Atmospheric CO₂ concentration data from ice core (blue, 1750-1975)
and direct atmospheric measurements (red, 1960-2010) vs. “compounding
interest” model described in post (purple). Click for a larger version.

In many ways, climate science is difficult. There’s a reason that the best climate models require some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world in order to run. But the most important concepts are easily understood by a non-expert with either a little mathematical skill or the ability to use some simple online tools. This is the inaugural post of a new series that seeks to illustrate how anyone and everyone can understand the most important concepts underlying climate science and the reality that is human-caused climate disruption.

Are people adding a lot of carbon dioxide (CO₂) to the atmosphere? It’s such an easy question to ask, but the answer depends on what you mean by “a lot.” And it depends on what you’re referring to. Full story »

It depends on what you mean by “save.”

Recently The Financial Times ran a story (“Shale gas boosts US manufacturing“) discussing the fact that a number of companies, both American and non-American, were either re-opening chemical or fertilizer plants in the United States, or were building new plants. This trend has emerged as the result in the significant fall in the price of natural gas in the US as compared with other regions. As the FT noted,

Dow Chemical plans to open new US ethylene and propylene plants later this decade, and restart a Louisiana ethylene cracker closed in 2009. Royal Dutch Shell announced a chemical plant in the gas-rich Appalachian mountain region to make ethylene and petrochemicals. Sasol of South Africa last week unveiled a plan to convert gas into diesel fuel in Louisiana.

In the fertiliser industry, Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan is investing $158m to restart a Louisiana anhydrous ammonia plant shut in 2003, when gas prices were climbing. Aluminium company Ormet is dusting off a nearby plant shuttered in 2006.

This is a turnaround from activity a decade ago, as the FT notes, when companies were closing plants and moving operations elsewhere. Full story »

Yesterday I reported on an article in The Daily Caller that turned reality on its head by claiming that the EPA’s attempt to avoid hiring 230,000 new employees to administer greenhouse gas (GHG) emission permits was actually the EPA planning to hire those employees. As I pointed out, the article had enough major errors that it needed either significant corrections or a full retraction.

Today the executive editor of The Daily Caller, David Martosko, attempted to justify the original article in an editorial. However, Martosko’s failed defense of an indefensible article means that The Daily Caller now has two articles that are so filled with errors and misrepresentations that they should be corrected or retracted entirely. Full story »

[See update at the end of the post]

The devil is always in the details. Which may explain why Matthew Boyle of The Daily Caller got his details and facts all twisted up when he wrote that the EPA’s greenhouse gas (GHG) regulations would force the EPA to grow by 230,000 employees. Boyle got this information out of an EPA court filing submitted on September 16 in a case involving the EPA’s authority to tailor regulations to major emitters of GHGs instead of to every emitter of GHGs.

Media Matters for America initially discovered the error and pointed out that the EPA avoided hiring an additional 230,000 employees to administer the GHG regulations. Yet Boyle, Fox News, and Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) all got that critical point wrong. Full story »

Yesterday, on Facebook, one of my friends posted a graphic of the president and this recent quote, which is making the rounds:

I reject the idea that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher is class warfare…

And today, over at the Great Orange Satan, msblucow has an interesting poll up aimed at gauging how likely voters are to support Obama’s reelection bid in 2012. More to the point, why they are likely to vote for him (or not)? If you click through to the poll, there’s a series of questions that asks if the president’s actions on a series of issues make you more likely to vote for him, less likely, undecided, or do his actions and policies have no effect. Full story »

Remember that 1993 film in which the Bill Murray repeats the same day over and over again? The Japanese nuclear crisis has also become déjà vu ad nauseum (please excuse mixed romance languages). Fukushima news reports today aren’t appreciably different from those shortly after the earthquake and tsunami. On May 18 the New York Times reported (note two words emphasized): Full story »

Full story »

Americans who favor it claim that nuclear energy makes us less dependent on Middle-Eastern oil with its attendant price spikes (those that aren’t a product of speculation, that is). But nuclear-energy plants don’t do much to ease the national debt. As Jeff Goodell reports in his Rolling Stone piece America’s Nuclear Nightmare (emphasis added)

Since the Manhattan Project was created to develop the atomic bomb back in the 1940s, the dream of a nuclear future has been fueled almost entirely by Big Government. America’s current fleet of reactors exists only because Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act in 1957, limiting the liability of nuclear plant operators in case of disaster. And even with taxpayers assuming most of the risk, Wall Street still won’t finance nuclear reactors without direct federal assistance, in part because construction costs are so high (up to $20 billion per plant) and in part because nukes are the only energy investment that can be rendered worthless in a matter of hours. “In a free market, where real risks and costs are accounted for, nuclear power doesn’t exist,” says Amory Lovins, a leading energy expert at the Rocky Mountain Institute. Nuclear plants “are a creation of government policy and intervention.” Full story »

New radiation leaks at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant spurred Japanese nuclear regulators to raise the level of how great an accident it is from five to seven (“major”). Since that’s  the highest on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s scale, it’s now on a par with Chernobyl.

Of course, Fukushima has emitted only a tenth of the radiation as Chernobyl, according to the Associated Press. In other words, if Fukushima is 7.0, Chernobyl was 7.999. But, AP writes of the Fukushima radiation leaks, “they eventually could exceed Chernobyl’s emissions if the crisis continues.” Full story »

The light shining on the safety of nuclear energy as a result of the Japanese nuclear crisis has been of such powerful wattage that it’s even flushing safety issues with nuclear weapons labs and manufacturing facilities out of hiding. Roger Snodgrass reports for the Santa Fe New Mexican.

On Friday, President Barack Obama asked the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission to review the safety of American nuclear power plants. . . . At Los Alamos National Laboratory, nuclear safety issues have been complicated with seismic concerns, as geological studies have uncovered an increasingly precarious underground structure. Full story »

The extent to which Libya has rendered the concept of political correctness irrelevant on not only the left, but the right, is breathtaking. For instance, Juan Cole writes:

I am unabashedly cheering the liberation movement on, and glad that the UNSC-authorized intervention has saved them from being crushed. Full story »

When the massive tsunami smacked into Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear power plant was stacked high with more uranium than it was originally designed to hold. . . . the equivalent of almost six years [almost 4,000] of the highly radioactive [spent] uranium fuel rods produced by the plant  . . . stored in deep pools of circulating water built into the highest floor of the Fukushima reactor buildings.

. . . reports Reuters. Full story »

At Pro Publica, in an article titled Even In Worst Case, Japan’s Nuclear Disaster Will Have Limited Reach Abrahm Lustgarten

. . . spoke with seven top nuclear engineers and scientists to at least establish some boundaries for the disaster’s potential health and environmental impacts. The rough consensus: The long-term and most severe effects from radiation at the plant, where four of six reactors are in crisis and hundreds of tons of spent fuel is a risk, will be largely contained to the area around the plant, affect a relatively limited population and will likely not spread outside Japan. Full story »

by Talbot Eckweiler

Part two in a five-part series.

While driving North on I-90, I caught my first view of the city of Niagara Falls’ skyline. Tall spires of concrete, metal, and glass snaked toward the heavens: the miracle of man, evident in many a metropolis. To the right, in front of the city, squat patches of orange, yellow, red and green huddled together. My eyes may strayed from the road one more moment to watch a wide, rolling puff of hazy gray matter rise off the clustered trees and partially obscure the view of the city.

My first thought: “There’s some sort of forest fire! How am I going to get to the park?” However, there were no siren wails, no fire trucks rushing down the middle of the road. Nothing on the radio suggested there was anything wrong. Full story »

A couple of years ago we were on holiday out in Devon and Cornwall for a week or so, and on the way back stopped off in Totnes. Totnes is a small town—well, not that small. It has a population of 7,000 or so, a good size for a town. That’s an important point, size, as we’ll see. But it’s a lovely spot, with a fine long High Street that hasn’t been completely taken over by chains, a fine bookstore (always a defining criterion), and, well, just a nice feel to the place, lots of tea shops, and several interesting looking pubs, another good sign. I’ve got an informal barometer for the well-being of a place that depends on some complicated calculus that I couldn’t possibly explain involving bakeries, bookstores, libraries, concert venues, tea shops, pubs, being near the water, and walking. It’s an old hippie town too, which makes it even better. Undoubtedly there’s a vinyl store somewhere too. It turns out my instincts were sound in this case. Because Totnes is one of the leaders of the Transition Towns movement here in the UK, and idea that seems to be spreading like wildfire around the world. In fact, they more or less invented the concept. Full story »

Recently released emails written by employees of the Canadian Embassy in Washington DC and other Canadian government workers show that the Embassy directly lobbied the Bush Administration and Congress in an attempt to influence regulations and legislation that could restrict exports of Alberta tar sands-derived bitumen and petroleum. The emails further reveal that the Bush Administration had asked the Canadian Embassy to lobby Congress and to use its influence with key oil companies to convince them to lobby on Canada’s – and the Bush Administration’s – behalf. Full story »

There are times when I think Obama is the smartest politician I have seen in my lifetime, and there are times when I’m scratching my head, wondering what the hell? Most of the latter occurrences arise in the context of Obama’s Justice Department, which, as far as I can tell, has yet to prosecute a single Bush administration official for malfeasance, although I may have missed it if it did happen. Then there’s Afghanistan, which looks like an unholy mess. Then there’s financial reform—or, more specifically, the lack of it, which I trace directly to Obama’s very foolhardy appointments of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, under the aegis of that old charlatan, Robert Rubin. If Obama loses his re-election effort, it will be because he listened to people like Rubin and Summers and Geithner, instead of ignoring them completely, which would have been the smarter thing to do given their roles in creating the mess to begin with.

Then there’s the environmental and climate stuff, where I had high hopes. And I’m very glad we’ve got some EPA enforcement again. But then there’s the biofuels boondoggle, suggesting that Obama is just another farm state senator. Well, that’s sort of ordinary and predictable stuff, the kind of stuff that any senator (or ex-Senator who becomes President) does—look at the otherwise generally admirable Chuck Schumer and his entanglements with the financial industry. But what do I make of this—the Obama administration has filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization against China’s renewable energy subsidies.
Full story »

One of my lists is currently engaged in a fairly dynamic discussion about “what is a progressive?”

In thinking about the issue, I realized that it might help to ask the question a slightly different way: what would a progressive society look like? Maybe I can better understand what it means to be progressive in 2010 if I reverse-engineer the definition from a vision of the future where things work the way they ought to.

I have argued that the success of the progressive movement hinges on seriously long-term thinking. It’s not about the 2012 elections or the 2016 elections or even the 2020 elections – those fights are about the battle, not the war.

Instead, if we do things properly, if we concentrate on and win the war, what does America look like on our Tricentennial? The following 40 articles suggest some ideas. Full story »

Sooner or later, they will all obediently troop to Iowa. Presidential wannabees of all stripes will march through diners and farms, pressing the flesh and taking the ethanol pledge. Flip-flops may occur, depending on whether someone is 1) leading in the polls, 2) trailing badly, 3) outside Iowa, or 4) speaking after the Iowa caucuses.

We need to support ethanol. Al Gore said that. In fact, he’s always saying that.

I support ethanol and I think it is a vital, a vital alternative energy source not only because of our dependency on foreign oil but its greenhouse gas reduction effects. John McCain said that in 2006.

But in a 2000 debate with George Bush, McCain said: We don’t need the subsidies and if it wasn’t for Iowa being the first caucus state no one on this stage would support ethanol. To which Bush replied: I support ethanol, I completely support ethanol, John. And I’d support it whether or not Iowa was first. But McCain elsewhere said this: Ethanol makes a lot of sense.
Full story »