Climate change is here — and worse than we thought
   
By James E. Hansen, Published: August 4

James E. Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.

But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.

My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.

In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.

These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.

Twenty-four years ago, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to help distinguish the long-term trend of climate change from the natural variability of day-to-day weather. Some summers are hot, some cool. Some winters brutal, some mild. That’s natural variability.

But as the climate warms, natural variability is altered, too. In a normal climate without global warming, two sides of the die would represent cooler-than-normal weather, two sides would be normal weather, and two sides would be warmer-than-normal weather. Rolling the die again and again, or season after season, you would get an equal variation of weather over time.

But loading the die with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal. Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you.

Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate (up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century), the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.

When we plotted the world’s changing temperatures on a bell curve, the extremes of unusually cool and, even more, the extremes of unusually hot are being altered so they are becoming both more common and more severe.

The change is so dramatic that one face of the die must now represent extreme weather to illustrate the greater frequency of extremely hot weather events.

Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the last three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10 percent of the globe.

This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.

There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.

The future is now. And it is hot.

Don't panic, boys, shale gas is coming.

Even Prez O'Bama says the US has enough to be cookin' with gas for a coupla centuries. China has plenty. We have plenty.
It's clean, cheap(ish) and getting cheaper.

We'll have solar by the time the gas runs out.

The sharp slump in solar PV prices has caused a dramatic re-evaluation of the technology cost and potential for solar by the world’s largest energy consumers – the US, China, and India – over the last three months.

The latest update came from US Energy secretary Stephen Chu, who suggested in a keynote speech late last week that the US government’s “sunshot” program launched in 2020 – with the goal of making solar cheaper than fossil fuels by the end of the decade – was no longer just aspirational, but a growing reality.

Chu began by making several observations about the US energy industry as it now stands. Onshore wind is already cheaper than new coal-fired energy, although gas is cheaper than both at around 5.5c/KWh, thanks to the boom in shale gas exploitation. Solar PV comes in at around 15c-24c/KWh. But Chu said the goal is to get solar down to 6.5c/KWh by the end of this decade (remember, Australia’s white energy paper absurdly predicts solar PV at 34c/KWh by 2035! Which is why you won’t hear a Chu-style speech from any current Australian energy minister).

Chu noted that utility-scale solar had already gone from $8 a watt in 2005 to $3.80 a watt in 2010, when the cost of the module was $1.70/watt. To get the cost of utility-scale solar down to $1/watt, it needs the cost of modules (which accounts for half of the total cost) to fall to 50c/watt. What makes him more optimistic than ever that the US will get there is the fact that in less than two years, it is already down to 93c/watt for silicon-based panels and below 80c/watt for cadmium telluride. “We’re more than half way there on module costs already, “ he told the ARPA-E conference. “Now we’ve got to do the same on the balance of system costs, and we are working hard on that.”

Once the total system cost gets to $1 a watt, utility-scale solar will have a long-term cost of energy of 6.5c/KWh. At that point, Chu says, it will be the same price as natural gas, without the need for any solar subsidies.

Chu’s predictions mean that the governments of the world’s three biggest energy users – China, the US and India – each believe that the cost of utility-scale solar will be cheaper than fossil fuels by 2020 at the latest. In India, because they have to import so much and have lousy transport infrastructure, that cost curve is expected to intersect with five years.

wooo james hansom.

As if anyone takes him serious anymore.

wooo james hansom.

As if anyone takes him serious anymore.

Hmmm we seem to have global warming that is not global. So is it global warming or is it local warming.

progressiveslol wrote on Aug 5^th, 2012 at 3:35pm:


Close but no cigar. If you are going to use sea ice as a proxy for global warming then you have to look at GLOBAL sea ice levels

http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/GlobalSeaIce_500.gif