Tag Archives: climate desk

No, the Earth Is Not Heading for a “Mini Ice Age”

by EdithHXAZzf Posted on July 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A new study and related press release from the Royal Astronomical Society is making the rounds in recent days, claiming that a new statistical analysis of sunspot cycles shows “solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s” to a level that last occurred during the so-called Little Ice Age, which ended 300 years ago.

Since climate change deniers have a particular fascination with sunspot cycles, this story has predictably been picked up by all manner of conservative news media, with a post in the Telegraph quickly gathering up tens of thousands of shares. The only problem is, it’s a wildly inaccurate reading of the research.

Sunspots have been observed on a regular basis for at least 400 years, and over that period, there’s a weak correlation between the number of sunspots and global temperature—most notably during a drastic downturn in the number of sunspots from about 1645 to 1715. Known as the Maunder minimum, this phenomenon happened about the same time as a decades-long European cold snap known as the Little Ice Age. That connection led to theory that this variability remains the dominant factor in Earth’s climate. Though that idea is still widely circulated, it’s been disproved. In reality, sunspots fluctuate in an 11-year cycle, and the current cycle is the weakest in 100 years—yet 2014 was the planet’s hottest year in recorded history.

If you look closely at the original press release, the study’s author, Valentina Zharkova, never implied a new ice age is imminent—only that we may see a sharp downturn in the number of sunspots. Yes, the sun is a variable star, but its output is remarkably stable. The amount of energy we receive from the sun just doesn’t change fast enough to cause a rapid-onset ice age in just a few decades.

The root of the problem here may be a poorly worded quote in the press release implying an imminent 60 percent decline in solar activity. Yes, numbers of sunspots can vary by that much or even more on an 11-year cycle, but the sun’s output—the total amount of energy we get—is extremely stable and only changes by about 0.1 percent, even in extreme sunspot cycles like the one Zharkova is predicting.

But let’s play devil’s advocate: What if Zharkova is right about the decline in solar activity? There’s still no need to worry (or to become complacent about global warming). Even assuming sunspots are in the process of shutting down, as happened during the Maunder minimum and Little Ice Age, it wouldn’t matter much.

An interesting new study published in June showed that a sharp decline in solar activity to record lows could have a relatively large impact on regional climate over a period of decades. But even the return of a Maunder minimum type slowdown in solar activity—an extreme scenario, by any measure—would slow global warming by only about a half-degree in northern Europe. That’s essentially negligible, on a global scale. A half-degree is within the margin of error of predictions for the continued decline in frost-free days in the United Kingdom, for example. Winter will still be a month shorter, on average, by the end of the century. Past research suggests that an extreme decline in solar activity would lead to a shift of just 0.16 degrees Celsius globally—and even that is erased once a more typical solar cycle resumes in a few decades.

For reference, we’ve already warmed the planet by about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1880 thanks to fossil fuels, and, despite all our decades of discussion about the problem, we’re still on pace for a worst-case scenario of between 3 and 4 degrees of warming by century end.

If anything, changes in the oceans—especially the Pacific, our largest ocean—over the last couple of years point to an imminent increase in the rate of global warming. El Niño has already grown to record levels in the Pacific for this time of year, and ocean temperatures in the vast patch of sea from Hawaii to California to Alaska are also without precedent. Similar events have coincided with a 10- to 20-year surge in global temperatures.

No matter what the sun does over the next century, we are not heading in to a new ice age. Why am I so sure about that? It may have something to do with the 110 million tons of carbon dioxide humanity is pumping into the atmosphere every single day. The resulting change to our global climate system is so huge, it overwhelms all natural atmospheric forces, including the sun. There is no other plausible explanation for global warming except us.

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No, the Earth Is Not Heading for a “Mini Ice Age”

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Ted Cruz Is Really Excited About Pluto. So Why Does He Want to Cripple NASA?

by FernandoHoman82 Posted on July 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and GOP presidential candidate, is really excited about NASA’s flight past Pluto today.

“This is a historic milestone in space exploration,” he gushed to Politico. To the National Journal, he crowed that it was “NASA doing what it does best, pushing the boundaries of our imagination by traveling to the unknown.”

But while Cruz is clearly eager to cheerlead for NASA on the day of this kickass achievement, he’s been singing a very different tune over the past few months, as the New Horizons spacecraft has been pushing to the edge of the solar system. Here’s a jaw-dropping look at what New Horizons found, in case you haven’t seen yet:

Cruz has good reason to be watching the fly-by closely: He’s in charge of the Senate’s subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, which oversees NASA. His chairmanship has centered on a campaign to correct what he sees as an imbalance in NASA’s activity: too much focus on Earth science, and not enough traveling to other planets. The Pluto mission is a perfect example of what he wants to see more of.

But NASA is also one of the main purveyors of the satellite observations of Earth that are a basic necessity for many fields of Earth science. That’s the part Cruz doesn’t like: He wants to slash the agency’s budget for Earth sciences—in particular, for climate change, a subject on which Cruz’s theories are, in the words of one scientist, “a load of claptrap.”

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It’s not just Cruz. In the House, Republicans are forging ahead with a bill that would gut $90 million from NASA’s Earth science budget.

There are a couple major problems with that approach, and they make Cruz’s lauding of the Pluto mission distinctly ironic and hypocritical. First, NASA is uniquely equipped among federal agencies to send satellites into space, so it would be hard to transfer its Earth research to some other outfit. (These are the very satellites, by the way, that produce the data Cruz likes to erroneously cite as evidence against global warming.)

But perhaps even more importantly, it’s pretty hard for scientists to make sense of what they see on other planets if they don’t understand the one we’re on.

Cruz’s attitude belies a deep misunderstanding of how NASA uses basic science—the very types of research that enabled the New Horizons spacecraft to reach Pluto in the first place—says Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“It doesn’t make sense to pick out one achievement as if it isn’t built on all this other basic research—everything from material science, to Earth science, to developing new instruments,” he said. “It’s not as if you have a standalone program for space that doesn’t depend on a huge number of other fields.”

Consider, for example, data about a new planet’s atmosphere, gathered by a passing spacecraft. What can scientists compare that to, if they don’t understand the Earth’s atmosphere, Rosenberg said. “The same goes for water, the motion of continents, and everything else we’d want to know about some far-off planet.”

The reverse is also true, said David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist and visiting scholar at the Library of Congress: There’s a lot we can learn from other planets about our own. He pointed to the hole in the ozone layer as a classic example: Scientists were first alerted to the possibility that the use of certain chemicals on Earth could erode the ozone by studying the atmosphere of Venus.

“The effort to explore the solar system and the effort to learn what we need to learn to do a better job as stewards of the Earth are really one and the same,” he said. “We can’t understand other worlds without using experience and techniques we gain from studying Earth, and a lot of discoveries about Earth have come about from exploring other planets.”

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Ted Cruz Is Really Excited About Pluto. So Why Does He Want to Cripple NASA?

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Solar Power Is Mostly for the Affluent. Here’s Obama’s Plan to Spread the Wealth Around.

by DarinRRZscwoob Posted on July 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Rooftop solar power systems cost a lot less these days than they did five or 10 years ago, and with many solar companies now offering leases and loans, it’s safe to say that going solar is more affordable than even before. That trend goes a long way to explaining why solar, while still making up less than 1 percent of the total US energy mix, is the fastest-growing power source in the country.

But access to solar power is still overwhelmingly skewed toward affluent households. Of the roughly 645,000 homes and business with rooftop solar panels in the US, less than 5 percent are households earning less than $40,000, according to a report earlier this year from the George Washington University Solar Institute. The typical solar home is 34 percent larger than the typical non-solar home, according to energy software provider Opower.

President Barack Obama wants to change that. On Monday the White House announced a package of initiatives to make solar more accessible for low-income households. The plans include a new solar target for federally subsidized housing and an effort to increase the availability of federally insured loans for solar systems.

Low-income households face a number of barriers to going solar. They’re less likely to own their own roof, less able to access loans or other financing options for solar, and more likely to have subsidized utility bills that don’t transfer the financial benefits of solar to the homeowner. And yet, in many ways low-income households stand to benefit the most from producing their own energy: The proportion of their income spent on energy is about four times greater than the national median, according to federal statistics. And because lower-income households tend to use less electricity overall than higher-income households, a typical solar setup covers more of their demand. The GW study found that a 4 kilowatt solar system, about the average size for a house, would cover more than half of a typical low-income household’s energy needs and that if all low-income households went solar, they would collectively save up to $23.3 billion each year.

“This is aimed at taking directly on those challenges and making it easier and straightforward to deploy low-cost solar energy in every community in the country,” senior White House climate advisor Brian Deese told reporters in a call yesterday.

The initiative starts by tripling the target for solar on federally subsidized housing to 300 megawatts by 2020, as well as directing the Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide technical guidance for state and local housing authorities on how to go solar. The White House also announced more than $520 million in commitments from private companies, investors, NGOs, and state and local governments to pay for energy efficiency and solar projects for low-income households. The initiative places particular emphasis on so-called “community” solar, in which groups of households pool resources to build and maintain a shared solar system in their neighborhood.

Some states and power companies are already angling to support solar for low-income housing. Arizona Public Service, a Phoenix-area utility, recently launched a $28.5 million program to install its own solar panels on rooftops in its service area, specifically targeting low-income households. And New York’s electricity regulators recently bolstered incentives for power companies that invest in energy efficiency and renewables. Con Ed, the power company serving most of New York City, plans to spend $250 million on such upgrades in Brooklyn and Queens, as an alternative to a $1 billion upgrade to the old natural gas-fired electric grid.

The president’s plan builds on a commitment he announced earlier this year to train 75,000 workers for the solar industry (which is already adding jobs 10 times faster than the overall economy). It also dovetails neatly with Obama’s larger climate objectives, especially his hotly-contested plan to reduce the nation’s energy-related carbon emissions 30 percent by 2030, as well as the economy-wide climate targets that form the US bargaining chip for this year’s UN climate negotiations in Paris.

For all those promises to work, “the question is how states and utilities can reduce their emissions, and the buildings that they serve are a critical part of that system,” said Natural Resources Defense Council financial policy analyst Philip Henderson. “Making those buildings more efficient and using less energy from dirty power plants is a direct and essential way to meet those goals.”

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Solar Power Is Mostly for the Affluent. Here’s Obama’s Plan to Spread the Wealth Around.

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Climate Activists Sued Their Country to Force It to Pollute Less. They Just Won.

by Antonio50E Posted on June 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A court in The Hague has ordered the Dutch government to cut its emissions by at least 25 percent within five years, in a landmark ruling expected to cause ripples around the world.

To cheers and hoots from climate campaigners in court, three judges ruled that government plans to cut emissions by just 14 to 17 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2020 were unlawful, given the scale of the threat posed by climate change.

Jubilant campaigners said that governments preparing for the Paris climate summit later this year would now need to look over their shoulders for civil rights era-style legal challenges where emissions-cutting pledges are inadequate.

“Before this judgment, the only legal obligations on states were those they agreed among themselves in international treaties,” said Dennis van Berkel, legal counsel for Urgenda, the group that brought the suit.

“This is the first time a court has determined that states have an independent legal obligation towards their citizens. That must inform the reduction commitments in Paris because if it doesn’t, they can expect pressure from courts in their own jurisdictions.”

In what was the first climate liability suit brought under human rights and tort law, Judge Hans Hofhuis told the court that the threat posed by global warming was severe and acknowledged by the Dutch government in international pacts.

“The state should not hide behind the argument that the solution to the global climate problem does not depend solely on Dutch efforts,” the judges’ ruling said. “Any reduction of emissions contributes to the prevention of dangerous climate change and as a developed country the Netherlands should take the lead in this.”

After a legal campaign that took two and a half years to get to its first hearing in April, normally dispassionate lawyers were visibly moved by the judge’s words. “As the verdict was being read out, I actually had tears in my eyes,” Roger Cox, Urgenda’s lead advocate, told the Guardian. “It was an emotional moment.”

Young activists in court said that the ruling had gone some way to restoring Dutch national pride, which has been dented as Denmark, Germany and even the UK overtook the Netherlands, once seen as a European climate leader, in the green economy race.

The Dutch Labor MP Eric Smaling cautioned though that “some people will feel proud but others are more unhappy about the influx of refugees. So far climate action has too much been the last baby of a relatively leftist elite.” He called for a wide coalition to spread the climate action message before elections in early 2017.

The Dutch government has not decided whether to appeal the court’s decision yet, but opposition politicians are steeling themselves for the prospect.

Stientje Van Veldhoven, an MP and spokesperson for the D66 Liberal opposition in parliament noted that the government had yielded to a comparable, if more limited, ruling ending gas extraction in part of the giant Groningen gas fields earlier this year.

“The government has never ignored a court ruling like this one before, but there has never been a ruling like this before either,” she said. “Everybody has a right to appeal.” Veldhoven has requested a parliamentary debate on Wednesday’s court ruling.

In a statement on behalf of prime minister Mark Rutte’s cabinet, the Dutch environment minister Wilma Mansfeld said that the government’s strategy was to implement EU-wide and international agreements.

“We and Urgenda share the same goal,” Mansfeld said. “We just hold different opinions regarding the manner in which to attain this goal. We will now examine what this ruling means for the Dutch state.”

Some 886 plaintiffs organized by Urgenda had accused the Dutch government of negligence for “knowingly contributing” to a breach of the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) maximum target for global warming.

Their legal arguments rested on axioms forbidding states from polluting to the extent that they damage other states, and the EU’s “precautionary principle” which prohibits actions that carry unknown but potentially severe risks.

An article by the UN climate secretariat obliging states to do whatever is necessary to prevent dangerous climate change was also cited. So was the UN climate science panel’s 2007 assessment of the reductions in carbon dioxide needed to have a 50 percent chance of containing global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

Several legal sources said that ideas outlined in the Oslo Principles for climate change obligations, launched in the Guardian in March, appeared to have been influential in the judge’s reasoning.

James Thornton, the CEO of the environmental law group ClientEarth, hailed what he said had been a “courageous and visionary” ruling, that would shape the playing field for future suits.

“There are moments in history when only courts can address overwhelming problems. In the past it has been issues like discrimination. Climate change is our overwhelming problem and this court has addressed it. The Dutch court’s ruling should encourage courts around the world to tackle climate change now.”

Serge de Gheldere, the president of Klimaat Zaak, which is pursuing an almost identical case to Urgenda’s in Belgium, said: “This gives us a lot of hope as it sets an incredible precedent. The government in Belgium will take a lot of notice of whats happened here today. This could be the first stone that sets an avalanche in motion.”

Professor Pier Vellinga, Urgenda’s chairman and the originator of the 2-degree target in 1989, said that the breakthrough judgment would have a massive impact. “The ruling is of enormous significance, and beyond our expectations,” he said.

The court also ordered the government to pay all of Urgenda’s costs.

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Climate Activists Sued Their Country to Force It to Pollute Less. They Just Won.

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Want To Get Rich? Become a Water Lawyer in California

by AlissaQdkhqo Posted on June 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Wired and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Want to get rich? Move to California, become a lawyer. Most important, specialize in water, because as the state’s drought drags on, every drop of coastal rain, every flake of Sierra snowpack, and every inch of reservoir water becomes both more valuable and more contested. Before long you’ll start counting rain drops—every one that fails to fall will ring cha-ching.

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California Has Cut Water to Some Farmers. What Exactly Does That Mean?

The latest windfall to California’s legal community came Friday, when the State Water Resources Control Board announced it was cutting certain historical water rights—held by some farmers, communities, and companies for more than a century. In a normal state with a normal drought, this wouldn’t be too much of an issue. But California water policies are so old (and so unsuited to the state’s desert ecosystem) that they might be outside the jurisdiction of the present-day water board. With barely a weekend for curtailment news to simmer, the summer air is already thick with lawsuit rumors.

“California has the most complex system of water rights in the world,” says Buzz Thompson, a legal expert in said system at Stanford University. The state’s problems trace back to its earliest days. In order to take the stress out of drafting up a constitution from scratch, California’s founders adopted English Common Law, and customized it with caveats to fit their needs. Unfortunately, they didn’t bother amending the Common Law rules on water allocations.

The English, and thus Californians today, used a system called riparian law: You are allowed to use a reasonable amount of any tributary, creek, stream, or river that abuts or bisects your land. This worked great in rainy England, veined with waterways. “That type of system of makes no sense in California,” says Thompson, “because there is a lot of land through which no river or stream passes.”

If you want water to run through your land in California, you have to dig a path for it yourself. The necessity of canals and pipes led to an irrigation-based water rights system called prior appropriation. Under this system, you are allocated a reasonable amount water from the source from whence you diverted, as long as you put it to good use.

Here’s where things get ridiculous. The system for establishing rights to those flows was—prior to 1914—absolutely bananas, leading to a lot of inappropriate water usage in a state that was, and remains, essentially a desert.

To lay claim to running water back then, all you had to do was post and record a notice of the diversion. In 1901, the mayor of San Francisco used this law to claim the Tuolumne River by posting a note on a tree. The state finally figured out its own water scarcity in 1914, when it passed a law requiring any new claims to submit an application to a state-controlled board (now known as the State Water Resources Control Board).

Literally kept in an old safe in the back room of an office building in Sacramento, these slips of paper determine how much water each rights-holder is due. More importantly, they determine the order in which the rights holder gets to drink. And that’s determined historically: First in line, first in law. “The whole system was created through action on the ground rather than someone making a legal regime and then codifying the system,” says Leon Szeptycki, the director of the Water in the West program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Setting up a first come, first serve water system in a desert is pretty insane. (For one thing, it creates an uneven patchwork of water haves and have-nots.) What’s crazier is that political pressures at the time meant the pre-1914 allocation and riparian rights got grandfathered right past the whole thing. That’s right: There are people in California whose right to water came from putting a piece of paper on a tree, and those rights are some of the most senior in the state. And they don’t just belong to people. Corporate farming conglomerates, sprawling rural irrigation districts, several cities, and even the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife have pre-1914 water rights.

Which brings us to last Friday. This move restricts access to water rights holders whose claims date from 1903 to 1914. (The state had already curtailed all post-1914 rights). Thompson says the agency’s move is both expected and incredibly historic. Expected because without precipitation the state is forced to cut off water from senior rights holders. Historic because the State Water Resources Control Board is a fairly cautious agency that does not like being sued.

“The most important thing about the most recent curtailment order is it reflects the depth of our current drought,” he says. In response to Friday’s announcement, many of the pre-1914 rights holders announced plans to sue the water resource board because their rights predate the existence of the board. In fact, the State Water Resources Control Board’s charter states that it only controls permits that come after 1914.

On the other hand, the board’s charter does not prevent it from curtailing pre-1914 rights, neither riparian nor appropriated. Further, there are several state statutes giving the board the authority to police both reasonable uses of water and illegal diversions. “Those statutes as well as other legislative and legal decisions I think provide the board sufficient authority to issue the type of curtailment orders that they did,” says Thompson.

And as long as the drought continues, these curtailments will continue to reach back in time; all the way to the most senior rights holders, whose allotments trace back to the Gold Rush.

But even though Governor Brown teased an overhaul of the state’s allocation system earlier this year, legal experts doubt this is possible. That’s because California’s water rights knot is enshrined in the state’s constitution. Any challenges would probably have to be backed up at the federal level.

Caught between the calcified reality of the drought and the calcified words in the state’s constitution, the curtailments will probably continue—and the lawsuits will follow. And like we’ve said before, any explanation of California’s drought is always incomplete. Even if the state does win its case, enforcing the curtailments is an entirely different dilemma, with woefully outdated and outclassed methods of tracking water. These conflicts aren’t going away anytime soon. Which reminds me: Feel free to tell your kid to study water law too.

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Want To Get Rich? Become a Water Lawyer in California

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The Pope Says Climate Change Is Real. Catholic GOP Candidates Disagree.

by INVFlorauj Posted on June 16, 2015

Mother Jones

Since ascending to the Catholic Church’s top perch in March 2013, Pope Francis hasn’t shied away from taking political stances that rankle conservatives. He has said evolution and creationism aren’t mutually exclusive. Asked about gay priests, he responded, “Who am I to judge?” And he has embraced a populist approach to tackling income inequality.

Now the pope risks drawing conservative ire on climate change. In a document set to be released on Thursday—which leaked to an Italian publication and was published as an act of “sabotage against the pope,” according to a Vatican official—Francis will apparently call for a strong, multi-country push to curb global warming and the “human causes that produce and accentuate it,” according to the Guardian. The message will reportedly call out climate deniers, saying “the attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem, to indifference, to convenient resignation or blind faith in technical solutions.”

There’s a growing contingent of congressional Republicans who are Catholic, and a number of the party’s leading presidential candidates (or potential candidates) are Catholic. If those candidates’ past statements on climate change are any indication, they could soon find themselves at odds with the pope over the looming encyclical. Here’s what they’ve said:

Rick Santorum: “The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we’re good at, which is theology and morality.”

Jeb Bush: Bush has said anybody who thinks the science on climate change is settled is “arrogant.”

Chris Christie: The New Jersey governor’s views might be the most in line with the pope’s: “I think global warming is real. I don’t think that’s deniable. And I do think human activity contributes to it.”

Bobby Jindal: While acknowledging that human activity has had an impact on the climate, Jindal has decried Obama’s environmental regulations as “reckless and based on a radical leftist ideology that will kill American jobs and increase energy prices,” according to the Associated Press.

Marco Rubio: “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. That’s what I do not. And I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy.”

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The Pope Says Climate Change Is Real. Catholic GOP Candidates Disagree.

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Dear Rick Santorum: Sorry, the Pope Actually Did Study Science. So He Might Know About Science.

by ElliottRundle Posted on June 16, 2015

Mother Jones

“I am not a scientist!” is now the standard escape hatch through which Republican climate deniers slither to avoid talking about climate science or evolution. From Sen. Marco Rubio, asked how old the Earth is: “I’m not a scientist, man.” Rick Perry whipped out the same “I’m not a scientist” line last year in DC while questioning the consensus around climate change. Jeb Bush said the same thing back in 2009.

Now at least one GOP presidential hopeful is turning the talking point into an attack on the pope, ahead of his landmark encyclical on the environment, to be released Thursday. (A draft of the document has already leaked). Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a Catholic with a history of criticizing Pope Francis, says the pope should leave science to the scientists. “The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science,” he told Dom Giordano, a radio host in Philadelphia, earlier this month. “And I think that we are probably better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we’re really good at, which is theology and morality.”

One problem with Santorum’s retort? The pope, while obviously not a climate scientist (he’s the pope), actually did study science and therefore might have a better grasp of fundamental scientific processes than most people who have not studied science.

The National Catholic Reporter and the Official Vatican Network both report that Francis, then Jorge Bergoglio, earned a technician’s degree in chemistry from a technical school in Buenos Aires before joining the seminary. Sylvia Poggioli from NPR also reports Francis worked as a chemist. Listen to her report from Morning Edition, below, from Rome:

And for good measure, here’s a video my Climate Desk colleagues—Tim McDonnell and Suzanne Goldenberg (from the Guardian)—put together last week. They asked a bunch of climate change deniers at the annual Heartland Institute conference in Washington, DC, what they think of the pope’s calls for action on climate change:

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Dear Rick Santorum: Sorry, the Pope Actually Did Study Science. So He Might Know About Science.

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Pope Francis’ Climate Change Encyclical Just Leaked. Here’s What It Says.

by Maxwell45K Posted on June 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Pope Francis will this week call for changes in lifestyles and energy consumption to avert the “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem” before the end of this century, according to a leaked draft of a papal encyclical. In a document released by an Italian magazine on Monday, the pontiff will warn that failure to act would have “grave consequences for all of us.”

Francis also called for a new global political authority tasked with “tackling…the reduction of pollution and the development of poor countries and regions.” His appeal echoed that of his predecessor, pope Benedict XVI, who in a 2009 encyclical proposed a kind of super-UN to deal with the world’s economic problems and injustices.

According to the lengthy draft, which was obtained and published by L’Espresso magazine, the Argentinean pope will align himself with the environmental movement and its objectives. While accepting that there may be some natural causes of global warming, the pope will also state that climate change is mostly a man-made problem.

“Humanity is called to take note of the need for changes in lifestyle and changes in methods of production and consumption to combat this warming, or at least the human causes that produce and accentuate it,” he wrote in the draft. “Numerous scientific studies indicate that the greater part of the global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases…given off above all because of human activity.”

The pope will also single out those obstructing solutions. In an apparent reference to climate-change deniers, the draft states: “The attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem, to indifference, to convenient resignation or blind faith in technical solutions.”

The leak has frustrated the Vatican’s elaborate rollout of the encyclical on Thursday. Its release had been planned to come before the pope’s trip to the US, where he is due to address the United Nations as well as a joint meeting of Congress.

Journalists were told they would be given an early copy on Thursday morning and that it would be released publicly at noon following a press conference. Cardinal Peter Turkson, who wrote an early draft of the encyclical, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a noted climate scientist in Germany, were expected to attend the press conference. On Monday evening, the Vatican asked journalists not to publish details of the draft, emphasizing that it was not the final text. A Vatican official said he believed the leak was an act of “sabotage against the pope.”

The draft is not a detailed scientific analysis of the global warming crisis. Instead, it is the pope’s reflection of humanity’s God-given responsibility as custodians of the Earth.

At the start of the draft essay, the pope wrote, the Earth “is protesting for the wrong that we are doing to her, because of the irresponsible use and abuse of the goods that God has placed on her. We have grown up thinking that we were her owners and dominators, authorized to loot her. The violence that exists in the human heart, wounded by sin, is also manifest in the symptoms of illness that we see in the Earth, the water, the air and in living things.”

He immediately makes clear, moreover, that unlike previous encyclicals, this one is directed to everyone, regardless of religion. “Faced with the global deterioration of the environment, I want to address every person who inhabits this planet,” the pope wrote. “In this encyclical, I especially propose to enter into discussion with everyone regarding our common home.”

According to the leaked document, the pope will praise the global ecological movement, which has “already traveled a long, rich road and has given rise to numerous groups of ordinary people that have inspired reflection.”

In a surprisingly specific and unambiguous passage, the draft rejects outright “carbon credits” as a solution to the problem. It says they “could give rise to a new form of speculation and would not help to reduce the overall emission of polluting gases.” On the contrary, the pope wrote, it could help “support the super-consumption of certain countries and sectors.”

The document is not Francis’s first foray into the climate debate. The pontiff, who was elected in 2013, has previously noted his disappointment with the failure to reach a global accord on curbing greenhouse gas emissions, chiding climate negotiators for having a “lack of courage” during the last major talks held in Lima, Peru.

Francis is likely to want to influence Republicans in Washington with his remarks. Most Republicans on Capitol Hill deny climate change is a man-made phenomenon and have staunchly opposed regulatory efforts by the Obama administration.

The encyclical will make for awkward reading among some Catholic Republicans, including John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House. While many Republicans have praised the pope, it will not be unprecedented for them to make a public break with the pontiff on the issue of global warming.

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Pope Francis’ Climate Change Encyclical Just Leaked. Here’s What It Says.

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California Is Literally Sinking Into the Ground

by TawnyaRiddle Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

This story was originally published by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

California is sinking—and fast.

While the state’s drought-induced sinking is well known, new details highlight just how severe it has become and how little the government has done to monitor it.

Last summer, scientists recorded the worst sinking in at least 50 years. This summer, all-time records are expected across the state as thousands of miles of land in the Central Valley and elsewhere sink.

But the extent of the problem and how much it will cost taxpayers to fix are part of the mystery of the state’s unfolding drought. No agency is tracking the sinking statewide, little public money has been put toward studying it and California allows agriculture businesses to keep crucial parts of their operations secret.

The cause is known: People are pulling unsustainable amounts of water out of underground aquifers, primarily for food production. With the water sucked out to irrigate crops, a practice that has accelerated during the drought, tens of thousands of square miles are deflating like a leaky air mattress, inch by inch.

Groundwater now supplies about 60 percent of the state’s water, with the vast majority of that going to agriculture. Tens of thousands of groundwater pumps run day and night, sucking up about 5 percent of the state’s total electricity, according to a Reveal analysis of the increased pumping resulting from the historic drought. That’s an increase of 40 percent over normal years – or enough electricity to power every home in San Francisco for three years.

The sinking is starting to destroy bridges, crack irrigation canals and twist highways across the state, according to the US Geological Survey.

Two bridges in Fresno County—an area that produces about 15 percent of the world’s almonds—have sunk so much that they are nearly underwater and will cost millions to rebuild. Nearby, an elementary school is slowly descending into a miles-long sinkhole that will make it susceptible to future flooding.

Private businesses are on the hook, too. One canal system is facing more than $60 million in repairs because one of its dams is sinking. And public and private water wells are being bent and disfigured like crumpled drinking straws as the earth collapses around them—costing $500,000 or more to replace.

The sinking has a technical name: subsidence. It occurs when aquifers are drained of water and the land collapses down where the water used to be.

The last comprehensive survey of sinking was in the 1970s, and a publicly funded monitoring system fell into disrepair the following decade. Even the government’s scientists are in the dark.

“We don’t know how bad it is because we’re not looking everywhere,” said Michelle Sneed, a hydrologist with the geological survey. “It’s frustrating, I’ll tell you that. There is a lot of work I want to do.”

Some places in the state are sinking more than a foot per year. The last time it was this bad, it cost the state more than a billion dollars to fix.

Joseph Poland of the US Geological Survey used a utility pole to document where a farmer would have been standing in 1925 and 1955 and where Poland was then standing in 1977 after land in the San Joaquin Valley had sunk nearly 30 feet. US Geological Survey

In the 1920s, farmers began transforming desert lands into verdant crop fields by pumping groundwater to the surface. At the time, these farmers were not just head and shoulders above their modern-day counterparts—they were actually as much as three stories above them. But then the land started to sink.

In the 1930s, scientists first noticed the land was sinking. At the time, the cause was a mystery. A legendary hydrologist, Joseph Poland, was assigned to solve the puzzle starting in the 1940s.

He realized that underneath the sinking land, groundwater was being pumped rapidly to irrigate crops. It created massive sinkholes that stretched for miles in every direction. In the farming community of Mendota, the land sunk about 30 feet between 1925 and 1977.

The sinkhole is so vast that it is essentially impossible for residents to see that they are standing in one. Poland used a utility pole to build a temporary monument to show them just how much the land had sunk.

The sinking, which peaked in the late 1960s, wreaked havoc on the state’s rapidly expanding infrastructure, damaging highways, bridges and irrigation canals. One estimate by the California Water Foundation put the price tag at $1.3 billion for just some of the repairs during that time.

The sinking did not slow until the 1970s, after California had completed its massive canal system—the most expensive public works project in state history. It delivered water from wetter parts of the state to farmers in the Central Valley and elsewhere, relieving their reliance on groundwater. The problem was fixed—at least for a while.

In 2012, Sneed, the hard-charging geological survey scientist, received a startling report. Land was subsiding along the San Joaquin River at a rate worse than during the 1987-92 drought. It was nearing the historic rates of sinking recorded by Poland in the late 1960s. She couldn’t believe it.

“Is this even real?” she asked. “We hadn’t seen rates of subsidence like that in a long time.”

She and others began assembling what little public data was available. They got funding to analyze satellite data for parts of the San Joaquin Valley. They discovered that in one of the worst observed areas, around the town of El Nido (Spanish for “The Nest”), land was sinking at a rate of about 1 foot per year in 2012.

“It’s incredible,” Sneed said, expelling a puff of air as if she still couldn’t believe it. “We looked away for a long time. And when we looked back, whoa—it had gotten real bad.”

The El Nido subsidence bowl was sinking so fast that the satellite couldn’t keep pace.

No one has monitored it since. But Sneed and others contacted by Reveal said they expect it now could be sinking by 2 feet per year. That would be an all-time record.

Chris White, general manager of the Central California Irrigation District, said that last year, a farmer near El Nido sent him a photo of a gas pipe that had protruded more than 18 inches from the ground in less than a year as the land sank around it.

White said Californians now might have the opportunity to witness firsthand the devastation Poland chronicled in the 1960s.

“There is that potential,” he said.

Sneed is practically begging to expand her limited research. A hodgepodge of about 350 ground-elevation monitors—many leftover from the 1960s—are all she and other researchers have to track tens of thousands of miles that are sinking. This includes vineyards in Sonoma and Napa counties, areas around Paso Robles and Santa Barbara, and agricultural regions encircling Los Angeles, all which have shown signs of sinking, according to a California Department of Water Resources report.

To draw awareness to the problem, Sneed replicated Poland’s 1977 photo. Her photo captures the early stages of today’s worsening subsidence problem, she said. But she and others expect that it will get much worse.

US Geological Survey scientist Michelle Sneed shows where a farmer would have been standing in 1988, before a six-year drought triggered sinking in California’s San Joaquin Valley. It also shows how sinking accelerated in 2008. US Geological Survey

Many businesses and state agencies appear to be unaware of the problem.

Sneed and her boss at the US Geological Survey, Claudia Faunt, have tried reaching out to various government agencies and private businesses to warn them and inquire about the extent of damage being done to infrastructure.

“We tried calling the railroads to ask them about it,” Faunt said. “But they didn’t know about subsidence. They told us they just fixed the railroads and categorized it as repair.”

Thousands of miles of highways snaking through the state also are being damaged, she said.

“They go to repair the roads, but they don’t even know it’s subsidence that is causing all the problems,” Faunt said. “They are having to fix a lot because of groundwater depletion.”

A spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation said the agency does not track costs related to subsidence and was not aware of any current bridge repairs resulting from it.

But Faunt pointed to the Russell Avenue bridge that crosses the Outside Canal in the Central Valley. It sank during two previous droughts—one in the late 1970s and then again between 1987 and 1992. Now with the current sinking, the 60-year-old bridge is almost totally submerged by canal water.

Down the road about a mile, Russell Avenue crosses another irrigation canal, the Delta-Mendota Canal. That bridge is sinking, too, and now is partially submerged in water. Plans to replace it are estimated to cost $2.5 million, according to an estimate by the Central California Irrigation District.

The wall of a canal (left) cracks as the earth around it sinks. The top of a well (right) is pushed up and out of the ground as the ground around it sinks. US Geological Survey

The bridge is part of an $80 million list of public and private repairs already needed near the El Nido subsidence bowl because of sinking, White said.

Last year, the state passed its first law attempting to regulate groundwater, but farmers won’t be required to meet goals until 2040 at the earliest. And the information on who is pumping what will be kept private.

The Russell Avenue bridge once passed more than 2 feet above the water, but it has been sinking as a result of groundwater pumping and now is nearly submerged in the canal. US Geological Survey

“A doomsayer would say we will run out of water,” said Matt Hurley, general manager of the Angiola Water District, near Bakersfield. “But I don’t believe we’re heading there. We’ve been given a good opportunity with the sustainability law.”

But Devin Galloway, a scientist with the geological survey, sees devastation of a historic proportion returning to California. He says that even if farmers stopped pumping groundwater immediately, the damage already done to aquifers now drained to record-low levels will trigger sinking that will last for years, even decades.

“This could be a very long process. Even if the water levels recover, things could continue to subside,” he said. “This is a consequence of the overuse of groundwater.”

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California Is Literally Sinking Into the Ground

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The Richest Countries on Earth Just Agreed to Stop Your Great-Grandchildren From Using Fossil Fuels

by SalvatoYkv Posted on June 8, 2015

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared on Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The global economy must be completely fossil fuel–free by the end of the century. That point of climate consensus came out of a meeting today between the US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the European Union, which make up the G7.

In the interest of preventing the planet from warming by more than 2 degrees Celsius, the nations said in a joint statement, “we emphasize that deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required with a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century.” To that end, the nations agreed to work toward cutting emissions by between 40 and 70 percent by 2050.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel also announced that the G7 countries would raise $100 billion by 2020 to help poorer nations adapt to climate change. Those funds, she said, would come from public and private sources. Financing to help the developing world confront climate change has long been a point of contention in climate negotiations, and past efforts to get rich countries to pony up have been a bit rocky.

Environmental groups praised the G7 announcement, which they had worried would be derailed by dissent from Japan and Canada. “The decisions made by the G7 today indicated an acknowledgement that there needs to be a phase-out of climate-killing coal and oil by 2050 at the latest,” said Greenpeace’s head of international climate politics, Martin Kaiser. “Merkel and Obama succeeded in not allowing Canada and Japan to continue blocking progress towards tackling climate change.”

After the Fukushima disaster, Japan backed away from nuclear energy, and has drawn criticism for favoring coal over renewables. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration has leaned heavily on Alberta’s tar sands as a potential economic boon for the country, and has been notoriously unfriendly to climate campaigners who disagree.

In a statement, the Sierra Club called today “the first time that the leaders of the world have made clear with one voice that we must get off fossil fuels completely.”

Though this announcement doesn’t require these countries to actually do anything specific, green groups see it as an encouraging indicator of momentum as we approach December’s UN climate summit in Paris, where 200 countries will commit to specific plans for how to green their economies. If, six months before diplomats sit down with pens in hand, the leaders of the world’s major economies are making announcements that involve words like “decarbonisation”—well, greens see that as a good thing.

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The Richest Countries on Earth Just Agreed to Stop Your Great-Grandchildren From Using Fossil Fuels

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