China's rapidly growing economy is leading to an insatiable appetite for energy. The nation is expected to exceed the U.S. and become the world leader in carbon emissions by 2030. Much of China's energy comes from the burning of coal - and China is already constructing the equivalent of one large coal-fueled power station per week.

It was interesting, then, to note that 12 China government departments, including the Ministry of Science and Technology, the China Meteorological Administration and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have issued the nation's first national assessment of global climate change. The assessment predicts temperatures to rise 1.3-2.1 degrees C by 2020. Although the report also predicts rainfall will increase, water shortages are expected to increase due to faster evaporation caused by higher temperatures.

A poll of Iowa Democratic caucus-goers indicates many consider global warming to be a significant issue.

A 72% of majority of Democratic caucus-goers say they consider global warming to be extremely (32%) or very (39%) serious - while another 15% say it is fairly serious. Only 11% dismiss it as just somewhat (9%) or not at all serious (2%).
Among a separate poll of Democratic county chairs and vice chairs, 77% think global warming is extremely (37%) or very (40%) serious - plus 14% who say it is fairly serious.

A large majority (over two thirds) of caucus-goers say they'd be more likely to support a presidential candidate who made global warming and cutting carbon emissions a big issue in their campaign, but many don't know where likely Democratic candidates stand on the issue.

Almost three times as many of those surveyed (19%) consider global warming to be a bigger problem than terrorism (7%) for the next generation.

When John Edwards declared his candidacy late last week, global warming was one of five priorities he listed, along with breaking America's (and the world's) addiction to oil. Not surprisingly, Edwards currently holds a substantial lead in that survey of Iowa caucus-goers.

We're expanding our Global Warming Center to include regular video segments. We're planning that these will be a weekly event, with Katie Fehlinger handling the on-air duties. The first of these is available now.

As we get more of these segments online, I look forward to hearing what you think, and what suggestions you have for potential content. I'm hoping these can be informative and educational for all of us. I'll be working closely with Katie and the rest of our team to come up with answers for the questions I've heard raised here a number of times.

We've talked about the letter from Senators Rockefeller and Snowe to the CEO of ExxonMobil, and a little about the letter from the UK's Royal Society to Esso - ExxonMobil in the UK - both calling for the oil giant to stop funding climate change contrarians. Now the Union of Concerned Scientists has weighed in with a report summarizing exactly how ExxonMobil has "manufactured uncertainty" on climate science.

The report, which can be linked from the UCS's homepage, or found directly on ABCnews.com, specifically describes the parallels between Big Tobacco's fight against science from the 1950s to the 1990s and ExxonMobil's ongoing climate science activities, including using some of the same organizations and personel.

The report also delineates some of ExxonMobil's lobbying efforts over the past several years.

Is UCS a valid source of critcism? Some of called them an "unlabeled left-wing activist" group, which means some readers here will reject their findings without even examining the report, while others will embrace it without any critcism. Personally, I think the report did a fairly good job describing (and discrediting) the relatively well known 17,000 signature site and revealing the connection between Tech Central Station and ExxonMobil. Whether everything in the report is accurate, I can't say.

We've talked and talked about Antarctic ice, but last week there was a story in the news about ice in the Arctic. An ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields broke free from the northern coast of Canada's Ellesmere Island in August of 2005. I'm sure you all know where Ellesmere Island is, right? Yep. North of Greenland. That's it at the very northern extent of this map:

We're talking 800 km (slightly less than 500 miles) south of the North Pole. Pretty remote, which is why scientists didn't realize it had happened right away. Scientists have been compiling seismic and satellite data to determine what happened. According to CNN, earthquake monitors 155 miles away picked up the vibrations from the collapse.

The remains of the ice shelf are about 15 km long and 5 km wide, and between 30 and 40 meters thick. It could pose a risk to oil platforms along its drift path in the spring.

Researchers have not said climate change is to blame for the collapse, but say global warming may have played a role in it. It was the largest breakup of its kind in the Canadian Arctic in 30 years.

I'm still playing catch-up after the holidays, so I'm just getting to a January 1st article from the New York Times which discusses the middle ground on climate change. This middle ground is held by those who believe global warming is occurring, and is caused by humans, but should not be the cause of alarmism or panic. I touched on this tangentially back in early November with my entry on what's been called "climate porn".

One of my favorite bloggers, Roger Pielke Jr., has even coined a name for the experts holding such views: "nonskeptical heretics."

"A lot of people have independently come to the same sort of conclusion," Dr. Pielke said. "We do have a problem, we do need to act, but what actions are practical and pragmatic?"

RealClimate took issue with the use of the word "heretic" and responded that their position was almost completely in line with what the article described as "heresy." Roger clarified that he was referring to a political rather than a scientific position. Given the comments we've had on this site, I'd say that it's pretty fair to say there's a "right" and a "left" on the issue of global warming, and a few voices in the middle aren't a bad thing.

I got a lot of comments on the story of the calving of the Ayles Ice Shelf, including a very informative one from Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College. I sent an e-mail to Dr. Luke Copland, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Copland was quoted in the article I linked and he was kind enough to respond. Here's the text of the e-mail:

Hi Laura,

Thanks for the good question - there have been many breakups of ice shelves across northern Ellesmere Island over the last century so. When these ice shelves were first discovered in about 1900, they were a total of about 10,000 sq km in area. Today they have reduced in size by about 90%, to about 1000 sq km in area. The Ayles Ice Shelf loss was the largest breakup in at least 25 years, but it is part of the long-term trend of loss over the last century.

The important point to note with all of these losses is that they are essentially permanent. There is no longer enough glacier ice flowing off the land to replace the ice that is being calved into the ocean. Hence these 3000+ year old shelves are now gone forever.

You might also be interested in looking at a media page that we've put together:
http://www.geomatics.uottawa.ca/copland/

Regards,
Luke

Perhaps the loss of these ice shelves is simply due to being in the midst of an interglacial period. Or maybe we're speeding up the process.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember an entry I wrote back in early November discussing George Monbiot's opinion piece titled "How sport is killing the planet." Apparently Mr. Monbiot's piece has resonated through the world of motorsports. Thanks to fellow blogger and big-time racing fan Alan Reppert for sending me a hard copy of an article from the December 2006 issue of F1 Racing (not available on-line) titled F1's Green Credentials.

Seems Formula 1 racing is feeling the pressure from the green lobby and is taking steps to improve their image. Turbo engines may return by 2011 - back in the '80s, turbos were a symbol of F1 excess, but the new turbos would be a means of producing power efficiently. In addition, F1

has the potential to provide the major car manufacturers with an opportunity to develop, showcase and popularise future technologies that will help to reduce the global problem of transport emissions.

The article doesn't specify any technologies which will be focused on, but does mention the potential of energy recovery from functions such as braking.

In other sports-related news, Park City Mountain Resort in Park City, Utah will be holding a town hall meeting at 6 p.m. tomorrow, January 9th at the Eccles Center to present the first-ever comprehensive study on global warming's potential effect on the Utah ski and snowboard industry. The meeting will include a presentation of the material from Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, followed by model results of temperatures and snowfall amounts through the remainder of the century. Park City Mountain Resort has received 97 inches of snow so far this ski season.

On ABC's This Week, George Stephanopoulos reported Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is "considering setting up a special committee in the House to deal with climate change and global warming." That was not confirmed by Rep. Henry Waxman of California. You can view the video just past the 12 minute mark at this link.

Waxman goes on to mention his 2006 bill, the Safe Climate Act, which sets a goal of 1990 emissions by the year 2020. This goal would be met through the use of a cap-and-trade system of controlling greenhouse gas emissions and also by requiring EPA to set standards for motor vehicle emissions which are at least as stringent as the current California standards. The National Academy of Sciences would be directed to review, at five-year intervals, the nation's progress toward avoiding "dangerous climate change."

Pretty much everyone has noticed the weather is wacky, right? Almost all of North America has had temperatures well above normal so far this winter. I had to look at places in the Rockies to find anyone below normal in the lower 48 - in a quick perusal - and to Alaska to find some significantly cold air. It's 29 below zero (F) as I write this. The normal high is -7. That air will be on the move over the next few days, but won't really drive into the lower 48 as we'd normally see in January. Why? Because we're still dominated by the Pacific jet stream. Arctic air is trapped. And we're not alone. I read an article yesterday which included some recent record warmth in Tibet.

An article from NBC news today asks the question "What's global warming got to do with it?" While the article does support something of a link between our current weather pattern - as Dr. Stephen Schneider of Stanford University says:

"Whatever the natural causes are, they are riding on top of the warming trend that has been induced by humans using the atmosphere as a free place to dump our tailpipe waste."

But overwhelmingly, this year's El Niño is blamed for our bizarro-world weather. It produces a stronger-than-normal southern jet stream, which prevents cold air from moving south.

Last week I wrote an entry about the rare middle ground on global warming - how it doesn't really help to paint a picture so dismal and gloomy that it causes people to give up. As Mike Hulme of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research wrote in a BBC Editorial:

The language of fear and terror operates as an ever-weakening vehicle for effective communication or inducement for behavioural change.

I was reminded of these things today when I read a piece in The Canadian, which bills itself as "Canada's new socially progressive and cross-cultural national newspaper." The headline grabbed my attention - stating that "Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by 2012." Pause for a minute. Think about that. The world's current population is a few ticks over 6.5 Billion, so this author is claiming that in a mere 5 years, almost three quarters of the world's population will have succumbed. Heck, if that's the case, I might as well go right down to the GM dealership and buy a Hummer. What difference will that make?

A quick read of the article finds it to have some significant holes. First of all, the author is citing a rapid climate warming due to the release of methane caused by the melting of permafrost. This, he says is a "weeks old" scientific theory - which is simply not true. I touched on it back in November, referencing a RealClimate.org entry from October, and methane hydrates were also addressed at RealClimate in December of 2005.

The author then goes on to state that methane in the atmosphere oxidizes into atmospheric carbon dioxide (true) which "lasts for hundreds of thousands of years." Oh really? I thought it stayed in the atmosphere 50-200 years.

If I gave an award for global warming hysteria, this would be the winner.

Had a number of comments on yesterday's entry on Warming and Weather. First of all, commenter Dion linked Monday's RealClimate entry on El Niño, Global Warming, and Anomalous U.S. Winter Warmth. The folks at RealClimate point out that in an ordinary El Niño winter, the amplitude of warming across the northern half of the U.S. averages about 1 degree C (2F). This year's warming is roughly 5 times that amount. They also point out that last winter was also anomalously warm, despite a weak La Nina. That warmth was most striking in January of 2006. They conclude that it's impossible to determine what role each factor is playing in our current warmth.

In reality, the individual roles of deterministic factors such as El Nino, anthropogenic climate change, and of purely random factors (i.e. "weather") in the pattern observed thusfar this winter cannot even in principle be ascertained. What we do know, however, is that both anthropogenic climate change and El Nino favor, in a statistical sense, warmer winters over large parts of the U.S. When these factors act constructively, as is the case this winter, warmer temperatures are certainly more likely. Both factors also favor warmer global mean surface temperatures (the warming is one or two tenths of a degree C for a moderate to strong El Nino). It is precisely for this reason that some scientists are already concluding, with some justification, that 2007 stands a good chance of being the warmest year on record for the globe.

I also had a commenter raise the question of what effect global warming will have on El Niño. The short answer is we don't know. Some have speculated that El Niño/ENSO events will be more frequent or more intense, but no one knows. For more information, see RealClimate, The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.

In off-topic news - I'm under the weather today, so this will likely be my only post today. I may be slower than normal in posting comments or responding to email over the next few days. Please bear with me.

In mid-December, NOAA expected 2006 to rank as the third-warmest on record, trailing 1998 and 1934. The unseasonable warmth of December (no state had below-normal temperatures - though as Jesse's blog shows, many states were near normal) and a further evaluation of data, here we stand (image courtesy NOAA):

Andrew Revkin's article in the New York Times on the topic plays up the fact that this is the first time a news release from NOAA has stated that the buildup of greenhouse gases is contributing to warming.