New Report: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States

From The White House blog:

TUESDAY, JUNE 16TH, 2009 AT 1:28 PM

Streaming Now: Climate Change Impacts Across America -- Renewed Focus for Decisions

Posted by Anne Waple

Ed. Note: Watch the release of the report now at WhiteHouse.gov/live.

Today, the White House helped to launch a new science report representing a consensus of 13 agencies developed over a year and half and focused on potential climate change impacts on the United States.

· Read the report

· View the powerpoint presentation

It’s the most comprehensive report to date on the possible impacts of climate change for everyone across America, and begins an important process of redefining the sort of information we need in order to deal with climate change at national and regional scales. Effectively managing our response to a changing climate falls into two general categories:

1) Implementing measures to limit climate change and therefore avoid many of the impacts discussed in the report. These measures must reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and might include increasing our reliance on clean energy, and developing energy efficient technologies

2) Reducing our vulnerability and increasing our resilience to ongoing climate change in pro-active, community-based ways. Examples of this include such measures as developing more climate-sensitive building codes to keep people out of harm’s way, or planting more drought or heat tolerant crops, for example.

As a first step in reducing the impact of climate change, we need to know what impacts we must avoid in the future, and this report, "Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States", does just that– outlining the possible direction of climate change under two broad scenarios: the first if we reduce greenhouse gas emissions aggressively, and the second, if we are less aggressive. These are neither the highest or lowest possible scenarios but begin to compare the possible futures for the U.S.

An important element of this new report, apart from that it is deliberately written in plain language so we can all read and understand the science in it, is that it dives down in the various regions of the U.S. and provides much more regional detail about possible impacts than ever before – critical information for an effective response. It also breaks down the potential climate change impacts by economic and social sectors, most of which transcend regional boundaries, such as water, energy, health, transportation, and agriculture – all vital components of a healthy and stable society.

The report notes climate change impacts that we are already seeing across the U.S. as well as those that will soon emerge or become more intense if action is slow to occur. Some of the impacts that the report mentions are:

· More rain is already coming in very heavy events, and this is projected to increase across the nation. This would have impacts on transportation, agriculture, water quality, health, and more;

· Heat waves will become more frequent and intense, increasing threats to human health and quality of life, especially in cities;

· Warming will decrease demand for heating energy in winter and increase demand for cooling energy in summer. The latter will increase peak electricity demand in most regions;

· Water resources will be stressed in many regions. For example, snowpack is declining in the West, and there is an increasing probability of drought in the Southwest, while floods and water quality issues are likely to be more of a problem in most regions;

· In coastal communities, sea-level rise and storm surge will increase threats to homes and infrastructure including water, sewer, transportation and communication systems.

Gulf Coast Area Roads at Risk from Sea-Level Rise

Through identifying the climate change impacts we are experiencing now, as well as those that are emerging faster than we thought, and those projected to increase in the future, the report clearly highlights the choices we face regarding possible response options to reduce the impacts of climate change across the United States.

Responses to climate change impacts in the United States will almost certainly evolve over time as we learn through experience. Determining and refining the responses will involve partnerships between scientists, policymakers, the public, private industry, communities, and decision-makers at all levels. Implementing these response strategies will require careful planning and continual feedback on the impacts of policies for government, industry, and society.

More of the report’s findings are located at http://www.globalchange.gov , which is the new home of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the interagency Government program that commissioned the report. The report was led by NOAA.


Dr. Anne Waple is with the US Global Change Research Program

Will Boredom Kill Us?

I found a great editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald which pretty much sums up my fears and views on the climate debate:

Maybe we're all too bored to bother saving the planet

LISA PRYOR

June 13, 2009

Boredom is going to kill us. Wait. Too dramatic. Let me put it more boringly. Boredom, and our collective inability to endure it, is going to compromise our capacity to tackle the challenges of our age in a way that is productive and conducive to progress in our society.

For more than a century, thinkers have been writing about how modern life, with its endless stimulations, actually makes boredom worse - and less easily tolerated. When the boom of the 1920s was busting, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote about this, focusing on the blah of waiting hours for a train.

If only he knew how bad things would become a lifetime later. Train commuters now have to endure the tedium of watching a blue monitor as they wait as the estimated time of arrival flicks down to three minutes, then back up to four, then back down to three. All that the commuter can do to ease this torture is check emails on a mobile, skim newspaper stories about the spat between Gordon Ramsay and Tracy Grimshaw, return missed phone calls and slurp coffee from a paper cup.

Boredom has always struck the most fortunate, people with plenty to keep them occupied. In Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Anna's lover, Vronsky, finds himself restless and dissatisfied right when his desires are fulfilled, when he is swanning around Europe in freedom with his lady love.

"It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realisation of their desires," Tolstoy writes. He describes boredom, or ennui, its more glamorous and chronic cousin, as the "desire for desires".

Are we all like this now? Easily over it? Crippled by the attention span of gnats? How ironic it is that in the very era of impatience and shrunken attention spans, the world has been confronted with a dilemma like climate change.

It is like a test God has sent us to remind us we're idiots, because it is a problem modern society is uniquely unsuited to fixing: the worst consequences are a long way off, and we don't care about a long way off, and the solutions are dull, and we don't care about dull.

If climate change could be solved with a sell out-charity concert and natty fund-raising ribbons, we'd be sorted. But it doesn't. It requires immediate action of a complex and boring nature. Negotiations over trading and credits and prices per tonne and projections. Just yesterday I fell asleep reading that the State Government has stalled on the issue of bonuses for rooftop solar panels, unsure of whether to grant home owners a gross tariff or a net tariff.

Have you noticed that when climate change activists have got into trouble for misrepresenting the issue, it is usually because they are trying to shape global warming into an issue more suited to our attention-deficit times? Appropriating the genre of before-and-after snaps of the gossip mags, only substituting melted faces with melted glaciers? Trouble over illustrating the issue of melting ice caps with sad photos of polar bears stranded on icebergs, as if climate change has robbed them of the ability to swim. Or trouble over turning disasters such as hurricane Katrina into news hooks, to show huge consequences are already upon us.

The trouble is not the lack of hard evidence but that hard evidence tends to be technical and unphotogenic, and not many media outlets do technical and unphotogenic these days.

In fact, if I was working on a public relations strategy on behalf of climate-change denialists or the fossil fuels industry, I would be concentrating on making the issue so complicated and dry that it loses traction in the wider community. Maybe this is happening already.

Sometimes spin is about sexing up an issue, but the reverse can be true. Spin can mean putting lipstick on a pig. It can also mean hiding a time bomb in a bucket of slops. I am reminded of this every time I get a letter from my bank saying its policies have changed, almost always to the detriment of the customer. The bank hides the nasty details in a little grey brochure, alongside tiny technical changes, so only the extremely vigilant look before chucking it.

Powerful interests can abuse our fear of boredom, just as effectively as they can abuse our desire for sensationalism. Maybe we have a civic duty to push through the boredom barrier.

Corporate Scientists Lie?

I found this too interesting and wanted to reprint in its entirety:

Industries Buried Internal Findings
Climate Wording Cut From Public Report
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 25, 2009

A group funded by fossil-fuel-dependent companies that argued for years that human-generated greenhouse gases were not driving global warming was advised by its own scientists that this was the case, according to documents submitted as part of an ongoing lawsuit between auto manufacturers and states seeking to regulate vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions.

The Global Climate Coalition, a group of representatives of the oil, auto and coal industries, spent years telling the public that the link between human activity and climate change was too uncertain to justify U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 treaty aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. In 1995, however, a "primer" on the issue produced by the organization's own scientific experts concluded that "the scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied."

This language was deleted from the primer when the group released it to the public.

Existence of the deleted material was first reported yesterday by the New York Times, which received it from a lawyer involved in a suit between the state of California and automakers; The Washington Post obtained a copy from the Sierra Club, which is also involved in the case.

William O'Keefe, who chaired the group before it folded in 2002, denied that the organization made an effort to suppress science suggesting a link between carbon-based emissions and climate change. He said the Times article "creates the impression the companies within the GCC intentionally tried to mislead the public on the human impact on the climate. That is absolute fiction. What we said then is there was enough uncertainty about the extent of human influence that it would not justify the Kyoto Protocol."

David Bookbinder, the Sierra Club's chief climate counsel, said it was notable that three of the parties in the case -- the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, General Motors and Chrysler -- had earlier dropped one of their legal claims that would have compelled them to hand over documents related to climate change science. Another party, the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, turned over the primer.

"The only conceivable reason they would drop their claim is they were afraid to share their documents on climate change with the public or the courts," Bookbinder said.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), one of the Senate's most vocal proponents of climate legislation, said the revelation of the deleted material "underscores the need to be wary of some of the industry studies and analyses that will come out" in the coming months as Congress debates whether to impose a mandatory limit on greenhouse gas emissions.

Former vice president Al Gore also attacked the Global Climate Coalition yesterday in a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, comparing it to disgraced financier Bernard Madoff. "They have committed a fraud larger than Madoff's fraud," Gore said. "They lied to people who trusted them, in order to make money."

In a sign of how much has changed over the past dozen years, former members of the defunct industry group now endorse a cap-and-trade bill to curb emissions.

"The utility industry doesn't dispute the science or the need for federal legislation," said Dan Riedinger of the Edison Electric Institute. "Our focus is on urging lawmakers to enact a climate bill that cuts emissions but also protects our customers from sharply higher costs."

What Does Climate Change Look Like?

As we come closer to the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December, the debate in the media rages on as to whether or not the environmental disasters seen worldwide are caused by humans. A new book, Climate Change: Picturing the Science chronicles the effects seen all over the world, from fires in Greece to the non-existent glaciers in Alaska, through pictures.

You can see a brief slideshow on Scientific American's website by clicking here.