,” Mr. Lehrer said.

Bob Inglis, formerly a Republican congressman from South Carolina who lost his seat in the 2010 primary to a Tea Party-supported challenger, is another member of this budding coalition. Before he left Congress, he proposed a revenue-neutral bill to create a carbon tax and cut payroll taxes.

Changing the political economy of a carbon tax remains an uphill slog especially in a stagnant economy. But Mr. Inglis notices a thaw. “The best way to do this is in the context of a grand bargain on tax reform,” he said. “It could happen in 2015 or 2016, but probably not before.”

He lists a dozen Republicans in the House and eight in the Senate who would be open to legislation to help avert climate change. He notes that Exelon, the gas and electricity giant, is sympathetic to his efforts — perhaps not least because a carbon tax would give an edge to gas over its dirtier rival, coal. Exxon, too, has also said a carbon tax would be the most effective way to reduce emissions. So why hasn’t the insurance industry come on board?

Robert Muir-Wood is the chief research officer of Risk Management Solutions, one of two main companies the insurance industry relies on to crunch data and model future risks. He argues that insurers haven’t changed their tune because — with the exception of 2004 and 2005, when a string of hurricanes from Ivan to Katrina caused damage worth more than $200 billion — they haven’t yet experienced hefty, sustained losses attributable to climate change.

“Insurers were ready to sign up to all sorts of actions against climate change,” Mr. Muir-Wood told me from his office in London. Then the weather calmed down.

Still, Mr. Muir-Wood notes that the insurance industry faces a different sort of risk: political action. “That is the biggest threat,” he said. When insurers canceled policies and raised premiums in Florida in 2006, politicians jumped on them. “Insurers in Florida,” he said, “became Public Enemy No. 1.”

And that’s the best hope for those concerned about climate change: that global warming isn’t just devastating for society, but also bad for business.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com; Twitter: @portereduardo

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/insurers-stray-from-the-conservative-line-on-climate-change.html

Read More

This isn't the weather we grew up with by John Abraham, Climate Consensus -- The 97%, The Guardian

Climate change means we are experiencing extreme weather with increasing frequency – and increasing economic cost
 

Floodwaters from hurricane Sandy rush down an elevator shaft into Hoboken PATH station in New York. Photograph: Reuters/Port Authority Trans-Hudson

by John Abraham, "Climate Consensus - The 97%", The Guardian, May 7, 2013

It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or an earth scientist for that matter) to know that today's weather isn't the weather we grew up with – and today's climate isn't the climate of yesterday. As a scientist who studies this topic daily, I and my colleagues know why. Human greenhouse gas emissions have led to a 40% increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As a result, the Earth is gaining energy at an alarming rate.

So what? How will all this energy change the climate (and the weather we experience)? Well some changes are pretty straightforward… First scientists expect that the Earth will globally get warmer, although the warming will happen much faster in some areas than others. We expect the rate of drying (and consequently drought) will increase in some areas while other regions will become wetter with more flooding. We expect to lose ice, see oceans rise, changes to the ocean acidity level, among other changes.

Some changes, however, have been harder to unearth but recent exciting findings are shining some illumination. Among the most exciting areas of research is the connection between loss of arctic sea ice and extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere. The arctic, which has been warming at an alarming rate has seen an approximately 75% decrease in the summer sea ice volume. Consequently arctic waters, which had been covered by ice, are now absorbing tremendous amounts of solar energy during the summer and releasing it to the atmosphere during the autumn and early winter.

This change in the arctic energy balance has begun to have an effect on the weather patterns, particularly on the jet stream. This rapidly flowing stream of high-altitude air separates the cold dry arctic air from warmer moist air closer to the equator. When that jet stream dips southward, watch out! Cold air and potential downpours or snow storms may be coming your way. Recently, the jet stream has been more likely to be found in an undulating, slowly moving state.

NASA image of meandering polar jet stream

What does this mean to us? It means that we shouldn't be surprised to see more severe weather that lasts for longer durations. Our weather can be expected to whiplash from one extreme to another.

In the U.S. we are seeing some evidence of this. Alternating wet, snowy winters and warm non-winters. Summers of either extreme heat and drought – or unbelievable flooding.

But don't just take my word for it. A leading researcher in this area, Dr. Jennifer Francis says,

The Arctic is warming two-to-three times faster than the rest of the northern hemisphere -- the loss of sea ice, spring snow cover, increased Greenland melting, and permafrost degradation are all symptoms of and contributors to this warming. It's inconceivable that a change of this scale and magnitude will not have substantial impacts on the atmosphere, ocean, and land both within the Arctic and also beyond the Arctic where millions of people live. These impacts will affect not only the physical system -- such as weather patterns and ocean circulation -- but also life on land and in the ocean. Exactly how these effects play out is a wide-open topic of research.

Jennifer Francis

Regarding the specific impact of global warming on Superstorm Sandy, her colleague, Dr. Charles Greene added,

Images of flooded subway stations in New York City, demolished towns on the New Jersey shore, and autumn blizzard conditions in Appalachia will be etched in the nation's psyche for quite some time. With the increasing frequency of extreme weather events serving as a backdrop, many people are asking what role, if any, did anthropogenic climate change play in the development of Superstorm Sandy? If one takes into account the record loss of Arctic sea ice this past September, then perhaps the likelihood of greenhouse warming playing a significant role in Sandy's evolution as an extra-tropical superstorm is at least as plausible as the idea that (she) was simply a freak of nature.

Charles Greene

If we are seeing this type of extreme weather already, it makes one wonder what the world will be like in 10, 20, or 50 years. We will certainly have to deal with many more costly weather disasters. More European heat waves like 2003 or 2010; more Midwest United States droughts of 2011 and 2012. Repeated 1000 year floods, larger storms like Sandy, and yes…. We will even see snow… lots of it. Charles Greene's November 2012 Scientific American paper was prescient – he virtually predicted the extreme weather, including Sandy and the series of nor'easters that have battered the Eastern Seaboard this past winter. It makes one wonder about other events. The alternating years of droughts and floods in the Midwest that have converted last year's severe dryout into today's severe floods in Indiana and Illinois? Are they tied to human emissions? What about the oscillating heat waves/drought and flooding episodes in Australia? We can only hope that this emerging science continues to advance so that these questions can be answered.

There are two takeaway messages to all of this. First, all of today's weather is now affected by climate change. Second, there is a tremendous cost to the extremes we are seeing. For those who say taking action to stop climate change is too expensive, we only have to point to the costs we are incurring right now. It is clear that it is too expensive to ignore this problem.

But don't just take it from me, ask my students. Engineering student Sara Backlund, who attends my heat transfer course recently remarked,

Last summer was crazy hot – so hot my soccer games had to be cut short. This spring it is incredibly cold – it's May and we haven't even started practicing and our games are being canceled. Even I can see the weather is changing…

So, it may not take a rocket scientist to tell us we're changing the weather… It might just take a bright engineering student.

• Dr. John Abraham of University of St. Thomas, the Climate Science Rapid Response Team and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/may/07/isnt-weather-we-grew-up-with

Read More

Hansen's New Climate Dice - Hot, Loaded, and Misunderstood

by Dana Nuccitelli, Skeptical Science, August 15, 2012

James Hansen's newest paper, Perception of climate change, has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).  In January 2012, Michael Sweet examined the draft version of this paper prior to its review and acceptance by PNAS.  The paper links increased heat wave frequency and intensity to human-caused climate change.  As a result, it has generated a great deal of mainstream media attention, and also a number of misinterpretations and misrepresentations which we will examine in this post.

Hansen's Findings

Hansen et al. examined the surface temperature record to determine how the distribution of temperatures has changed over the past six decades.  As we know, the average global temperature has increased approximately 0.7 °C over that period, so not surprisingly, the distribution of temperature anomalies has also shifted towards warmer values on average, as illustrated by the animation below and Figure 1.

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center GISS and Scientific Visualization Studio 

This changing temperature distribution is a wholly empirical result, and has also been observed by Donat and Alexander (2012):

"The results indicate that the distributions of both daily maximum and minimum temperatures have significantly shifted towards higher values in the latter period compared to the earlier period in almost all regions"

and

"...these changes have had the greatest impact on the extremes of the distribution and we conclude that the distribution of global daily temperatures has indeed become “more extreme” since the middle of the 20th century."

This was also shown by Meehl (2009), which examined how the ratio of hot to cold records in the United States has changed over the past six decades (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of record highs (red) to record lows (blue) for each decade. The 1960s and 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30 years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole.

This main conclusion that we are seeing more and stronger heat waves as a consequence of global warming is a clear, expected, empirical result which we would hope nobody will dispute. The controversy comes in when these results are used to try and attribute individual heat waves to human-caused global warming.

Extreme Heat Waves - Anthropogenic and Natural

Martin Hoerling of NOAA criticized Hansen et al. for attributing several heat waves to global warming in the abstract of their paper:

"we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small."

and in Hansen's related New York Times (NYT) op-ed:

"The change is so drastic, the paper says, that scientists can claim with near certainty that events like the Texas heat wave last year, the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the European heat wave of 2003 would not have happened without the planetary warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases."

Hoerling responded in a separate NYT interview by stating that he had previously co-authored a paper which concluded that the Russian heat wave was largely a consequence of natural climate variability.  However, the paper in question is Dole et al. (2011), which contained some serious flaws, failing to account for a glitch in the Moscow July station temperature data, which saw an urban heat island correction erroneously applied, as discussed in detail by Stefan Rahmstorf at RealClimate.

Meanwhile the results of Hansen et al. are consistent with those of Rahmstorf and Coumou (2011), who concluded that the Moscow heat wave would likely not have broken the record without an assist from human-caused global warming.

"For July temperature in Moscow, we estimate that the local warming trendhas increased the number of records expected in the past decade fivefold, which implies an approximate 80% probability that the 2010 July heat record would not have occurred without climate warming."

Otto et al. (2012) found that the Moscow heat wave was so intense that the human-caused warming alone could not account for it -- in other words that it can be called "mostly natural."  However, they also found that the warming trend had caused a three-fold increase in the likelihood that the heat record would be broken (Figure 2); in that sense "supporting the assertion that the risk of the event occurring was mainly attributable to the external trend."

Figure 2. Return periods of temperature-geopotential height conditions in the model for the 1960s (green) and the 2000s (blue) and in ERA-Interim for 1979-2010 (black). The vertical black arrow shows the anomaly of the Russian heat wave 2010 (black horizontal line) compared to the July mean temperatures of the 1960s (dashed line). The vertical red arrow gives the increase in the magnitude of the heat wave due to the shift of the distribution whereas the horizontal red arrow shows the change in the return period.  Figure 4 in Otto et al. (2012).

And Hansen's comments about the 2003 European heat wave are consistent with the results of Stott et al. (2004):

"we estimate it is very likely (confidence level >90%) that human influence has at least doubled the risk of a heatwave exceeding this threshold magnitude."

Drought Confusion

In his NYT interview, Hoerling claimed that Hansen's paper confused droughts with heat waves.  Patrick Michaels has also described Hansen's paper in similar terms:

"Hansen claims that global warming is associated with increased drought in the US....His hypothesis is a complete and abject failure."

It is a red flag when Patrick Michaels -- who has become famous for deleting inconvenient data and distorting other scientists' results -- agrees with your criticisms of another scientist's work.  It's an olympic-sized red flag when Anthony Watts also agrees.

Predictably, these claims are simply wrong, and entirely mischaracterize Hansen's paper, which focuses almost exclusively on temperature changes and barely even mentions droughts.  Watts' confusion came from this Associated Press article which does equate heat waves with drought several times.  However, nowhere in the article is Hansen quoted even mentioning drought.  Hoerling and Michaels may have confused Hansen's paper with his NYT op-ed, in which he said:

"Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding."

However, this comment came two paragraphs before Hansen began discussing his new paper, and note that the comment discusses future, not present droughts. Hansen's comments on this matter are supported by the scientific literature, for example Dai (2010), which projects changes in the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), shown in Figures 3 and 4, concluding:

"Regions like the United States have avoided prolonged droughts during the last 50 years due to natural climate variations, but might see persistent droughts in the next 20–50 years"

Figure 3. PDSI 2030-2039. (Courtesy UCAR)

Figure 4. PDSI 2060-2069. (Courtesy UCAR)

Wehner et al. (2011) (related presentation here) arrived at similar conclusions, as did a new paper by Dai (2012).  Joe Romm has a good roundup of relevant research.

Hoerling also quoted the IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) to support his point.  However, he quoted a section on floods instead of droughts. Here is what the SREX says about US droughts in the next few decades:

"There is medium confidence that droughts will intensify in the 21st century in some seasons and areas, due to reduced precipitation and/or increased evapotranspiration. This applies to regions including...central North America."

Again, this is consistent with Hansen's comments.

Tamino on Variability

Tamino has pointed out that the change in the distribution of surface temperatures may not be due to increased variability, as Hansen et al. conclude, but rather simply due to a combination of different regions warming at different rates, and when their data are combined, the result looks the same as it would if temperature variability were increasing.  In other words, we don't know how much of the increase in hot weather events is due to weather becoming more variable, and how much is simply due to average temperatures becoming hotter.

The results of Donat and Alexander (2012) lend some credibility to Tamino's comments regarding a lesser change in temperature variance, although they find that an increase in skewness (asymmetry) of the temperature distribution has probably contributed to the increased frequency of extreme heat events (Figure 5).

"The results indicate that the distributions of both daily maximum and minimum temperatures have significantly shifted towards higher values in the latter period compared to the earlier period in almost all regions, whereas changes in variance are spatially heterogeneous and mostly less significant.  However asymmetry appears to have decreased but is altered in such a way that it has become skewed towards the hotter part of the distribution."

Figure 5. The differences in higher moment statistics of (a) mean, (b) variance, and (c) skewness for each grid box in HadGHCND for (left) daily minimum temperature anomalies and (right) daily maximum temperature anomalies for the two time periods shown. Hatching indicates changes between the two periods that are significant at the 10% level for the mean (using a Student’s t-test) and the variance (using an f-test) of the distribution. Figure 1 in Donat and Alexander (2012).

This is an issue we will be exploring in another post in the near future.  However, it does not impact the main result of Hansen et al., that global warming has caused extreme heat events to occur more frequently and to be more intense on average.  The question is more of a technical issue -- whether the increase in extreme heat events is due more to an increased temperature variability, to the warmer shift in average temperatures, or to increased skewness in the temperature distribution.  In any case, human-caused global warming is responsible. 

More Mischaracterizations of Hansen et al.

In addition to the misrepresentation of Hansen's results from Michaels and Hoerling, Roger Pielke, Sr., has endorsed an extremely poor critique of Hansen et al. by Mike Smith, which does not even address Hansen's new paper, but rather his 1988 paper, and does so by distorting reality as many others (including the aforementioned Patrick Michaels) have.  Hansen's paper created global warming projections based on three greenhouse gas emissions scenarios (A, B, and C).  Smith claims:

"Turns out that Scenario A turned out to be correct"

This is a false statement which we have debunked many times, most recently here, where we showed that Scenario A has actually turned out to be the furthest from reality (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Radiative forcing contributions from 1988 to 2010 from CO2 (dark blue), N2O (red), CH4 (green), CFC-11 (purple), and CFC-12 (light blue) in each of the scenarios modeled in Hansen et al. 1988, vs. observations (NOAA).

Smith in turn (along with Watts, who also posted Michaels' strawman attack on Hansen et al.) endorsed another poor analysis of Hansen's work by Cliff Mass. Mass grossly oversimplified the situation, for example trying to parse out what percentage of the heat waves could be attributed to global warming vs. natural variability by examining the mean annual temperature increase without recognizing that this increase varies over different seasons, different local regions, and possibly even different types of weather events. A few people left good comments on Mass' post here and here, for further reading.

Mass generally misunderstood the arguments of Hansen et al. as well. In the end, Mass basically echoed part of the conclusion from Otto et al. (2012), that the heat waves could be described as "mostly natural." However, the main point of Hansen et al. is that heat waves like those in Moscow, Texas and Oklahoma will occur more frequently and on average be more intense than they would be without human-caused global warming.  As Tamino notes,

"Cliff Mass gives the impression that there’s nothing to worry about because our “3-sigma” events — the real killers — will only be one degree hotter, quite ignoring the fact that we’ll get 10 times as many of them."

Probability - the Language of Science

As the papers discussed here note, these issues boil down to probabilities. Global warming has obviously made temperatures warmer, on average, which in turn has increased the odds of extreme heat events.  Hansen's argument is that without global warming, the probability of the Moscow, Texas and Oklahoma heat waves being so hot is so small, that it's safe to say that global warming was a contributing factor -- that they would not have been as blisteringly hot in the absence of global warming. 

That's not to say that humans caused these heat waves -- we didn't. However, odds are very good that they wouldn't have been as hot or record-breaking without human influences, and human influences will also cause more frequent, hotter, record breaking heat waves in the future as global warming continues.

This is where the 'loading the dice' analogy comes in.  Hansen's point is that by increasing the average temperature, we are making the hotter temperatures more likely -- effectively weighting the hotter values of the climate dice.  As a result, today's extreme heat will become the norm a few decades from now, just as what we considered extreme heat a few decades ago has now become much more commonplace.  As Tamino put it in a recent post:

"When a 3-sigma event happens, it’s a problem but we can deal with it and recover from it. When 10 (or more) times as many 3-sigma events happen … we have a problem.

That means we’re already in trouble. The really bad news is that we’re already in trouble from just the warming we’ve already experienced, but it’s going to get worse because it’s going to get hotter. You think the 2011 Texas-Oklahoma heat wave was bad? You think this year’s corn-belt heat wave was bad? You think the 2010 Russian heat wave was very very bad? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet."

Hot and Heavy Dice

To summarize, Hansen et al. showed that extreme heat events have become more common and more intense as a result of global warming.  While Hansen correctly noted in a NYT op-ed that droughts are expected to become more frequent in parts of the USA in the coming decades, aside from a brief discussion of the link between extreme heat and drought, Hansen et al. (2012) does not address droughts or attribute them to global warming.

Hansen et al. have shown that a number of heat waves such as the 2010 Russian event are very unlikely to have been as intense or record-breaking if humans weren't causing global warming. Simply put, several recent heat waves have been so hot that the chances of a similarly intense heat wave happening several decades ago would have been very, very low.  We are loading the dice to make the chances of extreme heat waves happening much higher, which is why they are happening more frequently.

As Hansen et al. note, "public opinion about the existence and importance of globalwarming depends strongly on their perceptions of recent local climate variations."  This is undoubtedly why their paper has been the target of so many mischaracterizations by people who want public opinion to stay right where it is.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/hansens-new-climate-dice-loaded-misunderstood.html

Read More

Martin Luther King and the call to direct action on climate

by Van Jones and Joe Romm, April 11, 2013

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," wrote Martin Luther King Jr. from a Birmingham jail on April 16, 1963. "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

The Atlanta-based King was explaining why he was in prison for nonviolent demonstrations so far from home, responding to a critical public statement by eight Southern white religious leaders.

His words are timeless and universal in part because King was a master of language but primarily because he viewed civil rights through a moral lens. The greater the moral crisis, the more his words apply.

The greatest moral crisis of our time is the threat posed to billions - and generations yet unborn - from unrestricted carbon pollution. Now more than ever, we are "tied in a single garment of destiny," cloaked as a species in a protective climate that we are in the process of unraveling.

Many have criticized the demonstrations against the Keystone XL pipeline, which would open a major spigot to the Canadian tar sands, as unwarranted and untimely - unwarranted given our broad dependence on fossil fuels and untimely because of our struggling economy. We disagree.

We think there has been far too little direct action, given the staggering scale of the threat. As the International Energy Agency has explained, we must leave the vast majority of fossil fuels in the ground if we are to preserve a livable climate and avoid levels of warming that "even school children know" will be catastrophic for us all. The tar sands would be near the top of any list of the largest, dirtiest pools of carbon that must be forsaken for the sake of humanity.

King explained in his letter, "In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action."

Has there ever been a problem where more facts from more unimpeachable sources have been collected and ignored than climate change? Every major scientific body and international group has taken to begging and pleading for action.

Last fall, the World Bank - no bastion of eco-consciousness - issued a report aimed to "shock us into action." It warned that "we're on track for a 4-degree Celsius warmer world marked by extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise."

If we don't act now, then, within decades, a large fraction of the world's 9 billion people will find themselves living in places whose once stable climate simply now can't sustain them - either because it is too hot or arid, the land is no longer arable, their glacially fed rivers are drying up, or the seas are rising too fast.

The overwhelming majority of those suffering the most - in this country and especially abroad - will be people who contributed little or nothing whatsoever to the problem.

This would be the greatest injustice in human history, irreversible on a time scale of centuries.

Has there ever been a problem subject to more failed negotiations? The international climate talks have been going on for a quarter century, full of sound and fury, but thwarted in large part by a U.S. Senate that itself talks to death every serious climate bill.

By "self-purification," King meant preparing the group of protesters for the rigors and trials of nonviolent demonstration. But it's his thoughts on another group that strike nearest now: "I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate," he wrote in words that apply to today's moderate, status quo intelligentsia of every color. "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

We understand why the fossil fuel industry works to block Congressional inaction and funds what has become the most effective disinformation campaign in history. We are bewildered by those who claim to accept climate science, but feel no urgency to act.

As King put it, "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people."

Especially relevant are King's words about time: "All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills."

As King explains, time "can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will." We feel the same.

Certainly nothing compares to the centuries of racial injustice King was impatient about. But each year brings an ever-worsening array of megadroughts and superstorms juiced by global warming like a baseball player on steroids. Each year brings higher emissions and ever more dire studies.

We know we're fast approaching climatic tipping points - the loss of Arctic sea ice, the disintegration of the great ice sheets, the release of vast amounts of carbon from the permafrost, Dust-Bowlification of much of the world's arable land - that are irreversible and catastrophic.

Even once-reticent climatologists are speaking out because, as Dr. Lonnie Thompson has written, "Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization." Others, like James Hansen and Jason Box, have themselves joined direct action and been arrested for it.

It is past time for many more to speak out, and for many more to join direct action.

We end with King on the need to act now: "There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience."

ABOUT THE WRITERS

Van Jones is president of Rebuild the Dream and author of "Rebuild the Dream." Joseph Romm runs ClimateProgress.org and is author of "Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga." Readers may write to them in care of Climate Nexus, 901 E Street NW, Suite 610, Washington, D.C. 20004; website: www.climatenexus.org.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/04/11/3975548/martin-luther-king-and-the-call.html#storylink=cpy

Read More