When Chevrolet offered the National Wildlife Federation a chance to spend the weekend with a Volt, I jumped at it. Chevy dropped off the car on a Friday morning and gave me a quick tutorial. There was no charge left on the battery after their drive from Maryland to my house, so I immediately plugged it in, which was super easy and took no more than a minute to do. I was hoping to get at least enough charge to get to work later in the morning.  After just 90 minutes, the charge was enough to go 6 miles.  Would have been more if I hadn’t blown a fuse when blow drying my hair!  Who would have thought that the bathroom on the opposite side of the house was on the same circuit as the garage?

Then, it was off to National Wildlife Federation Headquarters to do a little show-and-tell for staff.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Ride

My home is only 4.8 miles from work, so I was able to get the whole way on the electric-only motor. The driving was very nice. Acceleration felt effortless, perhaps because you can’t hear the engine working through the gears. It handled really well in (suburban) traffic. And, it was fun to watch the display indicating the energy flow within the car: from the electric motor to the wheels when accelerating, from the wheels back to the battery when coasting and braking.

I felt oh-so-very modern and sophisticated driving this car.  Not only does it look way cooler than my minivan, but the sounds and the display were all new-age-y.  Of course, it helped that there were lots of luxury touches in this car, part of the reason it comes with a hefty price tag of $44,680, or around $37,000 after $7,500 of federal tax credits.

The Reaction

I also felt rather virtuous. The Volt’s carbon pollution is typically less than half of what a comparable passenger vehicle gets. I was getting the equivalent of 90+ miles per gallon. A little part of me wanted to tell all the other cars to “Suck my exhaust! After all, it’s quite clean compared to what you’re putting out!”

The funny thing is that I anticipated getting lots of stares from other drivers on the road.  Maybe even someone wanting to have a little chat at a stop light. But that didn’t happen at all. In fact, I only had two conversations with strangers all weekend, and one of those people already owned a Volt. It occurred to me that the car actually looks quite similar to many other models on the road.  Unless you were looking carefully, you might not notice that it’s a Volt. The styling doesn’t shout out eco car, like some of the other options on the market.  Being indistinguishable from other cars actually might be a good thing for achieving wide adoption.

The Review

Chevy refers to the Volt as an all electric car with extended range. Unlike other hybrid gasoline-electric cars, the Volt is always driven by the electric motor. When the battery charge is depleted, a gasoline generator seamlessly turns on to charge the battery.  We wanted to see what it was like when the car switched on the gasoline generator. That turned out to be harder than expected.  With one night of charging on our regular 120V outlet in our garage, the battery had enough range to take us 38 miles. That’s more than ample for running errands in our neighborhood, taking the kids for a hike at a nearby national park, and taking many neighbors and friends for short test drives.

So, on Sunday afternoon I decided to take the car out for a longer drive specifically to drain the battery.   I was on the expressway when it changed over.  If I wasn’t eagerly anticipating it, I wouldn’t have noticed.  The transition was that smooth. But, then I noticed that the car wasn’t as fun to drive anymore. The GM employee who picked up the car said it’s because the electric-only motor is more “torque-y” and could more quickly respond to my pushing on the accelerator.

My main gripe with the car is that it can only seat four people. That means we can’t take our family of five on outings all together, much less have the kids bring friends along or participate in carpools. Put this technology in a minivan and I would be the first in line.

But at this size, it will never make sense as the primary vehicle for our family. It could be a good second car, primarily used by the spouse who is commuting and not carpooling. But, the price tag makes it a little hard to justify for cost-conscious families. Let’s hope that as the cars become more widely available and other competitors enter the marketplace, the price will come down. In fact, GM says that they will be offering less expensive versions with fewer luxury features in 2012. And Toyota is already accepting priority registrants for the Prius plug-in hybrid promised by Spring 2012.

As my time with the Chevy Volt drew to an end, I couldn’t help but feel hopeful and excited about the future of automobiles. This car is not just for eco-enthusiasts.  It was fun to drive and attractive. I could easily imagine how this car could make our lives better – fewer trips to the gas station and much less money spent on gas. And, it’s just the sort of ingenuity that will help us achieve the significant reductions in carbon pollution needed to curb climate change.

The Rundown

What I love about the Chevy Volt:

• Low carbon emissions
• Looks sleek and stylish
• Fun to drive on the electric motor, acceleration felt effortless
• Feels virtuous and modern
• Super easy to plug-in
• No anxiety about getting stranded
• Plenty of range on electric battery for day-to-day needs
• Quiet and serene

What could use some improvement:

• Price tag
• Only fits 4 passengers
• Driving with the gasoline generator was hum-drum
• Braking at slow speeds was jerky
• Concerns about safety because it’s so quiet, especially around kids and vision impaired

Polar bear at the Maryland Zoo, July 2011 (via Flickr's Michael Bentley)

New data confirms what you already knew – July was incredibly hot, one of the warmest on record.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center just released its recap of July 2011. Here are some of the highlights:

• Persistent, scorching heat in the central and eastern United States during July 2011 contributed to the nation’s fourth-warmest July on record.
• The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for July 2011 was the seventh warmest on record, at 16.37°C (61.43°F), which is 0.57°C (1.03°F) above the 20^th century average of 15.8°C (60.4°F).
• For the year-to-date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 14.31°C (57.82°F) was the 11^th warmest January–July period on record. This value is 0.51°C (0.92°F) above the 20^th century average.
• The average Arctic sea ice extent during July was 21.6 percent below average, ranking as the smallest July extent since satellite records began in 1979. The extent was 81,000 square miles (210,000 square kilometers) below the previous July record low, set in 2007.

“We’ve had another unusually warm month and are on the way to another unusually hot year, but the reality is that these conditions are the new normals that we all need to get used to,” said Dr. Amanda Staudt, climate scientist with the National Wildlife Federation.

Here’s one example of our new normal: We’re on pace for the 35th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average. That means your humble blogger has never been alive in a year with global temperatures at or below the 20th century average.

You can get more details at the NOAA NCDC State of the Climate page, including this map of July extreme weather events. To read Dr. Staudt’s reports on the connection between climate change and extreme weather, visit NWF.org/ExtremeWeather.

The new data comes on the same day that Politifact looked into the climate science consensus, reporting that while some politicians may find it to be an inconvenient truth, “there is significant scientific consensus that human beings are contributing to global warming.”

Midwest snowstorm (via Flickr's NASA Goddard Photo & Video)

Here’s the thing about people who deny 2010 was tied for the hottest year on record, or claim that even if this year’s warm, it’s all totally normal – what’s your alternative explanation for 18-foot ice waves?

A major blizzard the National Weather Service is calling “life-threatening” is on its way to the Chicago area, also bringing along strong winds that could send 18-foot Lake Michigan waves onto Lake Shore Drive Tuesday night into early Wednesday. [...]

Wind gusts could hit up to 50 mph and waves could build up to 14 to 18 feet on Lake Shore Drive. That could result in beach erosion and coastal flooding, particularly on Lake Shore Drive and on other flood prone areas near the lake with overwash from high waves, [National Weather Service meteorologist Samuel] Shea said.

Although a 1/2-inch of ice buildup was reported on Lake Michigan Monday morning, the winds and waves could break up the ice and send it onto nearby roads.

Dr. Amanda Staudt, climate scientist with the National Wildlife Federation, has reported on how the climate crisis is causing extreme winter weather:

• Global warming is bringing a clear trend toward heavier precipitation events. Many areas are seeing bigger and more intense snowstorms, especially in the upper Midwest and Northeast.
• Global warming is shifting storm tracks northward. Areas from the Dakotas eastward to northern Michigan have seen a trend toward more heavy snowfall season.
• Reduced ice cover on the Great Lakes increases lake-effect snowfalls.

At last week’s American Meteorological Society annual meeting, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said it’s time to stop asking whether any one particular extreme weather event is caused by the climate crisis:

It is worth considering whether the odds of the particular event have changed sufficiently that one can make the alternative statement “It is unlikely that this event would have occurred without global warming.” For instance, this probably applies to the extremes that occurred in the summer of 2010: the floods in Pakistan, India, and China and the drought, heat waves and wild fires in Russia. It likely also applies to the flooding in Queensland, Australia In January 2011.

Watch Dr. Staudt explain the connection between rising carbon pollution & extreme winter weather:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via Flickr's Mark Abel

Most Americans aren’t friends with a single scientist … yet they let one into their living room every night.

According to a 2005 survey, only 18% of Americans say they know a scientist personally. But about half of the people who deliver forecasts on your local television news are trained scientists.

Meteorologists have a unique opportunity to educate Americans about the threats the climate crisis poses to people & wildlife. That’s why Dr. Amanda Staudt, climate scientist with the National Wildlife Federation, is spending the week in Seattle at the 91st annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society.

What’s the difference between climate & weather? What role does the AMS have to play in educating Americans about the latest climate science? Watch my conversation with Dr. Staudt:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’ll be bringing you updates from the AMS annual meeting all week long. In the meantime, learn more about the connection between the climate crisis and stronger hurricanes, heat waves & wildfires at NWF.org/ExtremeWeather.

Study after study speaks in a loud, clear voice – our climate is warming, man-made pollution is to blame, and we need to move quickly to break our fossil fuel addiction to have any chance at stabilizing the forecast. Just this week, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed 2010 tied for the hottest year on record. Scientific debate centers not on whether our climate is in crisis, but by how much and how rapidly our planet is heating up, and exactly what the impacts of that will be.

One area of climate science that’s coming into clearer focus is global warming’s impact on extreme weather. The National Wildlife Federation’s Dr. Amanda Staudt works to tell Americans exactly what that means for our local weather patterns, with consequences including stronger storms, deeper droughts & more intense wildfires.

ABC News recently did a great job of putting recent extreme weather into perspective – not setting up false controversy, but simply presenting the facts:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And it’s not just that we’re seeing changes now. “The prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future,” says Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Read an interview with Dr. Trenberth conducted by Joe Romm of ClimateProgress.org.

Unfortunately, for every straightforward report like ABC’s, there’s another that trips over itself to soften science. From CNN.com:

It stands to reason that a warmer climate would lead to warmer ocean temperatures, thus enhancing the rainfall brought about by El Nino/La Nina even further.

Some studies have shown this relationship, but like other climate change studies, the results are based on a limited and somewhat unreliable data record.

I’m by no means questioning this particular meteorologist’s personal commitment to science. But this is why the public doesn’t get that the climate crisis is an urgent problem in need of decisive action. He takes some uncertainty in a narrow area – how global warming is impacting El Nino & La Nina in the South Pacific Ocean – and suddenly & without explanation applies it to the entire scientific concept of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

Have you seen examples of really good (or not so good) climate science reporting? Share them with us in comments below.

Downtown Syracuse, NY (via Flickr's GKS.)

This year, Syracuse’s unusually heavy early snow is making national headlines:

The new snow pushed this December – which reached its midpoint at noon Wednesday – to second on the list of snowiest Decembers on record. National Weather Service instruments report 69.5 inches of snow have fallen at Syracuse Hancock International Airport since the month began through 6:54 this morning. Syracuse’s snowiest December was in 2000, when 70.3 inches fell.

But wait, there’s more. The 70.3 inches of snow that has fallen since July 1 is the most ever before the winter solstice, the official start of winter, said Theodore Champney, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Binghamton office. The old record, 63.5 inches, was set in 1995.

But wait, Syracuse.com. How am I supposed to know exactly how much 66.1 inches is? Put it in a context that I can understand!

If sources on the Web are accurate, pop sensation Justin Bieber, shown during his performance at this year’s State Fair, is 5 feet, 5 inches tall. If he stood in 66.1 inches of snow, the top of his famous hair would be covered by more than an inch of snow.

Not Justin Bieber’s hair! Curse you global warming! Now you’ve gone too far! I just love the analogy though. Doesn’t everyone know exactly how tall Justin Bieber is? (I couldn’t have picked Justin Bieber out of a police lineup until I saw him in the CNN telethon to benefit NWF’s Gulf Oil Spill Restoration Fund.)

Back to the snow. I know what you’re thinking. If global warming is accelerating, how can Syracuse’s snowfall be breaking records? First, WeatherBug explains why lake effect snow is so dependent on warm water:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s Dr. Amanda Staudt, National Wildlife Federation climate scientist, explaining why global warming means more warm water – and more lake effect snow:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Learn more about the connection between global warming & oddball winter weather at NWF.org/ExtremeWeather.

Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), named a Big Oil All-Star by NWF

Want to know why it’s so scary that Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) could re-claim chairmanship of the House Energy & Commerce Committee? A new report reveals how destructive his last tenure was for Americans’ understanding of climate science.

Back in 2005, then-Chair Barton requested a investigation, led by George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman, on some past climate science reports. Wegman’s work was then repeatedly cited in Congressional hearings as evidence of problems with climate science.

A 2006 National Research Council (NRC) report largely vindicated the work of climate scientists like Michael Mann. And now a new USA Today investigation has revealed Wegman’s attacks were riddled with plagiarism & inaccuracies:

An influential 2006 congressional report that raised questions about the validity of global warming research was partly based on material copied from textbooks, Wikipedia and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report, plagiarism experts say.

Review of the 91-page report by three experts contacted by USA TODAY found repeated instances of passages lifted word for word and what appear to be thinly disguised paraphrases. [...]

“It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others’ integrity when you don’t conform to the basic rules of scholarship,” Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner says.

Here’s reaction from Dr. Amanda Staudt, climate scientist with the National Wildlife Federation:

I helped staff the 2006 NRC report, chaired by Gerald North, and attended the hearing at which Wegman presented his findings.

In my opinion, it was clear from the get-go that the Wegman report was shoddy scholarship. I only find it surprising that it’s taken this long for anyone to take a crack at carefully discrediting it. I suppose it was because no one in the climate science community took the report seriously.

As far as I know, the report never underwent any formal or informal peer review. I remember finding that point ironic at the time because the first recommendation of the Wegman report is that climate science “should have a more intense level of scrutiny and review”.

The Wegman report authors had little if any knowledge of climate science.  In fact, Wegman was unable to answer basic questions about the greenhouse effect during the hearing.

The report ignored large swaths of the literature on the topic of paleoclimate reconstructions and gave undue attention to the work of a couple skeptics, whose valid criticisms of the statistical methods used by Mann had already been addressed.  In fact, most of the 2006 Wegman report focused on a 1998 paper by Michael Mann & others, ignoring the fact that Mann’s work had progressed since then and that other independent research teams had validated the findings.

If you’re not familiar with Rep. Barton, here are some of his most notable moments:

• Famously apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward at the height of the Gulf oil disaster
• Said humans could adapt to global warming by finding shade
• The National Wildlife Federation named Rep. Barton to its Big Oil All-Star Team

Now Rep. Barton is looking to bend term limits rules in an attempt to regain the Energy & Commerce chairmanship. If he does, you can be sure we’ll see even more fraudulent attacks on climate science like the Wegman report.

Click here to view the embedded video.

]]> http://blog.nwf.org/2010/08/video-getting-the-word-out-on-heat-waves-and-global-warming/feed/ 0 http://blog.nwf.org/2010/08/extreme-heat-in-summer-2010-a-window-on-the-future/ http://blog.nwf.org/2010/08/extreme-heat-in-summer-2010-a-window-on-the-future/#comments Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:07:38 +0000 Miles Grant http://blog.nwf.org/wildlifepromise/2010/08/extreme-heat-in-summer-2010-a-window-on-the-future/ Read more >]]>

Could the sweltering summer of 2010 be considered mild compared to the typical summers of the future? It depends on whether America & nations around the world act now to curb our global warming pollution.

That’s the conclusion of a new National Wildlife Federation report, Extreme Heat in Summer 2010: A Window on the Future:

In 2010, New Jersey, Delaware & North Carolina had their hottest June on record, while Rhode Island & Delaware had their hottest July. Sixteen other states had Junes or Julys that ranked in the top-five hottest. That means upward of 70 million Americans experienced extreme heat these two months. Hundreds of daily temperature records were broken across the country.

Not surprisingly, this hot spell has brought many days where the thermometer topped 90°F. Our analysis of large cities in the eastern United States shows that most locations have had about twice as many days with temperatures exceeding 90°F than they typically would by the end of July. For example, Washington, DC , had 39 days
with temperatures in the 90s by July 31, 2010, compared to 18 days for the same period in an average year. If conditions continue to stay warm, or even if we return to more average conditions in August, Washington and several other cities are on track to meet or break records for the total number of days exceeding 90°F in a single year. Cities in the south-central United States are also running hot: many have had about 50 percent more days over 90°F than average.

While the House passed the American Clean Energy & Security Act, obstructionists in the Senate have blocked action on clean energy & climate legislation. What could happen if the deny & delay crowd continues to block pollution limits?

Summers like the current one, or even worse, will become the norm by 2050 if global warming pollution continues to increase unabated. Alternatively, taking steps to reduce emissions can help avoid some of this increase in extremely hot days. For example:

• Washington, DC, is projected to have about 55 days over 90°F by midcentury under a lower-emissions scenario and about 100 such days if emissions are higher. For comparison, the city will likely have about 50 days above 90°F in 2010 if August and September have an average number of very hot days.
• Philadelphia, PA, is projected to have about 40 days over 90°F by midcentury under a lower-emissions scenario and about 60 such days if emissions are higher. Through the end of July, the city had 25 days exceeding 90°F in 2010 and is on track to have about 30 or more such days for the year.
• St. Louis, MO, is projected to have about 60 days over 90°F by midcentury under a lower-emissions scenario and about 80 such days if emissions are higher. This year, the city is on track to have 45 extremely hot days, about 10 more than average.

Read the full report (PDF), then take action. Tell your senators we need comprehensive climate & energy answers now.

Park picture via Flickr’s vasofoto.com

Click here to view the embedded video.

Longer, more intense heat waves are exactly what climate scientists have been warning as a consequence of our warming world. The National Wildlife Federation issued a report last summer on the connection between Global Warming & Heat Waves. Here’s a short video with NWF’s Dr. Amanda Staudt detailing its conclusions:

Click here to view the embedded video.