Two stories in the news today about climate change and what we might be able to do about. First, on the political front, we now have the text of the complete bill now making its way through the Senate.

Senator Barbara Boxer released a 923-page draft of the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act over the weekend, the Senate version of climate and energy legislation, for the first time specifying emissions allocations and costs proposed in the bill.

“We’ve reached another milestone as we move to a clean energy future, creating millions of jobs and protecting our children from dangerous pollution,” Boxer, chairperson of the Environmental and Public Works Committee, who wrote the bill with Senator John Kerry, said on Friday.

In terms of emissions allocation, the Senate bill in many respect mirrors provisions in the House version passed last summer (H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.)

There are links in the original that will take you to the complete texts of both the House and Senate bills as they are now configured. The other news indicates that focusing on emissions from energy plants, industry, and automobiles could be only about half of the solution.

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the lifecycle and supply chain of animals raised for food account for 51% of annual emissions caused by humans and should be given higher priority in global efforts to fight climate change, World Bank Group experts argue.

The authors recognise that the 51% figure put forward “is a strong claim that requires strong evidence,” but stress that if their argument is right, “it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives” would have far more rapid effects on the climate than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

This partly due to significant reductions in the amount of methane, produced by enteric fermentation from cattle. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation, 37% of human-induced methane comes from livestock. Although methane produced by enteric fermentation from cattle warms the atmosphere much more strongly than CO2, its half-life in the atmosphere is only about eight years, compared to at least 100 years for CO2.

Before anyone decides that what this means is that animals are just as responsible for greenhouse gases as we are, consider this:

“Livestock (like automobiles) are a human invention and convenience, not part of pre-human times, and a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe,” they state.

Another factor involved is the amount of forest land cut down and cleared to make pastures for grazing animals. That not only releases CO2 from the soil, it reduces the forest’s capacity for removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

What this all makes apparent is that climate change is a global problem not only in the geographical sense, but also in the sense that it’s a consideration in our entire lives, from the cars we drive, the way we heat our homes and light our cities, even to the kinds of food we eat and how it’s grown. The bills now working their way through Congress are focused on energy and transportation, maybe it’s time to get the Agriculture Committee involved, too.

And Congress hasn’t even passed a law yet.

The United States has ended a century of rising carbon emissions and has now entered a new energy era, one of declining emissions. Peak carbon is now history. What had appeared to be hopelessly difficult is happening at amazing speed.

For a country where oil and coal use have been growing for more than a century, the fall since 2007 is startling. In 2008, oil use dropped 5 percent, coal 1 percent, and carbon emissions by 3 percent. Estimates for 2009, based on U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) data for the first nine months, show oil use down by another 5 percent. Coal is set to fall by 10 percent. Carbon emissions from burning all fossil fuels dropped 9 percent over the two years.

Add in future stronger requirements in automobile emissions, more efficient building techniques, and a recession influenced drop in individual energy use and there’s actually reason to believe that meaningful cuts in emissions, the kind needed to at least slow down the pace of global warming, can be achieved. Something to feel good about as a new week begins.

Spotted seals, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, are doing just fine, thank you.

Spotted seals off Alaska’s coast do not merit endangered species protection despite losses of Arctic sea ice from global warming, a federal agency announced Thursday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, however, will list as threatened a small population of spotted seals that live off the coasts of Russia and China.

Doug Mecum, acting administrator for NOAA’s Fisheries Service Alaska region, said spotted seals in two populations closest to Alaska exceed 200,000 animals.

Those two scare words, “global warming”, are at the heart of this decision. Once a federal agency cites global warming as the reason for listing a species as endangered, the regulatory shit will hit the proverbial fan. That’s a step the feds would like to avoid at all costs, even though it’s becoming more and more evident that global warming is threatening the health of many species. But if you invoke the Endangered Species Act with global warming as the reason, there’s no turning back on regulating the causes of global warming. The Act doesn’t leave much room for compromise.

Compromise, of course, is exactly what Congress is all about, so there’s big pressure to avoid invoking the Act and letting Congress make up its mind about whether and how to regulate the causes of global warming. Until that happens, expect NOAA’s spotted seal decision to be a guide for any federal agencies that run up against the problem of the realtionship between global warming and endangered species.

The plight of rainforests and their significance when it comes to global warming is pretty well known. New to most of us, though, is the idea that there are forests under the ocean that are every bit, if not more, important than rainforests when it comes to capturing CO2 and alleviating climate change.

Life in the ocean has the potential to help to prevent global warming, according to a report published today.
Marine plant life sucks 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, but most of the plankton responsible never reaches the seabed to become a permanent carbon store.

Mangrove forests, salt marshes and seagrass beds are a different matter. Although together they cover less than 1 percent of the world’s seabed, they lock away well over half of all carbon to be buried in the ocean floor. They are estimated to store 1,650 million tons of carbon dioxide every year — nearly half of global transport emissions — making them one of the most intense carbon sinks on Earth.

Their capacity to absorb the emissions is under threat, however: the habitats are being lost at a rate of up to 7 percent a year, up to 15 times faster than the tropical rainforests. A third have already been lost.

One nightmare scenario, the kind you might find in a good disaster novel, would be that the solution to our global warming problem is out there, but that by the time we find it the plant or animal it depends on is already gone, a victim of the change it may have helped prevent or ameliorate. The oceans harbor so much life, and so much would be lost if we completely screwed them up, that’s it’s not to difficult conceiving the ifea that the solutions we need could be found there, and that it is already to lat to do anything about it.

If you’ve been watching and enjoying Ken Burns’ documentary on our national parks now being shown on PBS stations, and why wouldn’t you, you’ve probably picked up on one of the major themes; that the early history of the parks was often one of a few people managing to establish the parks in the face of misunderstanding and, at times, outright opposition. That the idea of the parks came to be at all is a minor miracle, that they were first established at a time when exploitation of resources was seen by many as the end all and be all of their existence is more of a major one.

Of course, the problems faced by the parks today are different than those encountered in simply trying to get them set up in the first place. Management and use issues tend to dominate conversation about the parks, but there is a looming issue that threatens to change the very nature of the parks themselves. If global warming and climate change prevail, for many of the parks, from the glaciers of Glacier National Park to the Joshua trees the very reasons the parks were established to preserve will disappear forever.

That’s the theme of a report issued last week by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization. As their report shows what Burns characterizes as America’s best idea is in danger of being destroyed not by competing development or over-use, although those are perennial problems, but by a changing climate that could lead to an irreversible change to the very landscape the parks are intended to preserve.

That would be a shame, not just for us but also the wildlife and other species that have come to depend on the presence of the parks to protect the habitat they depend on for life. The problem is serious, but it may not be too late yet to do something about it. For an introduction, including a slide show of the most endangered parks, click here, to go straight to the report, here (pdf file).

It’s been a while since we took a look at conditions on the Arctic ice cap. It would be nice to have some good news to pass along for a change, but that just doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

Out in the Arctic Ocean, about 200 miles (322 km ) north of the nearest human settlement, the future of the world’s climate is written in the patterns of ice patches on the water’s surface.

Old, “multiyear” ice — the glue that holds the polar ice cap together and forms the Arctic’s defense against encroaching warming — is slowly disintegrating, a process that is plain to see from the air.

Thick ice floes used to be kilometers (miles) wide just over a decade ago, said Jim Overland, a sea-ice expert with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who has been surveying the site since the 1990s.

Now the narrow floes — with bright-white tops and a blue underwater glow — are just meters (yards) wide, observed Overland as he studied the patterns from the window of a U.S. Coast Guard C-130 aircraft.

The dense, high-quality ice is not coming back, Overland said.

The arctic ice cap is a major component of the entire world’s climate. If it disappears, and all evidence right now is that it’s a matter of when, not if, it could have a profound effect on the balance of weather patterns all around the Earth. That’s a future we are looking at unless real efforts are made to prevent it, and with all the opposition to doing anything from everyone who profits from things as they are, and the people they’ve convinced that global warming isn’t something we have anything to do with or can do anything about, it’s hard to see how that will happen.

I’m becoming more and more afraid that nothing meaningful will be done about what we’re doing to the environment until some major catastrophe occurs, and by then, for millions of people, it will be too late.

Those intent on denying human involvement in global warming often like to point to what natural causes that they feel explain away the phenomena. “It’s sunspots”, they’ll say, or “Shifts in the Earth’s orbit.”

Meanwhile, for climate scientists and the rest of us the evidence has been quite good for a while that global warming and climate change are being propelled by human activities like pollution from greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Now, as if we didn’t have enough evidence already, a new study just released shows that if it wasn’t for us, the Arctic would be cooling instead of melting.

Arctic temperatures have been dropping for the last 2,000 years. Since 1900, temperature anomaly has turned positive, indicating temperatures started becoming warmer than the long term average, new research indicates. The study, which incorporates geologic records and computer simulations, provides new evidence that the Arctic would be cooling if not for greenhouse gas emissions that are overpowering natural climate patterns. The Summer temperature anomaly changed from about — 1 to + 1 which is a very large change.

The international study, led by Northern Arizona University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), will be published in the September 4 edition of Science. It was primarily funded by the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor.

“This result is particularly important because the Arctic, perhaps more than any other region on Earth, is facing dramatic impacts from climate change,” says NCAR scientist David Schneider, one of the co-authors. “This study provides us with a long-term record that reveals how greenhouse gases from human activities are overwhelming the Arctic’s natural climate system.”

“If it hadn’t been for the increase in human-produced greenhouse gases, summer temperatures in the Arctic should have cooled gradually over the last century,” says Bette Otto-Bliesner, an NCAR scientist who participated in the study.

So there you have it. We are influencing the climate not just enough to cancel out a two millenium long cooling trend, but we’ve actually reversed the process. Anyone denying human responsibility for global warming can now do so only as a matter of stubborn, ignorant belief. it has nothing to do with science, or the facts.

Forget about peer-reviewed articles, years of research, and Nobel Prizes, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has decided that only they know how to arrive at the facts about global warming and climate change.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business federation, wants to put climate change science on trial.

In an attempt to head off a U.S. EPA finding that climate change endangers public health and welfare in the United States, the Chamber Tuesday petitioned the federal agency for a trial-like hearing of the scientific evidence before an administrative judge or EPA official.

Yes, that’s right, they want a federal judge or administrator to rule on whether or not climate scientists have their facts right. Now, perhaps their motives are pure, and the Chamber of Commerce really wants to make sure the facts are right before we start doing anything that would save the planet at the possible cost of some corporate profits, but more likely this has more to do with keeping the EPA from deciding the issue by regulations, rather than having Congress pass legislation. Now that Obama’s people are in at the EPA, the Chamber no doubt feels it’s easier to influence Congress than it is to control the EPA.

And if you still think the Chamber’s motives are pure, check this out:

The Chamber of Commerce argues in its petition that rather than endangering public health, global warming would benefit Americans because, “the reduction of wintertime deaths from cold weather would be several times larger than the increase in summertime heat stress related deaths.”

The Chamber faults Administrator Jackson for “ignoring analyses” that show that a warming of even 3º Celsius in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to Americans. Most scientists say warming must be held below 2º Celsius to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

That’s right, as long as they can convince themselves a few Americans might benefit, to heck with the rest of the world. I suppose as a Minnesotan, I should welcome the prospect of a warmer Winter, but then I think about the prospects of long-term drought caused by climate change, and its effect on the lives of the millions of people living in the American Southwest and southern California. But, by the Chamber’s reasoning, my life might be a little easier in the Winter, so I shouldn’t care about that.

Luckily, not all of us are so selfish and short-sighted. There are even some Republicans who fail to see any wisdom in the Chamber’s petition.

On Tuesday, Republicans for Environmental Protection positioned itself on the scientific side of that divide.

Calling the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s demand for a Scopes monkey trial of climate change science “a crass attempt to exploit religious beliefs in order to stall actions necessary to protect the country from carbon pollution,” the grassroots organization said the business lobby should get behind clean energy technology.

Anyone who lives near a large body of water knows the effect it hasd on weather, from hurricanes to lake-affect snow. The oceans, of course, affect the weather worldwide. That’s why the latest news from the NOAA has the potential be meaningful in all our live.

The planet’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for July, breaking the previous high mark established in 1998 according to an analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The combined average global land and ocean surface temperature for July 2009 ranked fifth-warmest since world-wide records began in 1880.

There may be single year or season variations, we’ve had a cooler than normal Summer here in Minnesota, but the long-term trends are that the planet is warming. And in the case of the oceans, we’re literally heating up the water we live in.

The problem is, for all three, the story’s the same.

Three major glaciers in Alaska and Washington state have thinned and shrunk dramatically, clear signs of a warming climate, according to a study released Thursday by the U.S. Geological Survey.

The three glaciers — Gulkana and Wolverine in Alaska and South Cascade in Washington — are considered benchmarks for those in alpine and maritime climates because they closely parallel other glaciers in their regions. They have also been the subject of close scientific scrutiny since 1957.

“These are the three glaciers in North America that have the longest record of mass change,” said Shad O’Neel, a United States Geological Survey glaciologist in Anchorage who was one of the study authors.

“All three of them have a different climate from the other two, yet all three are showing a similar pattern of behavior, and that behavior is mass loss.”

“Mass loss” is a technical way of saying the glaciers are shrinking. And, as the quoted story indicates, melting glaciers are a world-wide phenomena. We’re living on a planet where the temperature is increasing, and, for the most part, we’re spending all our time arguing over who’s been turning up the heat, rather than doing anything about it. That’s people for you.