In his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama warned
that Americans must take steps now to cut “our emissions of the
dangerous carbon pollution that threatens our planet.” To justify
these efforts, he appealed to the “overwhelming judgment of
science,” pointing chiefly to recent weather extremes in the United
States as evidence for the urgency of action. Skeptics “can choose
to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in
decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were
all just a freak coincidence,” Obama announced, but the president
clearly does not. “Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods—all are
now more frequent and more intense.”

Is he right? Let’s take a closer look at those trends the
president cites. After that, we can assess the he wants to
implement as a response.

Heat, Drought, Fires, and Floods

Let’s start, as Obama did, with heat waves. According to the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last year was the
hottest
year since 1895 for the contiguous United States, about 3.2
degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average. Globally, 2012
was the
tenth warmest year on record, and all 12 years to date in the
21st century rank among the 14 warmest since 1880. On the other
hand, the Environmental Protection Agency’s
Heat Wave Index from 1895 to 2011 shows that the frequency and
breadth of heat waves in the lower 48 states were dramatically more
severe in the 1930s than at any other time in the historical
record, although there has been an uptick in recent years. A
study
in the January 2013 issue of Climatic Change, analyzing
trends in monthly mean temperatures around the globe since the
1880s, reports that “the number of record-breaking heat extremes
has on average increased to roughly 5 times the number expected in
a climate with no long-term warming.”

With regard to droughts, the
Palmer Drought Severity Index for the continental U.S. reveals
that the 1930s and 1950s saw the most widespread droughts since the
record begins in 1895; the last 50 years have generally been wetter
than average. In 1934 about
80 percent of the lower 48 experienced drought. The next worst
years were 1954 and 2012, when more than 60 percent of the
contiguous U.S. suffered drought. The most recent data show that
the drought in the middle section of the country has not yet abated. Interestingly,
even as average global temperatures have increased, a
study published in Nature in November 2012 argued that
the index overestimated the increase in global drought and that
“there has been little change in drought over the past 60
years.”

Last year was America’s third
biggest year for wildfires since 1960, with just 2006
and 2007 coming out ahead. Each of those years saw more than 9
million acres burn, according to data from the National Interagency
Fire Center (NIFC). Between 1960 and 2000, an average of about 3.7
million acres of wildlands burned every year. Since 2000, the
average has been about 7 million acres. In the 1930s, by contrast,
about 40 to
50 million acres of wildlands burned annually, dropping below
10 million acres by the mid-1950s. (It’s hard to get good data on
the trends prior to the ’30s.) The 52-year average of the NIFC data
is 4.5 million acres per year, so the area burned by wildfires each
year has declined by more 90 percent since the 1930s. Still, the
current trajectory doesn’t look good: In December NASA researchers
reported that climate models project that “high fire years like
2012 would likely
occur two to four times per decade by mid-century, instead of
once per decade under current climate conditions.”

What about flooding? A 2011 study by the U.S. Geological Survey
looked at data from stream gauges collected over the past 127 years
in four regions of the U.S. The hydrologists found
no “strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing”
with carbon dioxide. The EPA does report that precipitation in the
lower 48 is
increasing at a rate of 5.9 percent per century. The EPA also
notes, drawing on data from 1910 and 2011, that
extreme precipitation events (defined as being in the top 10
percent of one-day events) over the conterminous U.S. states are
also increasing. Other studies find that the frequency of extreme
precipitation events is also increasing
globally.

As noted above, Obama also invoked Superstorm Sandy as evidence
of dangerous man-made climatic trends. Sandy was especially
disastrous because it combined with a snowstorm and came ashore
when the local tides were running high. But is Sandy evidence of
worsening global hurricane trends? It’s worth recalling the reason
that Sandy was dubbed a “superstorm”: It was no longer a
hurricane when it hit the northeastern United States. In his
2011 article for Geophysical Research Letters, “Recent
Historically Low Global Tropical Cyclone Activity,” the
atmospheric scientist Ryan Maue reports
that accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) has recently been at a
40-year low.

ACE measures each tropical storm’s wind energy. Even though
Sandy was a monster storm, the North Atlantic ACE measure for 2012
was the 20th highest out of the last 62 years. Less happily,
climate computer models project that future warming will likely
cause hurricanes globally to increase
in average intensity by between 2 to 11
percent.

On balance, then, currently available scientific evidence
indicates that heat waves and wildfires in the U.S. have increased
in recent years. On the other hand, there appear to be no strong
trends for droughts, floods, and hurricanes in the continental
United States. However, most climate computer models suggest that
all of these aspects of climate will get worse as the century
unfolds.

Carbon Rationing and a Slew of Subsidies

After Obama gestured toward the evidence for man-made global
warming, he declared, “The good news is we can make meaningful
progress on this issue while driving strong economic growth.” In a
nod towards climate change bipartisanship, the president mentioned
the “market-based solution to climate change, like the one John
McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago.” That
bill was a
cap-and-trade scheme that aimed to push carbon dioxide
emissions to sixty percent below the 1990 level by
2050. 

On Thursday, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Barbara Boxer
(D-Calif.) introduced a bill that would
impose a carbon tax on fossil fuels at the wellhead and
mine-head. The idea is the by boosting the price of fossil fuels,
consumers and inventors will be incentivized to seek out and
develop low-carbon and no-carbon energy sources. Boxer and Sanders
are proposing that three-fifths of the $1.2 trillion collected over
the next ten years would be rebated annually to every legal
resident and the rest would be funneled toward “investments
in energy efficiency and sustainable energy technologies such as
wind, solar, geothermal and biomass.”

If Congress doesn’t adopt some kind of carbon rationing scheme,
the president intends to impose one through administrative fiat.
(“If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I
will,” he promised.) The president is probably thinking of
something along the lines of a plan to cap power company carbon
dioxide emissions outlined in December by the Natural Resources
Defense Council (NRDC). Under that proposal, the EPA would set
emissions standards for each state based on their mix of power
plants and then require them to meet various caps. The NRDC claims
that its proposal could cut carbon dioxide
emissions from America’s power plants by 26 percent from 2005
levels by 2020 and 34 percent by 2025, all at a hypothetical
cost of a mere $4 billion.

The president was gung-ho about the country’s natural gas boom,
noting correctly that it “has led to cleaner power and greater
energy independence.” He then claimed, “Much of our new-found
energy is drawn from lands and waters that we, the public, own
together,” and promised “my administration will keep cutting red
tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits.” Oddly, the president
seems not to be in any
hurry to cut the red tape that is halting the construction of the
Keystone XL pipeline that would transport nearly 1 million
barrels of crude per day from Canada’s oilsands to refineries in
the U.S. In any case, very little of the “newfound energy” in the
form of oil is drawn from federal lands. Since 2007, 96
percent of the increase in oil production has occurred on
private and state-owned lands, not federal lands. On that account,
the administration still has a considerable way to go to fulfill
the president’s promise to speed production by cutting red
tape.