Who is winning the race?

Right now, nations are racing towards the new low-carbon future.

Fossil fuels can only get more expensive because the cheapest reserves have already been tapped and new reserves are more expensive. When industrialised economies were developing, oil was the equivalent of $13 a barrel, but now countries must pay $120 to $130, according to Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency.

Another factor making fossil fuels more expensive is the increasing recognition of the damage caused by greenhouse gases and the impact of global warming. More countries are imposing carbon taxes/prices which will add to the cost of fossil fuels.

The race is on – 2011 was the first year that global investments in renewable energy surpassed investments in fossil fuels. 

European countries are ahead in the race because they started running years ago, while others watched from the sidelines. Now more countries are also running hard.

Some runners have been slowed down by fossil fuel interests that have undermined public confidence in the science behind climate change.  These countries are hobbled by their misinformed electorates.

Who are the winners? Anyone who is ahead of the pack will be a winner because they will avoid the worst impact of rising fossil fuel costs. Eventually, everyone will get there, but the laggards will pay a high price. Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, says that for every $1 that countries do not spend on cleaner fuel, they will have to spend $4.3 within the next two decades to make up for their reliance on fossil fuels.

Rich countries have a moral obligation to help poor countries keep up with the main pack.



Scott Mandia, a professor of meteorology at Suffolk County Community College in New York uses this analogy.  He is the founder of The Climate Science Rapid Response Team and The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.  He is a leading US voice in engaging the public, media and his students about the serious threat of climate change.

Source: Be Green

Bloomberg New Energy Finance produces a ranking of the Top 20 Green Banks which it bills as The Race for Clean Energy.

It's like your health – bad habits make it worse

Climate change is making difficult situations even worse, just as poor habits will make your health worse.

We know that poor diet affects health, and we know lack of exercise affects health, and when you put them both together, it REALLY affects our health.

We are using our natural resources at the edge of their capacity, or beyond it. For example, agriculture in West Texas relies on extracting water from the aquifers in winter. They are already extracting more water than is being replenished, so they will run out of water in a few decades.

The added impact of climate change makes the situation worse, and farmers in West Texas are likely to run out of water sooner.

The natural variability of the climate system puts stress on human activity through droughts, floods, severe winters, heatwaves, storms, etc. Climate change is making this natural variability more severe. 


The health analogy was used by Katharine Hayhoe, Research Associate Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas Tech University, in this interview.

House of bricks

You can think of the ecosystem as a very big house composed of 40 million bricks. Every brick represents a unique species. And every day, around 120 bricks are removed from somewhere in the building as species become extinct. 

"As more bricks are removed, cracks would develop in the walls, the roof would sag, and leaks would appear. At some point that we cannot predict, the entire structure would collapse and the house would turn to rubble."

 Source:  Clemson University

H/T Char Grainger

The clothes dryer effect

Just as a clothes dryer uses warm air to evaporate more easily, so our warming planet is drawing more moisture into the atmosphere. This moisure is leading to more extreme weather.

A report released in March 2012 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed that a strong body of evidence links global warming to an increase in heat waves, a rise in episodes of heavy rainfall and other precipitation, and more frequent coastal flooding. 

We're lurching from one weather extreme to another. The United States saw a February freeze followed by record breaking warm Spring weather where farmers are planting six weeks early.  Across Europe, people died by the hundreds during a severe cold wave in the first half of February, but a week later revelers in Paris were strolling down the Champs-Élysées in their shirt-sleeves. Australia has gone from a 10 year drought to record breaking floods.

Scientists say that the loss of Arctic ice is part of the story.

The question really is not whether the loss of the sea ice can be affecting the atmospheric circulation on a large scale, the question is, how can it not be, and what are the mechanisms?

Jennifer A. Francis, a Rutgers University climate researcher

Thomas C. Peterson, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, used the clothes dryer analogy in this NYT article.

Spring is cancelled

To say that an unusually cool summer debunks climate change is like saying that a cold patch in late April (or September in the Southern Hemisphere)  means that Spring is cancelled.

Or as Bill Maher puts it:

One major reason [people don't believe in climate change] ...  is that we had a very long snowy winter, which is the same as saying the sun is not real, because last night it got dark.

Mike Haseler fell for this error on his Scottish Sceptic blog.

Open the fridge door

How does a warming Arctic cause winter cold in Europe and Northern America? Or, in other words, if the globe is warming, why the cold freeze?

It's because the Arctic refrigerator door has been opened and the cold air spilled out at the bottom, according to John Cook of Skeptical Science.

The refrigerator door is the jet stream that marks the differences in atmospheric pressure in higher latitudes (20N) compared with mid-latitudes (37-45N). This difference in pressure is measured by the Arctic oscillation (AO)  index or Northern Annular Mode/Northern Hemisphere Annular Mode (NAM).

NASA climatologist Dr. James E. Hansen explains the mechanism by which the AO affects weather at points far from the Arctic:

The degree to which Arctic air penetrates into middle latitudes is related to the AO index, which is defined by surface atmospheric pressure patterns. When the AO index is positive, surface pressure is low in the polar region. This helps the middle latitude jet stream to blow strongly and consistently from west to east, thus keeping cold Arctic air locked in the polar region. When the AO index is negative, there tends to be high pressure in the polar region, weaker zonal winds, and greater movement of frigid polar air into middle latitudes.

So warmer temperatures in the Arctic mess with the air pressure and this tends to make the refrigerator door swing open. Sometimes it just chinks open a little bit, other times it's like a teenager came to raid the fridge. That's when Europe really freezes!

Boxing kangaroo

Here's the professor training his boxing kangaroo called Weather.

The way I like to think about it is to think of weather as a boxer throwing punches at us. Over history, weather has always thrown these punches at us – in Brisbane we had floods in 1974, and in the late 1800s we had floods that went through Brisbane as well. So there’s always been these punches coming at us, but what we’re doing now with global warming is like training the boxer to throw harder and faster punches at us.

John Cook, Skeptical Science

You could say we're not just training Weather, we are also giving him a different feedmix – one with more carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone.