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Back in February of 2010, Senator James Inhofe's grandchildren built an igloo for Al Gore. Inhofe is an Oklahoma Republican and the most skeptical of Congressional climate deniers; he's the one who called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." The 2010 winter was one of the snowiest in recent memory — including a massive blizzard that February that became known as "Snowmageddon" — which skeptics like Inhofe happily used as evidence that man-made climate change didn't really exist. So Inhofe's daughter, son-in-law and four grandchildren built a snowpacked igloo in Washington after one major storm, and stuck a sign on it: "Al Gore's New Home."

Fast-forward a year and a half. The weather in Washington is extreme again, but this time it's brutally hot, with the city in early July setting a record for the most consecutive 95 F plus days in a row — ten of them lined in a hyperthermic murderer's row. And the heat isn't confined to the nation's capital; over the past few weeks, just about every part of the country except for the Pacific Northwest has experienced unusually high temperatures. The national weather map looks like a U.S.-shaped burn mark. To environmentalists, the summer of 2012 is climate change in action — which led the green group 350.org to plan an ice-based stunt of their own. Activists were going to build an ice sculpture of the word "HOAX?" on July 7 in front of Capitol Hill, then let it melt in Washington's triple-digit heat.

In the end, 350.org decided not to go ahead with the ice-melting event. (The group's executive director Bill McKibben ultimately worried that the protest would be seen as insensitive given the very real human toll of the heat wave.) But HOAX in ice and Al Gore's igloo both underscore the way that the weather, more than anything else, drives our belief in climate change — and our uneven commitment to doing something about it. After the exceedingly mild winter just past and a warm spring that started early, one Yale University study found that 66% of Americans said they believe in climate change, up from 57% in January 2010 — right in the middle of that snowy winter. If we check in with the American public after another snowmageddon, expect the figure to fall again.

But it's a mistake to look at climate change only through the lens of public opinion polls, because what's happening right now in the U.S. really is out of the ordinary — assuming that ordinary still applies. More than 2 million acres have been burned in massive wildfires in much of the West, more than 110 million people were living under extreme heat advisories at the end of June and more than two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought. Last month, 3,215 daily high temperature records were set nationwide — and that's nothing compared to the 15,000 set in March. The 12 months ending in May were the warmest 12 continuous months on record in the U.S. "What we see now is what global warming really looks like," says Michael Oppenheimer, a climate expert and a professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. "The heat, the fires, these kinds of environmental disasters."

This isn't to say that climate change is directly causing the extreme heat that's been suffocating much of the U.S. this summer. Fingerprinting a single extreme weather event as evidence of global warming — be it a heat wave, a major storm, a drought or a flood — take years of intensive study, though researchers are beginning to make those connections. A 2011 study in Nature made waves by linking rising instances of extreme precipitation in the second half of the 20th century to man-made global warming — the kind of large-scale survey that needs to be done to make the climate change case authoritatively. The sheer number of factors that influence individual weather events is immense. But we do have a pretty good idea of what climate change will look like in the years to come — if it continues uninterrupted — and it will look a lot like this summer, this spring and this winter. "The frequency of hot days and hot periods has already increased and will increase further," says Oppenheimer. "What we're seeing fits into the pattern you would expect."

Here's what we should take away from the heat: climate change is real and it's happening now. We can disagree about how to handle it, and how much those policies might cost, but it's long past time to surrender to the science. Perhaps this year of extreme heat will help shake loose the forces blocking climate change action, though judging from the near-complete absence of global warming as an issue on the Presidential campaign trail, that hasn't happened yet. It had better happen soon. We're living in an igloo in the summertime, and the ice is melting all around us. Time to face facts. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2119129,00.html

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• Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

• The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850.

• The Arctic is feeling the effects the most. Average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average, according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report compiled between 2000 and 2004.

• Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana's Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later.

• Coral reefs, which are highly sensitive to small changes in water temperature, suffered the worst bleaching—or die-off in response to stress—ever recorded in 1998, with some areas seeing bleach rates of 70 percent. Experts expect these sorts of events to increase in frequency and intensity in the next 50 years as sea temperatures rise.

• An upsurge in the amount of extreme weather events, such as wildfires, heat waves, and strong tropical storms, is also attributed in part to climate change by some experts. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/1206_041206_global_war
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The Reality Campaign has released a new ad. They're the folks behind the widely-played ad that featured a foreman in a hard hat taking viewers on a tour of a non-existent clean coal facility.

In this new ad, a pitchman gives us the hard sell on a "Clean Coal Clean"-scented air freshener that works just as well as "clean coal."

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Big Oil is using fake “Americans” to defend billions in tax subsidies. The American Petroleum Institute is running full-page ads in Politico and Roll Call that attack Congress for “new energy taxes”:

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Congress will likely consider new taxes on America’s oil and natural gas industry. These new energy taxes will produce wide-reaching effects, and ripple through our economy when America — and Americans — can least afford it.

These unprecedented taxes will serve to reduce investment in new energy supplies at a time when most Americans support developing our domestic oil and natural gas resources. That means less energy, thousands of American jobs being lost and further erosion of our energy security.

Our economy is in crisis, and we need to get the nation on the road to economic recovery. This is no time to burden Americans with new energy costs.

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The target of this ad is the Obama administration’s effort to remove $36 billion in loopholes and subsidies for the oil industry. As it turns out, the “Americans” presented in the ad are stock photos from Getty Images.

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Farmers suffer as soaring temperatures worsen drought in Midwest



A severe drought is spreading across the Midwest this summer, resulting in some of the worst conditions in decades and leaving more than a thousand counties designated as natural disaster areas, authorities said.

Farmers in the region are suffering, with pastures for livestock and fields of crops becoming increasingly parched during June, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Many areas in the southern Midwest are reporting the poorest conditions for June since 1988.

The farmers' difficulties come amid a record-setting level of hot, dry weather across the nation

As of Tuesday, about 61% of the contiguous United States (excluding Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico) was experiencing drought conditions, the highest percentage in the 12-year record of the U.S. Drought Monitor.

The past 12 months have been the warmest the United States has experienced since records began in 1895, the climatic data center said.

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A map of significant climate events for the United States in June looks almost apocalyptic: hellish heat, ferocious fires and severe storms leaving people injured, homeless and even dead.

That followed a warm winter and early season droughts. And on Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report calling 2011 a year of extreme weather.

"As we change the climate, we're shifting the odds for extreme weather," Chris Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, said. It's sort of like upping your chances of a car accident if you're speeding. The four classes of extremes -- high heat, heavy precipitation and floods, duration and intensity of droughts and extremes related to higher sea levels -- have changed in the last 50 years, Field said.

"When you've got a planet that's nearest warmest levels on record, that doesn't mean every part of the world is going to be the warmest ever," said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for Weather Underground.

"The U.S. has been unlucky enough to be in that sort of pattern," he said. "Increasingly, we are loading the dice towards these very damaging kinds of extremes."

In 2011, two back-to-back La Niñas, each characterized by cooler-than-average water temperatures in the eastern Pacific, affected significant weather events -- including droughts in the southern United States and northern Mexico and in east Africa.

There is debate over how climate change affects such weather patterns but the NOAA-led "state of the climate" report said La Niña-related heat waves are now 20 times more likely to occur than 50 years ago.

Scientists also analyzed the United Kingdom's very warm November 2011 and a very cold December 2010. They said that cold Decembers are now half as likely to occur versus 50 years ago, whereas warm Novembers are now 62 times more likely.

This year, the United States has already lived through four named storms -- two in May and two in June. The last was Tropical Storm Debby, which flooded Florida.

The warmer waters can lead to warmer temperatures on land, Downs said. So can extended drought.

"The biggest thing of this year is the cumulative effect of the last two seasons. Some parts of the United States have been under drought conditions for the past two years," he said, and did not have much rain in April and May. Less solar energy is absorbed by hot, parched land.

"The drought amplifies temperatures -- 90 becomes 100. 100 becomes 105."

Americans and others will likely be paying a lot more for cereal, sweeteners and meat as the price of corn goes up because of failed crops.

"The crops are hurting," said Chad Hart, a grain market specialist at Iowa State University.

The eastern part of the Corn Belt is especially hard-hit. In states like Iowa, farmers are in the critical stage of corn pollination.

"We need a good inch of moisture this week," Hart said. "And there's no rain in the forecast. "That means we are looking for a much lower yield for crops we produce in the Midwest."

That means farmers will be devastated and consumers could see higher prices at the grocery store for corn, soy and wheat products, as well as meat from animals raised on corn feed.

They will also be paying more to utility companies for running air-conditioners as the sizzling summer continues.

The hottest year on record for the United States is 1998. Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at the National Climatic Data Center, said 2012 is on track to beat it. Perhaps people should get used to hotter temperatures, experts say, because the trends point that way. A heatwave that occurred every 20 years will, by the year 2080, occur every one to two years, Field said. http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/10/world/unusual-world-weather/index.html

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