“On Thinner Ice”

…from the Asia Society. Recommended.

Amory responds to Stewart Brand

…in Grist. Longer paper here (pdf).

Good question: What year will coastal property values crash?

And as usual, Joe Romm has a good answer.

I heard Ed Mazria give a talk at the RESNET conference a few weeks ago, and he had some great and startling slides showing many cities before and after see level rise. It’s so dramatic, but it seems to be so far outside our imagination that there isn’t much response, other than amazement. I wonder when the response will turn to OH SHIT. That’s when property values will crash.

Great day at the California Academy of Sciences

Great building and exhibits. But it’s hard to get away from work…

NOAA’s significant climate anomalies of 2008 is out

NOAA’s annual map of the wierd and terrifying weather from last year, in case the weather missed you…(click here for a full-sized version).

Future coastlines

I keep wondering when the real estate industry will take a look at maps like this–Southeast US in 2100. A lot of valuable property is going underwater. What is the appraised value of property that won’t exist in 90 years, and be seriously degraded much sooner?

More maps of future coastlines at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets.

Of course, there is more than just inundated land to worry about–Rising sea salinates India’s Ganges. It’s one thing to lose condos, but much more serious to lose the farmland for millions of people.

US drought monitor

As the California drought worsens, here is another map that we’ll be watching…

WSJ: The Warming Earth Blows Hot, Cold and Chaotic

WSJ (sub. req’d):

The Warming Earth Blows Hot, Cold and Chaotic:

Subtle Rises in Temperature Make for Wild Weather; ‘Exceptionally Unusual’ Becomes the New Normal

SAN FRANCISCO — Three independent research groups have concluded that 2008 was a comparatively cool year on planet Earth — a feverish chill on our warming world. (…)

“I do believe we are entering a new state,” says arctic researcher Julienne Stroeve at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “Ice loss is happening faster than the climate models are showing.”

Since 2003, for instance, more than two trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted, adding enough water to oceans to raise global sea level by one-fifth of an inch, NASA geophysicists reported at the conference.

Alaska’s low-lying ice fields are disappearing at two to three times the rate of a decade ago, according to aerial surveys by researchers at the University of Alaska. Since 2000, Greenland alone has lost 355.4 square miles of ice — an area 10 times the size of Manhattan — Ohio State University researchers reported. Using data from two NASA satellites, they determined that Greenland’s 32 largest glaciers lost three times as much ice last year as the year before.

“I wouldn’t run for the hills,” says glacier analyst Eric Rignot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “But it might be time to start walking.” (…)

By analyzing five years worth of infrared measurements from NASA’s Aqua satellite, JPL researchers found that high-altitude tropical storm and rain clouds are increasing. At the present rate of warming, the scientists reported last month, tropical storms can be expected to increase by 6% every 10 years. (…)

Peak coal?

What a concept. Is it good news or bad news? Is is good we’re running out (if it’s true), or bad that we’re burned up half the stored carbon. I don’t know, but it’s a chance to bring out my favorite carbon sequestration strategy, which I like because it’s: (1) technologically feasible, and (2) cost-effective:

Primer on cap and trade

Cap and Trade 101 (pdf) from the Sightline Institute. I get a headache every time I think about how hard it’s going to be to implement cap and trade, and consequently I’ve resisted learning the details, so I should read this.

Getting smart about this is especially important because the Western Climate Initiative just released its design recommendations for the WCI regional cap and trade program, and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative just had its first carbon auction, with results to be posted tomorrow.

To make matters worse…

From Climate Progress:

Has runaway climate change begun?

The UK’s Independent reported today some pretty shocking news in “Exclusive: The methane time bomb“:

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.

Assuming these findings are published in a peer-reviewed publication, as is planned, they should be taken quite seriously for four reasons. First, many fear that a huge methane release is what happened during the Permian-Triassic extinction event and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Second, releasing even a small fraction of the sub-sea methane would make a stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions at non-catastrophic concentrations all but impossible.

(more…)

Global carbon emissions jumped 3% in 2007

From Joe:

The Global Carbon Project released its “Carbon Budget 2007” [big PDF] today. The report shows a continuation of the grossly unsustainable growth rate in CO2 emissions since 2000, which is nearly four times the growth rate of the 1990s:

(more…)

Here we go again

From the National Hurricane Center. See detailed analysis at the Wunderground blog .

Blogging from Asilomar

This the Sunday night plenary talk–Hal Harvey talking about climate policies (via iPhone…).

Coal is the problem…

Jim Hansen recently published a report (link to pdf) on a visit to Europe, which Joe Romm summarizes. These graphs tell many stories:

Coal is rising dramatically in China and India, but it is rising everywhere except Russia. Hansen is especially depressed at this because the key climate solution is reducing carbon emissions from coal use (not necessarily coal use itself).