Articles by Joseph Romm

Daylight saving time wastes energy, study says

I have been asked this question about daylight saving time many times. I have long believed it was not an energy saver -- even though that is how it is typically justified. Turns out there is quantitative proof.

For those who are interested in this relatively obscure issue -- I doubt Congress would change DST on the basis of this or any other study -- you can read a very good article in the Wall Street Journal. "Springing forward," as we will do March 9, "may actually waste energy":

VP hopeful Pawlenty fails energy/climate conservative litmus test

Just in case you thought conservatives might be warming up to climate action and clean energy with the impending nomination of John McCain, uber-conservative columnist Bob Novak explains otherwise in a column titled "How Not to Run for Vice President."

As a nonconservative, I know I can't do justice to Novak's "logic" by summarizing it, and I suspect many readers would think I was taking his argument out of context, since it seems so ... well ... judge for yourself. I'll just reprint most of it:

A new climate science paper calls for dramatic action

Avoiding climate catastrophe will probably require going to near-zero net emissions of greenhouse gases this century. That is the conclusion of a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters (subs. req'd) co-authored by one of my favorite climate scientists, Ken Caldeira, whose papers always merit attention. Here is the abstract:

Current international climate mitigation efforts aim to stabilize levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, human-induced climate warming will continue for many centuries, even after atmospheric CO2 levels are stabilized. In this paper, we assess the CO2 emissions requirements for global temperature stabilization within the next several centuries, using an Earth system model of intermediate complexity. We show first that a single pulse of carbon released into the atmosphere increases globally averaged surface temperature by an amount that remains approximately constant for several centuries, even in the absence of additional emissions. We then show that to hold climate constant at a given global temperature requires near-zero future carbon emissions. Our results suggest that future anthropogenic emissions would need to be eliminated in order to stabilize global-mean temperatures. As a consequence, any future anthropogenic emissions will commit the climate system to warming that is essentially irreversible on centennial timescales.

Since the rest of the article is behind a firewall, let me extract a couple of key findings:

Climate science doesn’t rely on a consensus of opinion

Salon liked my post "How do we really know humans are causing global warming?" but wanted something more in-depth and ... serious. The result is "The cold truth about climate change: Deniers say there's no consensus about global warming. Well, there's not. There's well-tested science and real-world observations [that are much more worrisome]."

James Hansen read the first draft and wrote me back, "Very important for the public to understand this -- why has nobody articulated this already?" I don't know the answer. All I can say is that while I was writing the article, the central point dawned on me: