ThinkProgress

White House admits Trump climate policies will destroy all U.S. coastal property

Will GOP tax reform burst the trillion-dollar U.S. coastal property bubble?

Joe Romm          November 7, 2017

 Downtown Houston flooding from Superstorm Harvey, August 28, 2017. CREDIT: AP/Jason Dearen

The massive climate report released by the Trump administration on Friday makes clear that the President’s climate policies will destroy every last bit of U.S. (and global) coastal property in the decades to come.

That means more than $1 trillion in U.S. coastal property will eventually be valueless. So the only question is “when” and not “if” that trillion-dollar housing bubble will burst.

The answer appears to be sooner, rather than later, for two reasons. First, the administration’s policies — to abandon the Paris climate deal while working to gut both domestic climate action and coastal adaptation programs — make the worst-case scenarios for climate change more likely while undermining any efforts to prepare for what’s coming. Second, the GOP tax reform bill will directly deflate coastal property values because it targets the tax breaks for the most expensive properties.

Climate change poses ‘nightmare scenario’ for Florida coast, Bloomberg warns

America’s trillion-dollar coastal property bubble could burst “before the sea consumes a single house.” Here’s why.

Sea levels are rising, and Trump policies will speed that up

Let’s start with how Friday’s congressionally-mandated National Climate Assessment (NCA) makes clear Trump’s climate policies will destroy every last bit of U.S. (and global) coastal property in the coming decades.

The report, the “authoritative assessment of the science of climate change, with a focus on the United States” by scientists from 13 federal agencies — which the Trump administration reviewed and cleared before releasing Friday — paints a grim picture for our coasts.

The scientists can’t rule out eight feet of sea level rise by century’s end (the “extreme” scenario). But then, the Arctic sees upwards of 18°F warming in the 2071-2100 timeframe, so melting of the Greenland ice sheet will be off the charts.

The NCA looks at a variety of scenarios, including ones where the nation and world meet or even surpass the Paris climate targets to minimize total warming. But it also examines higher emissions scenarios where Paris fails. They reflect plausible worst-case scenarios on the business-as-usual path, which is the path that Trump’s policies keep us on.

In those “intermediate-high” and “high” scenarios, sea levels rise 4.9 to 6.6 feet respectively by century’s end. Significantly, they rise 1.4 to 1.8 feet by 2050, which is in the time frame of 30-year mortgages that banks will soon be considering. When banks stop providing those mortgages, property values will plummet.

Remember, the storm surge from future Harveys and Sandys will be on top of whatever sea level rise we see, which is why studies find that, in high emissions scenarios, Sandy-type storm surges occur every year or two by mid century.

NOAA: Warming-Driven Sea Level Rise To Make Sandy-Type Storm Surges The Norm On East Coast 

The report also looks at the often neglected rate of sea level rise in the coming decades. In the “high” scenario, seas are rising 8 inches per decade by 2050, and 14 inches per decade by 2090. That rise continues to accelerate until it reaches a rate of 2 feet per decade early in the next century.

How exactly do coastal areas adapt to such rapid and accelerating sea level rise? How rapidly do you abandon places that you know will be repeatedly inundated by the combination of sea level rise and storm surge in the coming decades?

And for those who consider such rates of sea level rise unlikely, the NCA has some bad news. The United States is all but certain to see higher “relative sea level” [RSL] rise than the global average especially in the Northeast and the western Gulf of Mexico. In fact for “for high [Global Mean Sea Level] rise scenarios, RSL rise is likely to be higher than the global average along all U.S. coastlines outside Alaska.”

Moreover, the report warns that “climate models are more likely to underestimate than to overestimate the amount of long-term future change.” Again, that means sea level rise is likely to be higher and faster than the report’s projections, especially under Trump’s policies.

The trillion-dollar coastal property bubble is ready to burst

The implications for coastal property values are grave. “The risk will rise as sea levels rise, and when that happens, you’d expect your property value to fall,” as Lloyd Dixon, the director of the RAND Center for Catastrophic Risk Management and Compensation, told the International Business Times last month. “At some point, the property becomes worthless.”

Sean Becketti, the chief economist for mortgage giant Freddie Mac, warned a year ago that the coastal property bubble will burst sooner than expected: “Some residents will cash out early and suffer minimal losses. Others will not be so lucky.”

As Bloomberg put it in April, “Demand and financing could collapse before the sea consumes a single house.”

That process may already be starting. Last November, the New York Times reported that “nationally, median home prices in areas at high risk for flooding are still 4.4 percent below what they were 10 years ago, while home prices in low-risk areas are up 29.7 percent over the same period.”

Jesse Keenan, who studies coastal property, has “begun to see evidence in survey data that middle-income people are leaving Miami Beach and other places with nuisance flooding that makes it difficult to get around at high tides or insure a car,” Scientific American reported back in May. “It’s not out of the question that Miami Beach loses 20 percent of its population and most of those people go to the mainland,” said Keenan. “I’m talking about the next 20 years.”

The GOP tax plan could start to deflate the bubble

The GOP tax reform bill the House of Representatives is considering takes a few whacks at states with a lot of coastal property. As the New York Times reports, it proposes “to put a cap of $10,000 on the property taxes that can be deducted at the federal level; to eliminate the deduction for state and local income taxes; and to restrict the mortgage interest deduction to loans of $500,000 or less.”

The key point is these changes hit the highest-price homes the most — and coastal property values are nearly double the value of similar inland property, according to a Congressional Budget Office study. They could deflate coastal property values more than 10 percent.

Given that the coastal property bubble must burst sometime in the not-too-distant future — and that the early sellers of overpriced coastal property will do a lot better than the later ones — this initial deflation may well hasten the inevitable sell-off.

Here’s the ultimate question for owners of coastal property —  and the financial institutions that back them: Who will be with the smart money that gets out early  —  and who will be with the other kind of money?

The Nation

The GOP Tax Bill Is an Attempt to Destroy Government

Americans need more services, not less.

By Robert L. Borosage        November 3, 2017

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell with Senate majority whip John Cornyn, and Senator John Barrasso, talk to reporters, July 25, 2017. (AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin)

The House Republican tax bill has been introduced, packaged beautifully with lies. Now House Republicans will push to pass, in one week, a 500-page bill written in secret that transforms the tax code. Powerful special interests will spend millions for and against. Legions of lobbyists will fill congressional offices. Experts will duel over the effects. Trump is already boasting about “a great Christmas present” of the biggest tax cuts ever.

Republicans hope that the fog of competing claims will cover their tracks. In the midst of the frenzy, remember one thing: this entire project is utterly wrong-headed. Few politicians dare say it, but the reality is Americans are not overtaxed. They are under-served by their government.

American corporations and American citizens are not overtaxed, compared with other industrial nations. The greatest impediment to corporate competitiveness isn’t what corporations pay in taxes; it is an inefficient, outdated, and increasingly dangerous infrastructure. It is time wasted in traffic jams, slow trains, and overcrowded airports. Our broadband is slower and costs more than that of other leaders in the industrial world. Nine percent of all bridges are rated “structurally deficient” and 40 percent are over 50 years old. Our energy and water systems are aged and fragile. A bridge falls every other day in America. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that our increasingly decrepit infrastructure will cost about 2.5 million jobs and $7 trillion in sales by 2025. For businesses, the best use of public dollars isn’t tax cuts for the rich and big corporations but investments in rebuilding America.

Similarly, America’s workers are gouged far more by inadequate and wasteful public investment than by high taxes. We pay about two times as much per capita for health care—with worse results and leaving millions of people still not covered. The costs of educating kids—from pre-K to summer programs to soaring college tuitions and fees—rise far faster than stagnant wages. Crowded and pot-holed roads steal time and tax cars and tires. Flint is not alone in suffering from aging pipelines and poisonous water. For working people, the best use of public dollars is to invest in Medicare for All, tuition-free college, universal pre-K, and efficient roads and water systems.

Trump and Republicans want to sell tax cuts as key to growth and jobs, but this too is a con. In using public money to create jobs, the most authoritative assessment—made by Moody’s Mark Zandi, a former adviser to John McCain—is that investing in infrastructure would produce far more “bang for the buck” in jobs and growth than tax cuts would create. The money would be more likely to stay here, since 35 percent of corporate tax cuts would go to foreign investors or companies. The working people hired on public projects spend their wages, the rich less so. All this is particularly true now: Corporate profits are near-record levels, inequality is at record extremes, and interest rates are still low. Corporations don’t need tax breaks. They need customers. The rich will get more money under the GOP plan, but they’ve already captured so much of the nation’s income and wealth that even the conservative International Monetary Fund has warned that inequality has reached extremes that are an impediment to growth and jobs.

Republicans hypocritically will run up deficits and add a trillion or two to the national debt, but the real damage is that they will exacerbate what is now a crippling public-investment deficit. For all the alarms you’ll hear from Democrats and some Republicans in the next weeks, the budget deficits aren’t much of an economic concern. Inflation, if anything, is too low, and America bonds sell at remarkably low interest rates.

Budget deficits, however, are a political club. Once the tax cuts are passed, Republicans will return to hectoring about deficits and debt. Their budget documents already call for brutal cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the entire range of public services. As crippling as America’s public investment is today, passage of the Republican tax plan virtually insures that it will get far worse.

As Republicans rush to get this bill passed before it is read, the big lies will be exposed. The rich will clean up; some in the middle class—particularly those with large families—will pay more. Wealthy real-estate operators, investors, lawyers, and accountants will pocket most of the so-called small business “pass-through” tax break. Repatriation and territoriality will give corporations even more incentive to rig their books to report profits in tax havens abroad. But the specific outrages are neither as destructive nor as appalling as the entire project itself. By making it harder to address America’s crippling public-investment deficits, large tax cuts, if passed, will accelerate this country’s decline.

Robert L. Borosage is a leading progressive writer and activist.

ThinkProgress

Embattled Navajo coal plant is a preview of what’s ahead as coal declines across the U.S.

“It tied us to those jobs and didn’t allow us to diversify.”

Nexus Media          November 6, 2017

Navajo Generating Station, Arizona. CREDIT: Wolfgang Moroder

By Jeremy Deaton

It looks like it doesn’t belong there. The lonely, aging power plant stands out against the red desert, connected to the nearest town by a single, crumbling road. It will soon become an artifact, a relic from when coal was king.

If the Navajo Generating Station (NGS) closes — as it is set to do in 2019 — it will leave the local communities with 800 fewer jobs and a massive dent in revenue. But opponents to the plant say the cost to human health has been too high, and it’s time to turn to alternative sources of energy and jobs.

The plant is facing a future familiar to many coal-fired power plants, struggling to compete with smaller, more nimble natural gas-fired generators, wind farms, and solar arrays.

“You know the old saying, ‘You make money if you buy low and sell high’? They’re buying high and selling lower,” said David Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

If the Navajo Generating Station shuts down, locals will lose some 800 jobs, both at the plant and in the nearby Kayenta mine, which supplies coal to the generating station. Facing unemployment rates upwards of 40 percent, the Navajo and Hopi tribes are eager to protect those jobs, to say nothing of the revenue the operation provides.

“The Navajo Nation is so dependent on the jobs and the revenue for their budget. It’s really sad because, looking forward, it just doesn’t seem to be a sustainable economic enterprise,” Schlissel said. “I have no idea who would put their money here.”

Credit: Stephanie Smith, Grand Canyon Trust

Some, however, are happy to see the plant and the mine close down. While the operation is the cornerstone of the local economy, it is also a symbol of exploitation. Built on sacred land and without the consent of traditional leaders, the operation has better served its corporate owners than the tribes themselves. Thanks to a one-sided lease brokered by the federal government, for decades the Navajo and Hopi tribes received pennies on the dollar for every ton of coal mined.

Critics of the plant see its closure as an opportunity to create new businesses owned and operated by Native Americans in tourism, agriculture, and energy. Experts believe the tribes could repurpose much of the existing infrastructure associated with the Navajo Generating Station — including power lines to populations centers — to support new solar and wind projects. The transition to renewable energy sources would be difficult, but it could breathe life into the community.

In many ways, the embattled plant is a microcosm of a story unfolding across the country. As coal loses ground to natural gas and renewable energy, coal miners and plant operators are looking to the Trump administration to keep them afloat. But there is only so much policymakers can do. The Navajo Generating Station offers a preview of what’s to come.

The Navajo Generating Station as viewed from above. CREDIT: Ken Lund

The rise and fall of the Navajo Generating Station

The story of the Navajo Generating Station dates back to the late 19th century, when government surveyors discovered expansive reserves of copper on land inhabited by Hopis, Navajos, and a handful of Mormon settlers. As Judith Nies explains in Unreal City, a history of coal power in the Southwest, President Chester A. Arthur worried that Mormons would snatch up the mineral-rich land at a time when demand for coal was on the rise.

In 1882, Thomas Edison flipped the switch on the world’s first commercial coal-fired power plant, and it was clear that the electrification of the United States would drive up demand for coal. That same year, Arthur signed an executive order creating an Indian reservation that spanned a large swath of Arizona coal deposits. The president’s order would keep coal reserves out of the hands of Mormon settlers, giving the federal government the opportunity to exploit those resources at a future date.

That day came nearly a century later, as the rapid growth of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and other cities in the Southwest spurred investments in coal power. In 1966, Navajo and Hopi leaders signed a lease allowing coal giant Peabody Energy to mine 40,000 of acres of their reservation. The lawyer who represented the Hopi tribe also represented Peabody, and he did much better work for the coal company than he did for the Native Americans.

The Peabody lease “violated every guideline that the Department of Interior had set up for leasing on public lands: no competitive bidding, no automatic renegotiation clauses, a fixed rate rather than a percentage royalty rate,” Nies writes. At that time, the royalty rate on federal lands was $1.50 per ton of coal, but under the terms of the lease, the Hopi and Navajo tribes would earn just 37 cents on each ton of coal mined. Hopi leaders decried the lease as “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion.”

The Kayenta Mine. CREDIT: Doc Searls

The deal was a giveaway to Peabody, but Nies writes the lease was “about more than money. It was about growth — the power to pump water into Phoenix, air-conditioning to Los Angeles, and the electricity to light the giant casinos and cool thousands of homes in Las Vegas as the population doubled and then tripled every year.” All of it depended on a steady supply of cheap electricity.

In 1973, Peabody began operations at the Kayenta mine. Three years later, the Navajo Generating Station came online, delivering power to customers across the Southwest. The tribe mined coal, exported electricity, and raised revenues, but the biggest winners were Peabody energy and the power utilities that owned the plant. “The Navajo Nation really didn’t get its fair share out of those operations,” said Brett Isaac, a Navajo solar entrepreneur. “It tied us to those jobs and didn’t allow us to diversify.”

Now, with the plant set to close, workers are worried about how they will make ends meet. “A lot of the miners and plant operators, they are pretty much lifelong employees of that operation,” Isaac said. “I have an uncle who has worked at the Peabody mine since right out of high school. The next week after graduation he started working at the mine. He’s never had to apply for a job.”

Until recently, coal was the country’s cheapest and most abundant source of power, and utilities relied on large facilities like the Navajo Generating Station to provide reliable electricity. In recent years, however, coal has lost ground to other power sources. Wind and solar are growing cheaper by the day, while advances in hydraulic fracturing have made natural gas more affordable than coal. Small, gas-fired power plants can ramp up and down more quickly than large, coal plants, allowing them to track consumer demand more closely.

Natural gas has overtaken coal as the largest source of electricity in the United States. Coal production is expected to continue its long decline. Credit: Energy Information Administration

“All of the major utilities in the region, who are already co-owners of the plant, have decided for economic reasons that it’s cheaper for them to produce their own power or buy power from gas and renewables,” said Roger Clark, a program director at the Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation group based in Arizona.

“The outlook has gotten dimmer and dimmer as the years have past,” Isaac said. “We knew we would have to diversify, but we didn’t think it would be this sudden.”

The Navajo Generating Station is in an especially precarious position. Because the plant is situated 4,000 feet above sea-level, where the air is thinner, the coal burns less efficiently than it would at a lower elevation. The plant is also hundreds of miles away from major markets like Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and some electricity is inevitably lost en route. Utilities would rather generate power from solar, wind or natural gas closer to where it’s being used.

“For one thing, you’re not having to pay 800 people to run the mine and the power plant,” said Clark. At a gas-fired power plant, “a shift might be three to five people. At the Navajo Generating Station, it’s several hundred people.”

The high cost of generating coal power is only one problem. There is also the human cost of operating the mine,  which has left a generation of workers with black lung disease. The power plant ,  which is the seventh-largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, along with a host of toxic chemicals that worsen asthma, provoke heart attacks, and shorten lives. Pollution from the plant can be seen as far away as the Grand Canyon.

“You can see the haze,” said Isaac, who lamented the years of operation. “What did it actually cost us? People getting sick.”

Navajo Generating Station, Arizona. Credit: Myrabella

A power plant on life support

Perhaps more than the Hopi and Navajo tribes, Peabody is determined to keep the Navajo Generating Station open. The coal company said it has found a number of potential buyers for the plant, but it has not disclosed any names, and it seems unlikely that investors would be lining up to purchase the generating station. IEEFA projects it would cost upwards of $400 million to keep the plan online through the end of 2019, and it could cost more than $2 billion in subsidies to keep the plant running through 2030.

Peabody has an ally in Trump administration, though, which is desperate to make good on its promise to rescue the coal industry. In addition to rolling back dozens of environmental safeguards, the administration is pushing regulators to compel utilities to buy costly, polluting coal power. It has made the Navajo Generating Station a priority, not simply because the federal government has an ownership stake in the plant.

“If NGS closes, it will be very damaging for the administration,” Mike McKenna, who served on Trump’s transition team, told ClimateWire. “Closure is a preventable tragedy. The administration needs to prevent it.”

Trump administration throws weight behind keeping Arizona coal plant open

Owners want to wash their hands of unprofitable coal plant.

Representatives from Peabody Energy recently met with officials at the Department of the Interior and the Department of Energy, as did Navajo and Hopi leaders. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is exploring options for keeping the plant open, including erecting a high-powered solar facility that would be compatible with the current operation.

“Since the first weeks of the Trump administration, one of Interior’s top priorities has been to roll up our sleeves with diverse stakeholders in search of an economic path forward to extend NGS and Kayenta Mine operations after 2019,” Zinke said in a statement in June. The administration has yet to put forward a plan to stave off the plant’s closure.

Window Rock, a sandstone formation on the Navajo reservation. CREDIT: Ben FrantzDale

An uncertain future for the Navajo and Hopi tribes

It’s unclear how locals could replace the jobs and revenue from the Navajo Generating Station, but experts have a few ideas. A recent report from IEEFA proposed that the Bureau of Reclamation, Peabody, and the utilities that own the plant “provide a substantial core of replacement jobs that require skill sets similar to those of the existing workforce.”

The report also recommended the tribes invest in infrastructure, tourism, agriculture, and water. Clark pointed to the infrastructure associated with the power plant, which includes a water pump, power lines, and an electric railroad that runs from the mine to the generating station. “All of these things might be able to be repurposed into a renewable-energy powered water system,” he said.

The power plant uses as much as 30,000 acre-feet of water each year, water that is siphoned from Lake Powell using a large pump, Clark explained. “If the power plant is taken down, that pump is a stranded asset, which also might complement the fact that the Navajo Nation itself has a legitimate claim to every bit of that water that the power plant is using plus another 20,000 acre-feet,” he said.

The Navajo tribe could build solar arrays to power the pump, which could be used to carry water from Lake Powell to the current site of the plant, a high point in the region. Water could then be fed to other parts of the reservation. “The water itself may be worth more than the coal to the Navajo Nation,” Clark said.

Lake Powell. Credit: Wolfgang Staudt

The Navajo tribe could also invest in clean energy, both to sell across state lines and to provide power locally. “Other states don’t buy coal power anymore,” Isaac said, “but other states will buy renewable energy. So, we’re looking for ways that we can capitalize on that.”

A 2012 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that “neither solar, wind, nor geothermal power alone can replace all the types of benefits currently provided by [the Navajo Generating Station]. They might in aggregate, however.” The IEEFA report found that solar power could “replace some of the lost generation capacity, jobs, and revenue” from the plant’s closure.

Isaac said that many Navajos doubt the viability of clean energy, so they built mobile solar power units to bring electricity to parts of the reservation that are off the grid — around a third of homes on the Navajo Reservation lack power. “I wanted to build something that people could touch,” Isaac said. “Essentially, we’re building stories, because that is hopefully what’s going to encourage communities to shift.”

One of Isaac’s mobile solar units. Credit: Brett Isaac

The Department of Commerce has awarded some $420,000 to the Navajo and Hopi tribes to help them cope with the plant’s closure, money that could be used to implement some of these ideas. Even if the plant stays online for a few more years, it is inevitable that it will close sooner rather than later. Any effort to keep the plant open distracts from the hard work of creating new businesses. Isaac says the Navajo tribe needs to look beyond coal for jobs and income.

“We seriously thought we couldn’t survive without that royalty. We couldn’t survive without those jobs. We kind of put ourselves in a corner when it came to how to discuss the economic impact,” Isaac said. “It’s going to hurt, but we are a lot more savvy than we give ourselves credit for.”

Jeremy Deaton writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated news-wire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.

EcoWatch

Detroit Free Press

State should end discussion, take action on Line 5

Dave Dempsey Published        November 4, 2017

(Photo: Ellen Creager/Detroit Free Press)

When the police pulls a resident over for going 100 mph in a 55-mph zone, they don’t cluck their tongues — they click their ticket books.

But when Michigan’s state government catches Enbridge Energy putting the Great Lakes at risk by failing again to disclose dangerous conditions on its Line 5 oil pipelines in the Mackinac Straits, the response is paralysis. The state has again caught Enbridge ignoring its legal obligation to be a proper steward of the submerged land that the state allows the company to occupy with its pipeline.

But all we’re hearing out of Lansing, and particularly Attorney General Bill Schuette is an expression of disappointment.

The difference between strict enforcement of laws against individuals and giving an oil transport giant chance after chance to meet its fundamental responsibility not to harm public waters is as stark as the difference between a single speeding motorist and a catastrophic oil spill fouling the drinking water source for millions.

The accumulation of studies, evidence of pipeline delamination and bends in June, and now exposed metal with likely corrosion, signals a dangerously flawed and ultimately incurable pair of sunken pipelines.

It’s time for our state government to stop treating the 1963 Constitution, statutes, and common law that protect our lakes as nice but meaningless environmental policy statements and start treating them as the duty the people through the Constitution and our courts have mandated.  More than ever, it’s time to shut down Line 5.

Dave Dempsey, Senior Advisor, FLOW, Traverse City

Los Angeles Times  Editorial

The world is warming even faster than expected. Trump isn’t going to act. The rest of us need to step up

The coal-fired Plant Scherer, one of the nation’s top carbon dioxide emitters, in Juliette, Ga. on June 3. (Branden Camp / Associated Press)

By The Times Editorial Board, Contact Reporter     November 4, 2017

The global climate is in trouble, worsening faster than experts believed only two years ago, and ambitious international steps to address the problem have been insufficient thus far. In December 2015, nearly every nation on earth committed themselves to the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a concerted effort to limit the rise in global temperature to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But scientists now say that threshold is too high — the line must be held at 1.5 degrees to prevent the climate change that’s already underway from becoming catastrophic.

Representatives of the nations that signed the Paris agreement meet this week at a United Nations climate conference in Bonn to take stock of where the world is right now, and of individual nations’ efforts to curtail emissions. The Trump administration is sending a career diplomat to the conference (which also will be attended by Gov. Jerry Brown, a key figure in organizing sub-national efforts to reduce emissions) even though President Trump has begun the process of withdrawing from the pact, possibly the single most dangerous step he has taken. While the U.S. government’s policy is to move backward — Trump wants to burn more fossil fuel, not less — state and local governments, other countries around the world and international corporations are all moving forward.

But the plans on the table are not enough. The United Nation’s own Emissions Gap Report released Oct. 31 found that “the gap between the reductions needed and the national pledges made in Paris is alarmingly high,” and that emissions must be throttled back even further. Nations also could help by pursuing reforestation programs, developing carbon storage technologies and adopting smarter agricultural and wetlands-management policies. Given the UN’s latest findings, attendees at the Bonn convention must come up with a strategy for accelerating global efforts to reduce emissions and ensure that the world reaches net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

If the president won’t lead on climate change, Congress must.

Even that may not suffice. A new report by the World Meteorological Organization concluded that carbon dioxide increased in the atmosphere at record speed last year and has reached a level not seen in more than 3 million years. At that time, the average atmospheric temperature was 3 degrees Celsius warmer than today, which melted glaciers in Greenland and the Antarctic and pushed sea levels at least 30 feet higher than they are now.

Currently, scientists are predicting sea-level rise in terms of feet, not inches, which would inundate coastlines, destroy infrastructure worldwide and displace tens of millions of people. We’re already seeing increased storm strength, more frequent flooding and deeper droughts, all ascribed to global warming.

More troubling is that last year’s increase came despite a global slowdown in the burning of fossil fuels. Some scientists fear we may be reaching a “feedback loop” in which warmer air in the Arctic thaws permafrost, which releases trapped methane (and carbon dioxide), which in turn feeds the rise in the air temperature. Others, relying on historic comparisons to previous warming cycles, think that the risk from tundra emissions might not be significant, but that increased rainfall in the tropics, which leads to microbial processes that release methane, could be. In either scenario, it will be crucial to offset the increases by reducing the amount of methane released from such human activities as drilling, cattle ranching and rice farming.

Individual actions are important too. One person’s carbon footprint is small, but in a country of 326 million people and a global population of 7.4 billion, individual actions add up quickly.

Still, strong policies by major emitting nations — the U.S. is second on that list behind China — are the best hope to arrest the rise in global temperatures. And that’s a difficult political lift, particularly in a country led by a man who believes climate change is a hoax. Fortunately, a majority of Americans accept the science Trump and some of his appointees so rigorously rebuff. Climate change was woefully underplayed in the last election cycle, and it needs to be made a major part of the 2018 congressional elections. If the president won’t lead on this issue, Congress must. The world is changing, and we need to do much, much more to limit the most devastating effects, from rising seas to fiercer storms to extended droughts. We created this mess, and became a wealthy nation in the process. We have both a moral and existential duty to act, and to act quickly.

McClatchy D.C. Bureau

US report contradicts Trump team: Warming mostly man-made

AP Science Writer               November 03, 2017

FILE – In this Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016 file photo, water from Roanoke Sound pounds the Virginia Dare Trail in Manteo, N.C., as Tropical Storm Hermine passes the Outer Banks. A massive U.S. report released Friday, Nov. 3, 2017, concludes the evidence of global warming is stronger than ever and that more than 90 percent of it has been caused by humans. Since 1900, the reports said Earth has warmed by 1.8 degrees 1 degree Celsius) and seas have risen by 8 inches.

Washington: A massive U.S. report concludes the evidence of global warming is stronger than ever, contradicting a favorite talking point of top Trump administration officials, who downplay humans’ role in climate change.

The report released Friday is one of two scientific assessments required every four years. A draft showing how warming affects the U.S. was also published.

Despite fears by some scientists and environmental advocates, David Fahey of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and several authors said there was no political interference or censoring of the 477-page final report.

“A lot of what we’ve been learning over the last four years suggests the possibility that things may have been more serious than we think,” said Robert Kopp of Rutgers University, one of dozens of scientists inside and outside the government who wrote the reports.

Since 1900, Earth has warmed by 1.8 degrees (1 degree Celsius) and seas have risen by 8 inches. Heat waves, downpours and wildfires have become frequent.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt have repeatedly said carbon dioxide isn’t the primary contributor to global warming.

It’s “extremely likely” — meaning with 95 to 100 percent certainty — that global warming is man-made, mostly from the spewing of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, scientists concluded.

“Over the last century, there are no convincing alternative explanations,” the report said.

Scientists calculated that human contribution to warming since 1950 is between 92 percent and 123 percent. It’s more than 100 percent on one end, because some natural forces — such as volcanoes and orbital cycle — are working to cool Earth, but are being overwhelmed by the effects of greenhouse gases, said study co-author Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech.

“This period is now the warmest in the history of modern civilization,” she said.

For the first time, scientists highlighted a dozen “tipping points” of potential dangers that could happen from warming, things that Hayhoe said “keep me up at night.”

They include the slowing down of the giant Atlantic Ocean circulation system that could dramatically warp weather worldwide, much stronger El Ninos, major decreases in ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, which would spike sea level rise, and massive release of methane and carbon dioxide from thawing permafrost that could turbo-charge warming.

Researchers did not provide an estimate of how likely tipping points would occur, but “there is certainly some chance of some of these things happening,” Fahey said.

The report also documented how different climate change-caused events can interact in a complex way to make life worse such as the California wildfires and Superstorm Sandy five years ago.

The world’s oceans are under a “triple threat” — the water is getting warmer, more acidic and seeing a drop in oxygen levels, Hayhoe said.

In a 1,504-page draft report on the impacts of climate change, scientists detailed dozens of ways global warming is already affecting parts of the U.S.

Scientists said global warming is already sickening, injuring and killing Americans with changes to weather, food, air, water and diseases. And it’s expected to get worse, hurting the economy, wildlife and energy supply.

“Risks range from the inconvenient, such as increasing high tide flooding along the East Coast related to sea level rise, to … the forced relocation of coastal communities in Alaska and along the Gulf Coast,” the draft report said.

Outside experts said the reports are the most up-to-date summary of climate science.

“It shows that if anything the findings of scientists have become more dire” since 2013, said University of California, Berkeley climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, who wasn’t part of the work.

Related:

Engadget: Federal report says humans are the cause of climate change

Mallory Locklear, Engadget         November 4, 2017 

Today, over a dozen federal agencies released the Climate Science Special Report, which is a product of the National Climate Assessment — a Congressionally mandated review that takes place every four years. In it, hundreds of scientists from dozens of government agencies and academic institutions present evidence that supports the existence of a human-caused warming planet and all of the consequences that come with it. “This assessment concludes, based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the report stated. “For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”

The special report notes that each of the last three years have set temperature highs and that global temperature averages have risen by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 115 years. It also warns that weather disasters like hurricanes and floods that have cost the US $1.1 trillion since 1980 could become more commonplace if action isn’t taken to reduce our emissions. “The frequency and intensity of extreme high temperature events are virtually certain to increase in the future as global temperature increases (high confidence). Extreme precipitation events will very likely continue to increase in frequency and intensity throughout most of the world (high confidence),” said the report.

Also noted, was the importance of reducing emissions for any hope of curtailing the negative outcomes of climate change. “The magnitude of climate change beyond the next few decades will depend primarily on the amount of greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) emitted globally. Without major reductions in emissions, the increase in annual average global temperature relative to pre-industrial times could reach 9°F (5°C) or more by the end of this century,” the report stated.

The report released today — an exhaustive compilation of research totaling over 600 pages and peer reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences — is just the first of two. A second, longer volume detailing the regional impacts of climate change is not yet finalized, but is open for public comment and will soon undergo peer review. Somewhat surprisingly, today’s report was approved by the White House even though the Trump administration has repeatedly worked against efforts to combat climate change including removing the US from the Paris Accord, placing a climate change denier at the helm of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and nominating one to lead NASA. Under the Trump presidency, the EPA has stopped researchers from speaking about climate change and deleted climate change information from its website while the Department of Agriculture has pressed its staff to not refer to climate change in their communications.

In regards to the report released today, Penn State University geo-scientist Richard Alley told NPR, “This is good, solid climate science. This has been reviewed so many times in so many ways, and it’s taking what we know from … a couple of centuries of climate science and applying it to the U.S.” Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University told the New York Times, “This new report simply confirms what we already knew. Human-caused climate change isn’t just a theory, it’s reality. Whether we’re talking about unprecedented heat waves, increasingly destructive hurricanes, epic drought and inundation of our coastal cities, the impacts of climate change are no longer subtle. They are upon us. That’s the consensus of our best scientists, as laid bare by this latest report.”

Read the full Climate Science Special Report here. Climate Change Special Report