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Senate Approves Short-Term Extension of Payroll Tax Cut, Gives Obama Two Months to OK Keystone XL Pipeline
Common Dreams
Agencies are reporting that the Senate has passed legislation to extend the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits for two months. The legislation also included a provision requiring the White House to make a decision on the Keystone XL project in 60 days.

GOP and Democratic sources told POLITICO "that the White House swallowed the House Republican-written pipeline rider in order to get a deal to extend the tax holiday, jobless benefits and the Medicare reimbursement rate into February."

On Friday, Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, stated: “The State Department’s own environmental review states that pumping dirty tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico through Keystone XL will pollute our water. It will also commit us to an unsustainable future based on dirty fossil fuels at the precise moment when the national interest demands that we rapidly transition to clean energy to avoid climate catastrophe. There is simply no way that President Obama can honor his commitments to the American people if he caves to Big Oil on Keystone XL at this late hour.”

From AP:

In a statement, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer indicated Obama would sign the two-month extension measure, saying it had met his test of "preventing a tax increase on 160 million hardworking Americans" and avoiding damage to the economy recovery.

The statement made no mention of the pipeline.

CNN reports:

A senior administration official noted that though the president has said he would reject any attempt to "mandate" construction of the pipeline before it receives further review, the Keystone provision Senate leaders have agreed to speeds up the approval process -- giving the administration 60 days to make a decision -- but does not mandate construction.

The two-month deadline on the pipeline decision comes as a defeat to the Obama administration, which had sought to postpone the decision until 2013, well after elections.
(17 December 2011)

As Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks
Justin Gillis, New York Times
FAIRBANKS, Alaska — A bubble rose through a hole in the surface of a frozen lake. It popped, followed by another, and another, as if a pot were somehow boiling in the icy depths.

Every bursting bubble sent up a puff of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas generated beneath the lake from the decay of plant debris. These plants last saw the light of day 30,000 years ago and have been locked in a deep freeze — until now.

“That’s a hot spot,” declared Katey M. Walter Anthony, a leading scientist in studying the escape of methane. A few minutes later, she leaned perilously over the edge of the ice, plunging a bottle into the water to grab a gas sample.

It was another small clue for scientists struggling to understand one of the biggest looming mysteries about the future of the earth.

... A recent estimate suggests that the perennially frozen ground known as permafrost, which underlies nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere.

Temperatures are warming across much of that region, primarily, scientists believe, because of the rapid human release of greenhouse gases. Permafrost is warming, too. Some has already thawed, and other signs are emerging that the frozen carbon may be becoming unstable.

... If a substantial amount of the carbon should enter the atmosphere, it would intensify the planetary warming. An especially worrisome possibility is that a significant proportion will emerge not as carbon dioxide, the gas that usually forms when organic material breaks down, but as methane, produced when the breakdown occurs in lakes or wetlands. Methane is especially potent at trapping the sun’s heat, and the potential for large new methane emissions in the Arctic is one of the biggest wild cards in climate science.

... In the minds of most experts, the chief worry is not that the carbon in the permafrost will break down quickly — typical estimates say that will take more than a century, perhaps several — but that once the decomposition starts, it will be impossible to stop.
(16 December 2011)
Runaway melting of the permafrost is perhaps the most horrible of the possible scenarios. I'm glad the NY Times is covering this important story, but the the headline and text are almost pathologically non-emotional. This is not a colony of ants we're studying.

-BA

Climate Change May Modify Half Earth's Plants
Cosmos Magazine
PASADENA - By 2100, global climate change will modify plant communities covering almost half of Earth's land surface.

Climate change will also drive the conversion of nearly 40% of land-based ecosystems from one major ecological community type - such as forest, grassland or tundra - toward another, according to a new NASA and university computer modelling study.

"For more than 25 years, scientists have warned of the dangers of human-induced climate change," said Jon Bergengren, a scientist who led the study while a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology in the U.S..

"Our study introduces a new view of climate change, exploring the ecological implications of a few degrees of global warming. While warnings of melting glaciers, rising sea levels and other environmental changes are illustrative and important, ultimately, it's the ecological consequences that matter most."
(16 December 2011)

In A Year Of Big Environmental Stories, COP17 Rises Above Them All
Matthew McDermott, Treehugger
In a year of big environmental stories the outcome of the COP17 climate talks in Durban has got to be the biggest. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the resultant Fukushima nuclear disaster, the fight over the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, the entire Occupy movement are all huge. But COP17 still stands out for me above them all.

It's all put into even harsher relief with Canada pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol shortly afterwards, in time as easily measured in hours and not days. And then Russia supporting the Canadian position shortly thereafter.

Underneath it all someplace, maybe a couple layers down in the thinking, the two largest nations with bordering the Arctic circle, both significant producers of fossil fuels and both standing to directly benefit from an ice-free Arctic in terms of shipping, have got to be thinking that global warming actually is a good thing for them.

COP17 ensures that for Russia, Canada, and every other nation, reducing emissions sufficiently to hold average temperature rise below 2°C has a minutely thin chance of happening.

Recent rhetoric from US lead negotiator Todd Stern focuses on the successes of COP17 in regards to keeping the international climate negotiation process alive. Indeed that is the only real success to be found. In short, as many people have said, the process is saved but not people nor the planet. We should have been reducing emissions radically years ago, and now the international community, obstructed foremost by the US, Canada, and other big polluters (saving notably the EU), has put off solidifying into a legal agreement emission reductions until it is too late.

Emissions may well be reduced, through a combination of existing action to expand renewable energy and/or recession, before 2020, but the odds of it being enough to forestall climate change are not good at all. We continue to be moving full steam ahead to a world with 4°C+ temperature rise and all the massive ecological and social disruption that will come with it.
(17 December 2011)

Critical Issues in the Domain of Climate Dynamics (request for comments) (PDF)
David Wasdell, Apollo-Gaia Project
This is the revised text of a paper currently being prepared for publication. The first draft has been revised in the light of feedback received from the global community, for which I am profoundly grateful. It is being re-circulated in this form as part of our commitment to a stringent and open process of peer learning and review, prior to the more formal and anonymous procedure of peer-review espoused by the leading journals. Your help and collaboration in this process would be immensely appreciated.

Abstract

Part 1: Climate Sensitivity

The threat to biodiversity and the intensity of the Anthropocene Extinction Event depend on the value of climate sensitivity. In addition to initiating the process of global warming, the anthropogenic disturbance of the climate system has also triggered the action of a complex web of interconnected feedback mechanisms which amplify the effect of the original disturbance. The value of the amplification factor determines the eventual increase in average surface temperature required to re-balance the dynamic thermal equilibrium of the planet. Using new visualisation techniques, this presentation offers a trans-disciplinary re-evaluation of climate sensitivity with profound implications for our current strategic approach to the mitigation of climate change.

Part 2: Beyond the Stable State

The most significant boundary in climate dynamics is the strength of the feedback factor at which the system behaviour crosses the critical threshold between equilibrium-seeking and self-amplifying outcomes. This is the tipping point at the boundary of runaway climate change. The second part of this paper will explore current state of knowledge about this boundary, and indicate policy implications.

Part 3: Developing a Strategic Response

Boundary conditions of the macro-system set the constraints which determine the envelope of sustainability of all dependent sub-systems. Regaining long-term viability, stability and sustainability of the interdependent set of climate, population, energy, consumption, entropy, politics and economics, and will require a phase-change in global dynamics, the initiation of which is the fundamental challenge facing human civilisation in the 21st Century.

This three-part paper was delivered in outline form at a public seminar conducted on 3rd November 2010 in the Department of Land Economy of the University of Cambridge
(December 2011)