Climate 411

Phone Calls from the Congressional Budget Office

By Nat Keohane / Published: March 4, 2008

Nat KeohaneThis post is by Nat Keohane, Ph.D., Director of Economic Policy and Analysis at the Environmental Defense Fund.

My February 21 post, CBO Report: The Real Story, caught the attention of the folks at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Last Wednesday, I received a call from Terry Dinan, the senior analyst at CBO who wrote the report. A little while later I got a second call, this time from Peter Orszag, the Director of CBO.

In particular, they didn’t like the attention-grabbing paragraph at the top that said:

…a careful reading reveals the report to be a theoretical exercise with no real-world relevance. It highlights the drawbacks of a version of cap-and-trade that no one advocates, and bases its efficiency analysis on a faulty premise.

I stand by what I wrote, as I’ll explain in a moment. But a call from the Director of CBO is fairly attention-getting, as well. Moreover, Dinan and Orszag are smart and well-respected economists, and my conversations with them helped to sharpen my own thinking. So I thought I’d explain a couple of points in more detail.

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Posted in Economics / Read 3 Responses

Sequestering Carbon Deep Within the Earth

By Scott Anderson / Published: March 3, 2008

Scott AndersonThis post is by Scott Anderson, an attorney and senior policy advisor at the Environmental Defense Fund. It’s the second in a three-part series on carbon sequestration – storing carbon or carbon dioxide (CO2) in soils, trees, geological formations, and oceans.

1. Biological Sequestration
2. Geological Sequestration
3. Ocean Sequestration

To stop global warming, the U.S. must substantially move away from carbon-emitting fossil fuels to clean renewable energy. But a transition of this magnitude takes time. Right now this country is heavily dependent on coal for electricity, and traditional coal plants are none too clean.

How do we stop global warming while renewable technologies to meet our energy needs are still under development? Part of the answer may lie in an emerging transition technology called Carbon dioxide (CO2) Capture and Storage (CCS). The idea behind CCS is to capture the CO2 from industrial processes like coal plants, and then store it in deep geological formations.

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Posted in Geoengineering / Read 12 Responses

2 Key Climate Terms to Know

By Lisa Moore / Published: February 29, 2008

Lisa MooreThis post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense.

Scientists use some technical terms in discussing climate change that can cause confusion. Two that are especially useful to know are "forcing" and "feedback".

You’ll hear these terms a lot in discussions of how human activity impacts climate – and especially when the topic turns to the melting Arctic. If you know what they mean, you’ll have a much better understanding of the dynamics behind climate change.

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Posted in Basic Science of Global Warming / Read 6 Responses

Did Global Warming Stop in January?

By Lisa Moore / Published: February 27, 2008

Lisa MooreThis post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense.

January 2008 was the coldest month in several years, according to the scientific groups that track global temperature. Is it true, as DailyTech concludes, that January’s cold "wipes out a century of warming"? Has global warming stopped?

In a word, no. A single month does not make for a climate trend. Let’s look at the data.

Monthly Average Global Temperature Variation

Source: Raw data from the U.K.’s Met Office Hadley Centre (see description of data).

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Posted in News / Read 28 Responses

Greenhouse Gases: How Long Will They Last?

By Lisa Moore / Published: February 26, 2008

Lisa MooreThis post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense.

In a comment on my Global Warming Crib Sheet, johnmashey asked if I could say something about the lifetimes of greenhouse gases – that is, how long different greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere. Great idea! Here’s a whole post on it.

Many people don’t realize that the greenhouse gases we emit can stay in the atmosphere for decades, centuries or even millennia. That’s why it’s so important that we cap emissions as soon as possible.

Here’s a table showing a selection of greenhouse gases, their global warming potential (GWP), and their lifetimes:

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Posted in News / Read 7 Responses

Climate Legislation on DailyKos and WSJ

By Sheryl Canter / Published: February 25, 2008

Sheryl CanterThis post is by Sheryl Canter, an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

In a post on DailyKos on the importance of acting now, TheGreenMiles called out an argument we made for the urgency of passing climate legislation, and expanded on it by discussing how action now could positively impact change at the local level.

The Wall Street Journal blog, posting on cap-and-trade versus carbon tax, called out two of our Climate 411 posts in their discussion of the relative merits of each approach. Their recap was mostly accurate, except for this misstatement:

Environmental Defense says the threat is catastrophic “tipping points” that could melt ice sheets, disrupt ocean currents, and accelerate deforestation. Never mind that those “tipping points” don’t always jibe with work done by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Because Environmental Defense starts from that more-worried point…

All our posts are reviewed by our science team, and do concur with the IPCC work.

Posted in Climate Change Legislation / Read 1 Response