Worldwatch just released its State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World, which finds:

The world will have to reduce emissions more drastically than has been widely predicted, essentially ending the emission of carbon dioxide by 2050 to avoid catastrophic disruption to the world's climate.

At a kick-off event, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said

President-elect Obama's goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 falls short of the response needed by world leaders to meet the challenge of reducing emissions to levels that will actually spare us the worst effects of climate change.

Told ya! (see "The U.S. needs a tougher 2020 GHG emissions target.")

Pachauri was the guy handpicked by Bush to replace the "alarmist" Bob Watson. But facts make scientists alarmists, not their politics, as I've said many times (see "Desperate times, desperate scientists"). At the end of 2007, Pachauri famously said:

This East Bay Express story is a must-read article. The same folks who decided the hydrogen highway was the road to the future now very well might kill the plug-in hybrid conversion industry.

I'd say we should send them a copy of Who Killed the Electric Car?, but chances are they only have Betamax.

Premier among their many unscientific beliefs, deniers cling to the notion that some magical negative feedback will avert serious climate impacts. Sadly, we will need magic to save humanity if we foolishly decide to listen to the deniers and to keep ignoring the one negative feedback that science says can certainly save humanity -- simply reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientific reality based on actual observations (not to mention the paleoclimate record) is that the climate models are not underestimating negative feedbacks -- the models are wildly underestimating the positive or amplifying feedbacks. Among the greatest concerns is the growing evidence that the major carbon sinks are saturating, that a greater and greater fraction of human emissions will end up in the atmosphere.

A new study in Geophysical Research Letters ($ub. req'd), "Sudden, considerable reduction in recent uptake of anthropogenic CO₂ by the East/Japan Sea," finds,

The results presented in this paper indicate that the rate of CO₂ accumulation in the deepest basin of the East/Japan Sea has considerably decreased over the transition period between 1992-1999 and 1999-2007.

The authors explain to the U.K.'s Guardian why this is an amplifying feedback, why warming is diminishing the ability of the ocean sink to absorb CO2:

The world's oceans soak up about 11bn tonnes of human carbon dioxide pollution each year, about a quarter of all produced, and even a slight weakening of this natural process would leave significantly more CO2 in the atmosphere. That would require countries to adopt much stricter emissions targets to prevent dangerous rises in temperature.

Kitack Lee, an associate professor at Pohang University of Science and Technology, who led the research, says the discovery is the "very first observation that directly relates ocean CO2 uptake change to ocean warming".

He says the warmer conditions disrupt a process known as "ventilation" -- the way seawater flows and mixes and drags absorbed CO2 from surface waters to the depths. He warns that the effect is probably not confined to the Sea of Japan. It could also affect CO2 uptake in the Atlantic and Southern oceans.

"Our result ... unequivocally demonstrated that oceanic uptake of CO2 has been directly affected by warming-induced weakening of vertical ventilation," he says ...

Lee adds: "In other words, the increase in atmospheric temperature due to global warming can profoundly influence the ocean ventilation, thereby decreasing the uptake rate of CO2."

This study matches other recent research on ocean sink saturation. In 2007, the BBC reported, "The amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world's oceans has reduced" based on more than 90,000 ship-based measurements of CO2 absorption over ten years. The Global Carbon Project analysis of the "natural land and ocean CO₂ sinks" finds:

As the nation turns its attention toward the big Inaugural events next week, Washington Governor Chris Gregoire (D) danced her way (back) into office during her own Inaugural Ball Wednesday night. But the celebration was over the next day as she announced her economic stimulus plan for the state, which faces its biggest budget shortfall in history.

While a big chunk of change -- more than $800 million -- would go toward accelerating building and road projects, she also suggests funding greener ventures: Some $30 million would help construct water-pollution-control facilities, and $10 million would install alternative-energy equipment in government facilities.

Gregoire also hopes to create 20,000 new jobs in the next two years. There's no word on exactly how many of those are "green jobs," but there are likely to be quite a few openings in light-rail construction now that Sound Transit has been awarded a $813 million federal grant as part of the Federal Transit Administration's New Starts program.

The three-mile light-rail tunnel linking hot-spots in Seattle was awarded the FTA's top rating because of the city's dense population and high transit-ridership. The money, which covers about 40 percent of the $1.9 billion price tag, will come primarily from federal gas taxes.

When the House rolled out its stimulus plan on Thursday, the set-aside for mass transit had fallen significantly from the proposal outlined last week by House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair James Oberstar (D-Minn.).

Oberstar had called for $30 billion for roads and bridges and $17 billion for mass transit, which would give mass transit 36 percent of all the transportation funding in the stimulus package. But in the plan unveiled yesterday, while the road money stayed the same, the transportation portion was reduced by 25 percent, which includes cutting operation assistance funds entirely. As for rail, for which Oberstar wanted $5 billion, its funding was reduced to $1.1 billion -- a 78 percent cut.

Whose decision was it to ax so much mass-transit funding, considering that the House committee chair responsible for it has been so pro-public-transit? Sources on the Hill say that the incoming administration's economic team was very involved in the drafting of this final proposal. Are they responsible for reducing transit so significantly, despite repeated claims that reducing oil use and investing in public transit is going to be top priority?

Oberstar's office says the cuts were the product of the House speaker's office, the Senate majority leader, and the Obama transition team. "How those decisions were made, I don't know," Jim Berard, communications director for the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told Grist. "It's disappointing that our recommendation was not accepted on the whole, but at the same time we got a good deal for transportation infrastructure and we want to keep the momentum going for this bill."

Berard says that at this point it's not likely transit advocates in Congress will make too big a deal out of the cuts. "We don't want to get into a family squabble at this point. I think the imperative is to get a bill going and get it going fast, and get it enacted quickly," he continued. "I think there's a lot of arguments to be made for more funding in every category on there. So to slow the process down by lobbying for more money for one particular sector or another may not be productive."

Transit activists, of course, are not happy.

President-elect Barack Obama took his "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" on the road Friday, talking up his clean energy plans at an Ohio factory that manufactures nuts and bolts used to build wind turbines.

Obama toured the Cardinal Fastener & Specialty Company in Bedford Heights, Ohio, which he cited as evidence that "a renewable energy economy isn't some pie-in-the-sky, far-off future."

"It's happening all across America right now," he said. "It's providing alternatives to foreign oil now. It can create millions of additional jobs and entire new industries if we act right now."

The visit and his speech afterward were meant to highlight his stimulus plan, which calls for doubling the production of renewable energy in the next three years, doing energy-efficiency retrofits on 75 percent of federal buildings, and weatherizing 2 million homes.

Obama said his plan, if enacted, would "put nearly half a million people to work building wind turbines and solar panels; constructing fuel-efficient cars and buildings; and developing the new energy technologies that will lead to new jobs, more savings, and a cleaner, safer planet in the bargain." A stronger economy, he said, "starts with new, clean sources of energy."

He also warned that without significant investments, renewable industries like Cardinal could go under. "I'm told that if we don't act now, because of the economic downturn, half of the wind projects planned for 2009 could wind up being abandoned," said Obama. "Think about that. Think about all the businesses that wouldn't come to be, all the jobs that wouldn't be created, all the clean energy we wouldn't produce."

This week Science published research ($ub. req'd) detailing the vast, global food-security implications of warming temperatures. The colored graphics are nothing short of terrifying when you realize the blotches of red and orange covering the better part of the globe indicate significantly warmer summers in coming decades.

The implications of the article are clear -- we need to be utilizing agricultural methods and crops that can withstand the potential myriad impacts of global climate change, especially warmer temperatures. The article significantly notes, "The probability exceeds 90 percent that by the end of the century, the summer average temperature will exceed the hottest summer on record throughout the tropics and subtropics. Because these regions are home to about half of the world's population, the human consequences of global climate change could be enormous."

Whether you believe global warming is part of a "natural cycle" or a man-made phenomenon is irrelevant. The bottom line is that our earth is rapidly warming, and this is going to drastically affect our food supply. We must undertake both the enormous task of reducing our carbon emissions now to avert the worst, while at the same time adapting our society to the vast and multitudinous effects of unavoidable global climate change. Failing to do either will, as the Science article indicates, have dire effects on a large portion of our world's population.

Determining the best course of action for ensuring food security in the face of global climate change remains a challenging task. Recognizing that climate change is slated to affect developing countries and small-scale farmers the most is a crucial point. Such understanding enables people to realize that viable solutions must be accessible, affordable, and relevant to the billions of small-scale farmers in the developing world. Unfortunately, it appears that some of the solutions on the table fail to meet these criteria.

Last week, Monsanto made a big public relations splash by filing documents with the FDA regarding a drought-tolerant GM corn variety it is developing with a German company, BASF. Monsanto claims that in field trials, the corn got 6-10 percent higher yields in drought-prone areas last year, but the release is extremely short on details. Regardless of the reality, Monsanto is presenting the corn as a way to help improve on-farm productivity in other parts of the world, notably Africa.

Yet, absent from the media hype were the many technical and social problems with Monsanto's corn.

"President-elect Obama's goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 falls short of the response needed by world leaders to meet the challenge of reducing emissions to levels that will actually spare us the worst effects of climate change."

-- Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The Columbia River Gorge at Corbett, Ore.

Photo: ~MVI~.

As the Columbia River runs its 1,200-mile course from a Canadian glacier out to the Pacific Ocean, it passes by one nuclear production complex, 13 pulp and paper mills, and countless agricultural areas, mines, and sewer outflows from major cities.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that the U.S. EPA recently found that the river -- which drains a 259,000-square-mile basin covering seven U.S. states and part of Canada -- is carrying "unacceptable" levels of contaminants like mercury, DDT, PCBs, and PBDEs.

Although other river systems like the Mississippi and the Colorado contain comparable levels of DDT, PCBs, and mercury, an EPA official said that reducing pollution in the Columbia basin would be a high priority. This is good news for many Northwest tribes who rely heavily on Columbia River fish for their diet. It's also important news for the region's salmon populations, which use the Columbia and its tributaries as spawning ground.

So how did these contaminants end up in the river? Here's a rundown, courtesy The Oregonian:

An amazing comment (here) from climate economist luminary Richard Tol epitomizes the narrow, linear, non-scientific thinking of the economics profession in the climate arena.

In Voodoo economists, part 3, I explained why a recent study, "Climate Shocks and Economic Growth [PDF], was a new favorite of global warming deniers. In projecting the economic consequences of global warming this century, the authors:

• knowingly ignored many of the key impacts (like sea-level rise, extreme weather, species loss)
• (unknowingly?) ignored all the other key impacts (like desertification and loss of the inland glaciers and ocean acidification)
• assumed the the tiny global warming impacts we have experienced in the last few decades could be be extrapolated in a linear fashion to determine the huge global warming impacts projected for this century on the business-as-usual emissions path
• absurdly did not assign China and India "significant negative consequences of climate change" because those countries would soon be rich.

That's the only way they could come up with conclusions like "we find very little impact of long-run climate change on world GDP" or "Changes in precipitation had no substantial effects on growth in either poor or rich countries" -- conclusions the right wing deniers at the Heritage Foundation and elsewhere were quick to embrace. But Richard Tol posted a comment here:

My browser's blowing up again with interesting tidbits from around the web. Time to serve up another platter of choice nuggets.

• I've been obsessing over a New York Times blog post on "The 11 Best Foods You Aren't Eating," which originally ran way back in June but was recently revived because of its popularity. The choices have been declared by nutritionist Jonny Bowden as packed with nutrients. They're also all extremely flavorful, and (with one exception) economical.

Most of them carry a kind of unearned stigma. Beets, for example, are one of our most glorious vegetables, but their reputation has been ruined by deplorable canned versions that prevailed in the '70s. Why don't Americans revere cabbage? I can't imagine a better way to consume something fresh and crunchy in the winter than a red-cabbage salad, dressed simply with lemon juice and olive oil. Canned sardines? People tend to recoil from this nutrient-dense, abundant, and, yes, delicious fish. I used to despise them, too; now I can't remember why. (Check out this recipe I conjured up for pasta with sardines a few years back.) And prunes (delicately called in the article "dried plums")? Fantastic -- and unjustly scorned. In an ideal world, this sort of list would be getting hung up in school-cafeteria kitchens across the land, where skilled cooks would debate about how best to teach children to love them. In our own fallen world, school-cafeteria kitchens barely exist (they been replaced by reheating centers for churning out Tyson chicken nuggets), and skilled cooks have long since been sent packing.

On Thursday I attended a hearing of the House global warming select committee on stimulus, efficiency, and green jobs. You can find a list of attendees, their full written testimony, and some pictures on the committee website.

Just a few observations.

First, and this will shock no one, Van Jones is a marvel. (It is not normal for Congressional testimony to solicit applause.) To take one example from today: I have labored through thousands of words on Grist to try to explain why the most common economic models fail to fully account for the benefits of efficiency investments. In doing so I have bored even myself and built great, airy rhetorical castles that only masochists would want to explore.

Here's what Jones said at the hearing: "Get the math right: don't just count what you spend, count what you save."

Um ... dammit. Why didn't I think of putting it that way? I could have trimmed 14,000 words down to 14.

Here's his opening statement, if you're interested:

Secretary-designate of Energy Steven Chu responds to ideas submitted and voted on at change.gov, including fighting climate change, creating a smart grid, and energy independence. Again, thoughtful, intelligent stuff, but frustratingly short on concrete policy recommendations (much less promises).

A plane crashes into the Hudson River. By great good luck, all 155 people aboard survive. The cause of the accident? "A double bird strike."

So how often do birds, going about their wild-thing business, bring down our massive metal machines? More often than you might think -- and yet, way less often than you'd think, considering the fact that the sky is full of birds and planes (87,000 flights a day, says the National Air Traffic Controllers Association). According to The New York Times, 486 commercial aircraft have collided with birds since 2000, with 166 having to do emergency landings like we saw yesterday and 66 aborting takeoffs entirely.

The Times piece recounts several of the more notable bird-strike incidents, and reveals the existence of Bird Strike Committee USA, a group created in 1991 that, according to its website, counts members from the FAA, USDA, and Department of Defense.

This is a guest post by Dave McCurdy, president and CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

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The auto industry and its customers are suffering from unprecedented market conditions. Within the past six months, the industry has been hit with three unforeseen market problems: $4 per gallon gasoline, frozen credit markets, and, now, a recession that is spurring job losses and dampening consumer confidence. These factors combined to drive down U.S. new vehicle sales by 18 percent in 2008 (compared to annual sales in 2007) -- this equals nearly 2.9 million fewer cars and trucks sold in our nation in 2008.

As Congress and the Obama administration consider solutions to our economic problems and long-term challenges of enhancing energy security and fighting global warming, modernizing our nation's automotive fleet would go a long way toward accomplishing those goals. Currently there are nearly 250 million cars and trucks on American roads and highways. Many of these are older vehicles, manufactured prior to enactment of emissions standards that help make the new vehicles sold today dramatically cleaner and better for our air quality.

In the industry, we often say that the best thing you can due to reduce emissions is to purchase a new car. Why? Because today's vehicles are 99 percent cleaner than vehicles of the 1970s, thanks to a dramatic reduction in smog-forming emissions. In fact, in recognition of the progress automakers have made in reducing smog-forming emissions, California has gone so far as to eliminate smog checks for new vehicles.

I'm a big fan of people who are persuasive advocates for clean energy -- and an even bigger fan of those who keep trying to improve their language skills.

And that brings me to Van Jones, founder of Green for All, an organization promoting green-collar jobs and opportunities for the disadvantaged (and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress). He is the subject of a must-read New Yorker profile by Elizabeth Kolbert, "Greening the Ghetto: Can a remedy serve for both global warming and poverty?"

This is the part that got my attention:

He spends a lot of time listening to speeches -- the way most people download Coltrane or Mozart, he's got Churchill and Martin Luther King on his iPod.

"Ronald Reagan I admire greatly," he once told me. "You look at what he gets away with in a speech -- unbelievable. He's able to take fairly complex prose and convey it in such a natural and conversational way that the beauty of the language and the power of the language are there, but you stay comfortable. That's very hard to do."

Precisely. We are constantly being told people have the "gift of gab" as if it is something you were born with. Facility with persuasive language is a skill that is developed and improved through practice and study.

Lincoln didn't become our most eloquent president through happenstance. He consciously decided to educate himself in rhetoric. Indeed, much as Van Jones listens to Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr., Lincoln studied, listen to, memorized, and recited the works of the greatest master of rhetoric in the English language -- William Shakespeare.

Churchill himself studied the art of rhetoric and the figures of speech all his life and at the age of 23 wrote a brilliant, unpublished essay, "The Scaffolding of Rhetoric," that explains:

In the '70s, the right-on-red wave passed through the states as drivers were increasingly frustrated by idling at red lights devoid of cross traffic. When one is stopped at a red light on a timer, a right-on-red and the even more daring left-on-red -- permitted in Oregon in some situations -- make sense.

What makes even more sense is to let bicyclists treat stop signs as yield signs so they can roll through or stop when appropriate. Adopting a similar rule from Idaho, the Bicycle Transportation Alliance is trying to get the laws changed in Oregon to make biking easier while imposing no downside for automotive traffic.

This is an idea that should spread to all 50 states; it's the right-on-red movement of the 21st century.

"So she is pretty extremist in my eyes in terms of her liberal leanings. Where do you draw the line between an extreme liberal and a Socialist? You know, everyone has a different view of that."

-- Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), commenting to FOX News on the crypto-socialism of Obama's new energy adviser Carol Browner

In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. Lettuce know what food worries keep you up at night.

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Dear Lou,

What about popcorn? Is it safe, healthy, and free of pesticides? What exactly is in the artificial butter flavor?

Thanks,
Greenee Trailer Trash from Mississippi

A healthy snack? Lou pops off and finds a kernel of truth.

Dear Greenee,

You might be sorry you asked. When I'm done here, there won't be much left to enjoy in your average batch of conventionally-grown and processed popcorn. But don't give up hope. You know how, in basic training, the Army breaks people down and builds them back up again? I break down America's favorite foods -- in this case, one that we consume to the tune of 16 billion quarts each year -- and build them back up with something more sustainable, and often more delicious.

In that vein, let's take a look at the problems with your average store-bought popcorn. Now, Greenee, I'm going to use some harsh words, and I hope I don't offend you. But I'm poppin' mad about the state of popcorn -- a fun-to-eat, whole-grain crunchy treat that has been deflated by the embrace of corporate food marketers.

The problems with conventional popcorn start in in the corn field.

In 2005, Henry Paulson stepped down as chief of Goldman Sachs to become President George W. Bush's Treasury secretary. The Wall Street-to-Treasury story is a bit dog-bites-man; Robert Rubin had taken the exact same path a decade before under Clinton.

Yet Paulson's appointment generated excitement in green circles, of all places. The new secretary had sat on the board of the Nature Conservancy and collaborated on projects with Conservation International. An article by Grist's own Amanda Griscom Little summed up the mood. She quoted Conservation International Chair and CEO Peter Seligmann:

My hope is that Paulson will raise the level of understanding around these issues [i.e., climate] within this inner circle, and rally a critical mass that will push the administration to make substantive moves in the right direction.

Since then, of course, Bush has done approximately nothing on climate. And Paulson has evidently been a less-than-constructive presence, as David Roberts recently pointed out.

So the Wall Street-friendly finance minister, despite his Big Green cred, ended up caving on climate. What does this tell us, as the Obama administration prepares to install its own Wall Street-friendly economics team?