New Global Temperature Records

The following temperature map from Bloomberg shows the hottest start to a year on record. "Results from the world's top monitoring agencies vary slightly. NOAA and the Japan Meteorological Agency both had March as the hottest month on record. NASA had it as the third-hottest. All three agencies agree that the past three months have been the hottest start to a year."

Tom Randall and Blacki Migliozzi, Global Temperature Records Just Got Crushed Again, BloombergBusiness, April 17, 2015. The piece also includes an illuminating animation recording monthly temperature measures for about 135 years. This is a screenshot of the most recent image from March 2015.

Cities by the Sea

From the February 2015 National Geographic, a graphic showing potential costs to coastal cities from rising sea levels.

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Gideon Mendel, "Drowning World," National Geographic, February 2015, 126-27.

California in Your Future

So it used to be said. Whatever happened in California would later happen in the United States. What happened in the United States would then happen in the world. As a Coloradan, I should like to say: Say it ain't so. 

These graphics from Bloomberg gave the incredible scale of California's epic drought and heat wave. The first shows temperatures well outside the range of recent experience: 

The next chart shows a drought measure called the SPEI, which takes account of both rainfall and heat. In weather charts, as in stock charts, it's generally not good to be on the bottom right of the panel. That means you're toast. 

The drought is also conveyed in a series of moving figures from 2011 to 2015: here is a snapshot of the last in the sequence:

Explains Bloomberg:

More than 44 percent of the state is now in “exceptional drought” (crimson). It’s a distinction marked by crop and pasture losses and water shortages that fall within the top two percentiles. California has seen droughts before with less rainfall, but it's the heat that sets this one apart. Higher temperatures increase evaporation from the soil and help deplete reservoirs and groundwater. The reservoirs are already almost half empty this year, and gone is the snowpack that would normally replenish lakes and farmlands well into June.  

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Tom Randall, California's New Era of Heat Destroys All Previous Records, Bloomberg Business, April 10, 2015

Climate Change and Brain-Eating Parasites

Joe Romm of Climate Progress details the impact of climate change on global health:

It’s a myth there are no big winners from climate change besides fossil fuel companies.

According to one study, global warming is doubling bark beetle mating, triggering up to 60 times as many beetles attacking trees every year. The decline in creatures with shells thanks to ocean acidification “could trigger an explosion in jellyfish populations.” And climate change has helped dengue fever, which spread to 28 U.S. states back in 2009.

Of course, invasive plants will become “even more dominant in the landscape.” And who doesn’t love ratsnakes?

Let’s also not forget brain-eating parasites, which are expected to thrive as U.S. lakes heat up. That parasite — the amoeba, Naegleria fowleri — feasts on human brains like a tiny zombie. As one Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expert warned several years ago: “This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better. In future decades, as temperatures rise, we’d expect to see more cases.”

But this is just a taste of things to come, as two parasite experts explain in a recent article, “Evolution in action: climate change, biodiversity dynamics and emerging infectious disease [EID].” That article is part of a special April issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B., whose theme is “Climate change and vector-borne diseases of humans.”

“The appearance of infectious diseases in new places and new hosts, such as West Nile virus and Ebola, is a predictable result of climate change,” as the news release explains. The article examines our “current EID crisis.”

Coauthor Daniel R. Brooks explains: “It’s not that there’s going to be one ‘Andromeda Strain’ that will wipe everybody out on the planet,” he said, referring to the deadly fictional pathogen. But he warns: “There are going to be a lot of localized outbreaks that put a lot of pressure on our medical and veterinary health systems. There won’t be enough money to keep up with all of it. It will be the death of a thousand cuts.”

Many tropical diseases are tropical because their insect or animal host prefer warmer climates. A 2015 report on neglected tropical diseases by the World Health Organization (WHO) pointed out that “climate variability and long-term climate changes in temperature, rainfall and relative humidity are expected to increase the distribution and incidence of at least a subset of these diseases.” For instance, WHO notes, “dengue has already re-emerged in countries in which it had been absent for the greater part of the last century.”

The Congressionally-mandated 2014 National Climate Assessmentconcurs: “Large-scale changes in the environment due to climate change and extreme weather events are increasing the risk of the emergence or reemergence of health threats that are currently uncommon in the United States, such as dengue fever.”

“Some of the neglected tropical diseases are no longer strictly tropical,” said Dr. Dirk Engels, the director WHO’s Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases, in a statement.

Certainly there have been major advances in the fight against many tropical diseases, but those are primarily due to medical advances and investments in public health. Such investments remain a top priority in a warming world. But the kind of extreme climate change humanity faces on our current path of unrestricted carbon pollution makes the job harder for all those focused on public health around the world.

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Joe Romm, “If You Like Brain-Eating Parasites and Dengue Fever, You’ll Love Climate Change,” Climate Progress, April 14, 2015.

The following is from the introduction to the academic study Romm mentions, “Climate change and vector-borne diseases of humans.”

This theme issue arose out of our perception that while it is widely recognized that an important impact of climate change on human health is likely to be via effects on vector-borne disease (VBD) transmission, the complexity of the biological and non-biological susceptibility modifying pathways by which such effects arise and combine to influence transmission is less well understood. This has made reliable appraisals of the potential effects of climate change and variability on VBDs complicated and represents a serious problem in developing more robust tools to assess the risk of climate change affecting VBDs in populations residing under different social and geographic contexts. This issue thus aims to provide not only an up-to-date synthesis of current knowledge of, and key research in, the impact of various individual components of climate change (biological, non-biological, evolutionary and economic factors), but also, crucially, to reveal and highlight the need (and potential means) to address the effects of multiple factor interactions, nonlinearities and human reflexivity if we are to develop and establish a more rigorous agenda for future research, including the provision of useful informatics for informed public health policy-making, in this important area of climate change studies.

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The 2C Red Line

This piece by Justin Gillis of the New York Times is part of a series on the most recent climate negotiations in Lima, Peru. The result of the meeting was preliminary language intended to keep warming from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) beyond the average global temperature at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Gillis explores where that figure came from, noting its emergence in the 1970s in the work of Yale economist William Nordhaus and its endorsement in the 1990s by the German government, the latter among the most active governmental campaigners for action on climate change. Gillis emphasizes the importance of the figure in relation to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and notes that some scientists believe that it is already beginning to break up.

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. . . A decade of subsequent research added scientific support to the notion that 2C was a dangerous threshold. Experts realized, for example, that at some increase in global temperature, the immense Greenland ice sheet would begin an unstoppable melt, raising the sea by as much as 23 feet over an unknown period. Their early calculations suggested that calamity would be unlikely as long as global warming did not exceed about 1.9 degrees Celsius.

 “Risking a loss of the whole Greenland ice sheet was considered a no-go area,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “We are talking about really sinking a lot of coastal cities.”

As the economic and scientific arguments accumulated, the Germans managed to persuade other countries to adopt the 2C target, turning it into official European policy. The proposal was always controversial, with African countries and island states, in particular, arguing that it was too much warming and would condemn them to ruin. The island states cited the potential for a large rise of the sea, and African countries feared severe effects on food production, among other problems.

But as a practical matter, the 2C target seemed the most ambitious possible, since it would require virtually ending fossil fuel emissions within 30 to 40 years. At Cancun in 2010, climate delegates made 2C one of the organizing principles of negotiations.

The talks culminating in Paris next year are seen as perhaps the best chance ever to turn that pledge into meaningful emissions limits, in part because President Obama has gone far beyond his predecessors in committing the United States, the largest historical producer of greenhouse gases, to action. That, in turn, has lured China, the largest current producer, into making its first serious commitments.

Yet even as the 2C target has become a touchstone for the climate talks, scientific theory and real-world observations have begun to raise serious questions about whether the target is stringent enough.

For starters, the world has already warmed by almost one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. That may sound modest, but as a global average, it is actually substantial. For any amount of global warming, the ocean, which covers 70 percent of the earth’s surface and absorbs considerable heat, will pull down the average. But the warming over land tends to be much greater, and the warming in some polar regions greater still.

The warming that has already occurred is causing enormous damage all over the planet, from dying forests to collapsing sea ice to savage heat waves to torrential rains. And scientists realize they may have underestimated the vulnerability of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

Those ice sheets now appear to be in the early stages of breaking up. For instance, Greenland’s glaciers have lately been spitting icebergs into the sea at an accelerated pace, and scientific papers published this year warned that the melting in parts of Antarctica may already be unstoppable.

“The climate is now out of equilibrium with the ice sheets,” said Andrea Dutton, a geochemist at the University of Florida who studies global sea levels. “They are going to melt.”

That could ultimately mean 30 feet, or even more, of sea level rise, though scientists have no clear idea of how fast that could happen. They hope it would take thousands of years, but cannot rule out a faster rise that might overwhelm the ability of human society to adapt.

Given the consequences already evident, can the 2C target really be viewed as safe? Frightened by what they are seeing, some countries, especially the low-lying island states, have been pressing that question with fresh urgency lately.

So, even as the world’s climate policy diplomats work on a plan that incorporates the 2C goal, they have enlisted scientists in a major review of whether it is strict enough. Results are due this summer, and if the reviewers recommend a lower target, that could add a contentious dimension to the climate negotiations in Paris next year.

Barring a technological miracle, or a mobilization of society on a scale unprecedented in peacetime, it is not at all clear how a lower target could be met.

Some experts think a stricter target could even backfire. If 2C already seems hard to achieve, with the world on track for levels of warming far beyond that, setting a tighter limit might prompt political leaders to throw up their hands in frustration.

In practice, moreover, a tighter temperature limit would not alter the advice that scientists have been giving to politicians for decades about cutting emissions. Their recommendation is simple and blunt: Get going now.

“Dealing with this is a little bit like saving for retirement,” said Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “All delay is costly, but it helps whenever you start.”

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Justin Gillis, “3.6 Degrees of Uncertainty,” The New York Times, December 15, 2014

 

IPCC Overestimates Soil as Carbon Store

From Yale Environment 360: 

As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, soils will likely store less carbon than scientists and climate models had predicted, according to new research published in Science. Scientists have long understood that rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere spur photosynthesis and plant growth, adding more carbon to the soil. Scientists had thought this soil carbon was relatively stable and could remain locked away for centuries. But the new study, from researchers at Northern Arizona University shows that increasing soil carbon actually spurs microbes to produce more CO2. Higher atmospheric CO2 levels added roughly 20 percent more carbon to the soil, through increased photosynthesis, but they also increased carbon turnover by microbes by 16.5 percent. Many climate models had previously assumed that far more of the carbon absorbed by soils stayed there for long periods of time. "Our findings mean that nature is not as efficient in slowing global warming as we previously thought," the lead researcher said. "By overlooking this effect of increased CO2 on soil microbes, models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may have overestimated the potential of soil to store carbon and mitigate the greenhouse effect."

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"Soils Release Far More CO2 Than Previously Thought, Researches Find," Yale e360 digest, April 25, 2014

Activist Turned Collapsitarian

Paul Kingsnorth, a one-time British environmental activist, is the subject of a profile by Daniel Smith in the New York Times Sunday magazine. Kingsnorth’s manifesto, “Uncivilization,” has attracted much attention and criticism (though I admit I had never heard of it before today).

His views are officially fringe, as he would be the first to acknowledge. However, they are interesting, especially to those of us trying to scope out the apocalypse.

These excerpts are about a third of the original article, “It’s the End of the World as We Know . . . And He Feels Fine.” (April 17, 2014)

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The Dark Mountain Project was founded in 2009. From the start, it has been difficult to pin down — even for its members. If you ask a representative of the Sierra Club to describe his organization, he will say that it promotes responsible use of the earth’s resources. When you ask Kingsnorth about Dark Mountain, he speaks of mourning, grief and despair. We are living, he says, through the “age of ecocide,” and like a long-dazed widower, we are finally becoming sensible to the magnitude of our loss, which it is our duty to face.

Kingsnorth himself arrived at this point about six years ago, after nearly two decades of devoted activism. He had just completed his second book, “Real England,” a travelogue about the homogenizing effects of global capitalism on English culture and character. “Real England” was a great success — the first of his career. All the major newspapers reviewed the book; the archbishop of Canterbury and David Cameron (then the opposition leader) cited it in speeches; Mark Rylance, the venerated Shakespearean actor, adopted it as a kind of bible during rehearsals for his hit play “Jerusalem.” Yet Kingsnorth found himself strangely ambivalent about the praise. “Real England” was a painful book to write. For months he interviewed publicans, shopkeepers and farmers fighting to maintain small, traditional English institutions — fighting and losing. Everywhere Kingsnorth traveled, he saw the forces of development, conglomeration and privatization flattening the country. By the time he published his findings, he was in little mood to celebrate.

At the same time, he felt his longstanding faith in environmental activism draining away. “I had a lot of friends who were writing about climate change and doing a lot of good work on it,” he told me during a break from his festival duties. “I was just listening and looking at the facts and thinking: Wow, we are really screwed here. We are not going to stop this from happening.”

The facts were indeed increasingly daunting. The first decade of the 21st century was shaping up to be the hottest in recorded history. In 2007, the Arctic sea ice shrank to a level not seen in centuries. That same year, the NASA climatologist James Hansen, who has been ringing the climate alarm since the 1980s, announced that in order to elude the most devastating consequences, we’d need to maintain carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a level of 350 parts per million. But we’d already surpassed 380, and the figure was rising. (It has since reached 400 p.p.m.) Animal and plant species, meanwhile, were dying out at a spectacular rate. Scientists were beginning to warn that human activity — greenhouse-gas emissions, urbanization, the global spread of invasive species — was driving the planet toward a “mass extinction” event, something that has occurred only five times since life emerged, 3.5 billion years ago.

“Everything had gotten worse,” Kingsnorth said. “You look at every trend that environmentalists like me have been trying to stop for 50 years, and every single thing had gotten worse. And I thought: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t sit here saying: ‘Yes, comrades, we must act! We only need one more push, and we’ll save the world!’ I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it! So what do I do?”

The first thing that Kingsnorth did was draft a manifesto. Also called “Uncivilization,” it was an intense, brooding document that vilified progress. “There is a fall coming,” it announced. “After a quarter-century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall . . . Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis.”

The initial print run of “Uncivilization” was only 500 copies. Yet the manifesto gained widespread attention. The philosopher John Gray reviewed it in The New Statesman. Professors included it on their reading lists. An events space in Wales invited Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, Dark Mountain’s co-founder, to put on a festival; 400 people showed up. Doug Tompkins, the billionaire who started the outdoor-apparel company the North Face, and his wife, Kristine Tompkins, the former C.E.O. of Patagonia, offered financing and invited Kingsnorth and his family to spend two months on land they own in southern Chile.

There were others, however, who saw Kingsnorth’s new work as a betrayal. With waters rising, deserts spreading and resource wars looming, how could his message be anything but reckless — even callous? He and his sympathizers were branded “doomers,” “nihilists” and (Kingsnorth’s favorite epithet) “crazy collapsitarians.” One critic, a sustainability advocate, published an essay in The Ecologist — a magazine Kingsnorth once helped run — comparing Dark Mountaineers to the complacent characters in the Douglas Adams novel “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”: “Diners [who] enjoyed watching the obliteration of life, the universe and everything whilst enjoying a nice steak.”

Kingsnorth regards such charges with equanimity, countering that the only hope he has abandoned is false hope. The great value of Dark Mountain, he has claimed, is that it gives people license to do the same. “Whenever I hear the word ‘hope’ these days, I reach for my whiskey bottle,” he told an interviewer in 2012. “It seems to me to be such a futile thing. What does it mean? What are we hoping for? And why are we reduced to something so desperate? Surely we only hope when we are powerless?”

Instead of trying to “save the earth,” Kingsnorth says, people should start talking about what is actually possible. Kingsnorth has admitted to an ex-activist’s cynicism about politics as well as to a worrying ambivalence about whether he even wants civilization, as it now operates, to prevail. But he insists that he isn’t opposed to political action, mass or otherwise, and that his indignations about environmental decline and industrial capitalism are, if anything, stronger than ever. Still, much of his recent writing has been devoted to fulminating against how environmentalism, in its crisis phase, draws adherents. Movements like Bill McKibben’s 350.org, for instance, might engage people, Kingsnorth told me, but they have no chance of stopping climate change. “I just wish there was a way to be more honest about that,” he went on, “because actually what McKibben’s doing, and what all these movements are doing, is selling people a false premise. They’re saying, ‘If we take these actions, we will be able to achieve this goal.’ And if you can’t, and you know that, then you’re lying to people. And those people . . . they’re going to feel despair.” . . .

For Kingsnorth, the notion that technology will stave off the most catastrophic effects of global warming is not just wrong, it’s repellent — a distortion of the proper relationship between humans and the natural world and evidence that in the throes of crisis, many environmentalists have abandoned the principle that “nature has some intrinsic, inherent value beyond the instrumental.” If we lose sight of that ideal in the name of saving civilization, he argues, if we allow ourselves to erect wind farms on every mountain and solar arrays in every desert, we will be accepting a Faustian bargain. . . .

Kingsnorth and Hine’s aspirations for their manifesto weren’t revolutionary, but neither were they nihilistic. Each man draws a distinction between a “problem,” which can be solved, and a “predicament,” which must be endured. “Uncivilization” was firm in its conviction that climate change and other ecological crises are predicaments, and it called for a cadre of like-minded writers to “challenge the stories which underpin our civilization: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality and the myth of separation from ‘nature.’ ” . . .

“People think that abandoning belief in progress, abandoning the belief that if we try hard enough we can fix this mess, is a nihilistic position,” Hine said. “They think we’re saying: ‘Screw it. Nothing matters.’ But in fact all we’re saying is: ‘Let’s not pretend we’re not feeling despair. Let’s sit with it for a while. Let’s be honest with ourselves and with each other. And then as our eyes adjust to the darkness, what do we start to notice?’” Hine compared coming to terms with the scope of ecological loss to coming to terms with a terminal illness. “The feeling is a feeling of despair to begin with, but within that space other things begin to come through.” . . .

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This is not exactly Smiling Through the Apocalypse, but it's getting there.

There was an extended debate in 2009 on these issues between Kingsnorth and George Monbiot, columnist at The Guardian.

Getting Motivated

One would presume that in principle the best way of motivating people to do something about climate change is to frighten them with portraits of a coming apocalyptic world. Not so, say Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute, in an op-ed at the New York Times. These two chaps have conducted a long running argument regarding the utility of non-stop-disaster messaging from the environmental movement; they are also big advocates of nuclear power and natural gas displacing coal.

They begin by pointing to Showtime's  new nine part series "Years of Living Dangerously" (the first episode of which is available without subscription.) The first episode is pretty good. It shows Harrison Ford getting educated, amid very sophisticated equipment and astonishing maps, about the basics of climate change. Ford travels to Indonesia, where we learn of the role that deforestation (to make way for palm oil plantations) is playing in exacerbating climate change. Deforestation and burning contributes about 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to the contribution made by the transportation sector.

The first episode also features Don Cheadle visiting drought stricken Texas. The heroine is a woman who teaches at Texas Tech, Katharine Hayhoe, who is that most unusual of creatures: an evangelical Christian and a climate change crusader. The local opinion leans heavily toward the idea that God is behind Texas's brutal drought (for which there is abundant evidence), but Professor Hayhoe says that God created human beings so that we could figure this stuff out by ourselves.

The Showtime series, thus far, doesn't really correspond to Nordhaus and Schellenberger's depiction. In fact, I was impressed by the degree to which Showtime intimated that it is impossible to do much of anything--even have a discussion about climate change--without lots of planes, trains, and automobiles hovering in the background.

Still, this question of how to do "messaging" is really interesting. Ultimately, I would prefer it if the advocates on either side didn't screen their advice with a filter that says: "Don't necessarily tell the truth as you see it, but shape the message so that readers and viewers will react appropriately." Most scientists would object to such a filter, but in their attempts to convince the public they have been dazed and confused by the seeming inability of the public to get it. If they want to do something about climate change, many have realized, they have no choice but to enter the arena and play by the somewhat underhanded rules that make for political success.

The producers of the Showtime series (including Joe Romm as one of the two chief science advsiors) are certainly themselves keenly aware of the importance of proper messaging. I haven't looked, but I imagine that Romm has already blasted away at Nordhaus and Schellenberger over at Climate Progress. We'll check in later with that; for now, here is how Shellenberger and Nordhaus present their counter-intuitive case.

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[T]here is every reason to believe that efforts to raise public concern about climate change by linking it to natural disasters will backfire. More than a decade’s worth of research suggests that fear-based appeals about climate change inspire denial, fatalism and polarization.

For instance, Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” popularized the idea that today’s natural disasters are increasing in severity and frequency because of human-caused global warming. It also contributed to public backlash and division. Since 2006, the number of Americans telling Gallup that the media was exaggerating global warming grew to 42 percent today from about 34 percent. Meanwhile, the gap between Democrats and Republicans on whether global warming is caused by humans rose to 42 percent last year from 26 percent in 2006, according to the Pew Research Center.

Other factors contributed. Some conservatives and fossil-fuel interests questioned the link between carbon emissions and global warming. And beginning in 2007, as the country was falling into recession, public support for environmental protection declined.

Still, environmental groups have known since 2000 that efforts to link climate change to natural disasters could backfire, after researchers at the Frameworks Institute studied public attitudes for its report “How to Talk About Global Warming.” Messages focused on extreme weather events, they found, made many Americans more likely to view climate change as an act of God — something to be weathered, not prevented.

Some people, the report noted, “are likely to buy an SUV to help them through the erratic weather to come” for example, rather than support fuel-efficiency standards.

Since then, evidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.

Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts.

But claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global warming simply can’t be supported by the science. Our warming world is, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increasing heat waves and intense precipitation in some places, and is likely to bring more extreme weather in the future. But the panel also said there is little evidence that this warming is increasing the loss of life or the economic costs of natural disasters. “Economic growth, including greater concentrations of people and wealth in periled areas and rising insurance penetration,” the climate panel noted, “is the most important driver of increasing losses.”

Claims that current disasters are connected to climate change do seem to motivate many liberals to support action. But they alienate conservatives in roughly equal measure.

What works, say environmental pollsters and researchers, is focusing on popular solutions. Climate advocates often do this, arguing that solar and wind can reduce emissions while strengthening the economy. But when renewable energy technologies are offered as solutions to the exclusion of other low-carbon alternatives, they polarize rather than unite.

One recent study, published by Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project, found that conservatives become less skeptical about global warming if they first read articles suggesting nuclear energy or geoengineering as solutions. Another study, in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2012, concluded that “communication should focus on how mitigation efforts can promote a better society” rather than “on the reality of climate change and averting its risks.”

Nonetheless, virtually every major national environmental organization continues to reject nuclear energy, even after four leading climate scientists wrote them an open letter last fall, imploring them to embrace the technology as a key climate solution. Together with catastrophic rhetoric, the rejection of technologies like nuclear and natural gas by environmental groups is most likely feeding the perception among many that climate change is being exaggerated. After all, if climate change is a planetary emergency, why take nuclear and natural gas off the table?

While the urgency that motivates exaggerated claims is understandable, turning down the rhetoric and embracing solutions like nuclear energy will better serve efforts to slow global warming.

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Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, “Global Warming Scare Tactics,” New York Times, April 8, 2014

As expected, Joe Romm lit into the authors' argument here: "The Brutally Dishonest Attacks on Showtime's Landmark Series on Climate Change," Climate Progress, April 9, 2014. 

Olympic Winter Games at Risk

From Yale Environment 360: 

As few as six of the world's previous 19 Olympic Winter Games sites will likely still be wintry enough to host snow sports at the end of the century, according to a report by Canadian and Austrian researchers. Iconic locales such as Squaw Valley, Utah, and Vancouver, Canada, will likely be too warm by the middle of this century. Even under conservative climate change scenarios, only 11 of the 19 sites would remain climatically stable enough to reliably host the games, the study found. Olympic organizing committees consistently cite poor weather as a major challenge for the winter games, and it's likely to get more challenging: The average February daytime temperature of winter games locations has steadily increased — from 0.4 degrees C at games held in the 1920s to 1950s, to 3.1 degrees C in the 1960s to 1990s, to 7.8 degrees C so far in the 21st century. These sites will likely warm by an additional 2.7 to 4.4 degrees C by the end of the century, according to the report. Technology like snow-making, track refrigeration, and high-resolution weather forecasting can mitigate weather challenges to some extent, but those advances are unlikely to keep pace with climate change, the researchers say. "Despite technological advances, there are limits to what current weather risk management strategies can cope with," said the study's lead author. "The cultural legacy of the world's celebration of winter sport is increasingly at risk."

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“Future Olympic Winter Games At Risk as Climate Warms,Researchers Warn,” Yale e360 digest, January 24, 2014.

Follow the Money

How far the climate change debate has been distorted by “dirty money”—that is, money provided by rich foundations and corporations directly interested in fossil fuel production—is a question taken up in a new study by Robert J. Brulle in the journal  Climate Change. The author, a professor of environmental sociology at Drexel University, identifies a range of foundations and think tanks that he calls “U.S. Climate Change Countermovement Organizations."  Then he matches them with their sources of funding. Brulle acknowledges that the majority of these organizations are “multiple focus organizations” and that “not all of this income was devoted to climate change activities.”   Still, he has clearly identified a network of funders and fundees who have thrown scorn upon the climate change movement, and he has demonstrated the intimate nexus of financial ties that exist within this network. His most unsettling finding is that unknown donors have recently assumed by far the most prominent role in funding the “countermovement.” However one understands these ties among conservative foundations and think tanks—a more innocent explanation is possible than the one Brulle offers—it is surely a travesty of democratic norms that those conducting such a big intervention in the debate should be allowed to do so anonymously.

The first pie-chart below shows the relative size of conservative public policy institutes—what Brulle calls the “Climate Change Countermovement Organizations.” The second pie-chart shows the conservative foundations that fund them.
 

 

 

 In perhaps his most interesting finding, Brulle shows the rise to funding prominence of Donors Trust and Donors Capital. Conveniently, these are “third party pass-through foundations” whose funders cannot be traced. In the following graph, we get a picture of changing “node strength,” which is “based on the assumption that a foundation’s influence in the funding network is a function of its overall grant-making levels.”

 

Notes Brulle:

As this graph shows, the overall percentage contribution of Donors Trust/Capital rapidly increased from 2007 to 2010. At the same time, the Koch Affiliated Foundations, which peaked at 9 % in 2006, declined to 2 %. The ExxonMobil Foundation effectively stopped publicly funding CCCM organizations in 2007. Additionally, funding by the Scaife Affiliated Foundations, the second largest funder of CCCM organizations, also declined from 14 % in 2003 to just under 6 % in 2010. Finally, Bradley Foundation funding slightly declined over this time period. The rapid increase in the percentage of funding of the CCCM by Donors Trust/Capital and the decline in both Koch and ExxonMobil corresponds to the initiation of campaigns by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace publicizing and criticizing both ExxonMobil and Koch Corporations as funders of climate denial. Although the correspondence is suggestive of an effort to conceal funding of the CCCM by these foundations, it is impossible to determine for certain whether or not ExxonMobil and the Koch Foundations continue to fund CCCM organizations via Donors Trust/Capital or direct corporate contributions. However, it is important to note that a Koch run foundation, the Knowledge and Progress Fund, initiated a pattern of making large grants to Donors Trust in 2008.

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Brulle promises a study of the influence of money on the other side of the debate as well. For a pdf of the paper, see Robert J. Brulle, “Institutionalizing Delay: Foundation Funding and the Creation of U.S. Climate Change Counter-Movement Organizations,” Climate Change (accepted November 19, 2013). Tip of the hat to Desdemona Despair.

Glaciers Retreat

From Yale Environment 360:

The glaciers on Mount Everest and the surrounding region have shrunk by 13 percent in the last five decades as temperatures have risen and snowfall has declined in that section of the Himalaya, according to a new study. Using satellite imagery and topographic maps, a team of scientists found that the majority of glaciers on Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, and in the surrounding Sagarmatha National Park are retreating at an accelerating rate. In the last 50 years, the snowline in the Everest region has shifted up by an average of 590 feet (180 meters), said Sudeep Thakuri, a Ph. D. student at the University of Milan and leader of the research team, which presented its findings at a conference in Cancún, Mexico. Because glaciers are melting faster than they are being replenished, researchers say, rock and debris that were previously hidden under snow are now exposed and absorbing heat. A separate study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, found that snow cover in the Rocky Mountains has declined by about 20 percent in the last three decades as a result of warmer springs.

EU Climate Policy on Verge of Collapse

The rejection by the European Parliament of a proposal to salvage the EU’s carbon-emissions trading system has left the program in utter disarray. The 334-315 vote on April 16th, generally regarded as a surprise, occurred against an anemic economic climate and European fears of a loss of competitiveness. Prices, which were over €6 a metric ton at the beginning of the year and have been sliding, fell yet further to around €2.5 a ton. The survival of the emissions-trading-system is now very much in doubt.  This now-dated chart from Spiegel Online shows the general tendency:

Notes Schumpeter at the Economist: “The ETS has long been troubled. The scheme is the world’s biggest carbon market, trading allowances to produce carbon which cover about half the European Union’s total carbon emissions. Partly because of weak industrial demand and partly because the EU gave away too many allowances to pollute in the first place, there is massive oversupply in the carbon-emissions market. Prices fell from €20 a tonne in 2011 to just €5 a tonne in February 2013. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, therefore hatched a plan to take about 900m tonnes of carbon allowances off the market now and reintroduce them in about five years time when, it was hoped, demand would be stronger (“backloading” in the jargon). This was the proposal the European Parliament turned down.”

 

Dave Keating, at EuropeanVoice.com, gives some immediate reactions:

 

Stig Schjølset, head of EU carbon analysis for PointCarbon, said the proposal is now “effectively dead”. “This means there will be no changes to the current system until 2020,” he said. “Prices will stay really low up to then. The EU ETS will not bring about any additional greenhouse gas reductions, so it will be irrelevant in terms of reducing total emissions in Europe.” 

 

"The EU's carbon market is at crisis point,” said Green MEP Bas Eickhout after the vote. He called the combination of centre-right MEPs, German Liberals and some hard left MEPs from the GUE group [European United Left] who voted to reject the proposal an “irresponsible and unholy alliance of MEPs.” . . .

Hans ten Berge, secretary general of electricity industry association Eurelectric, said the vote “is a dangerous set-back for the internal energy market and for EU carbon goals.” “Immediate carbon market reactions to the vote show how low the credibility of the ETS has fallen," he added. "Only urgent action by the Commission to put forward structural proposals on ETS can now stop Member States from each legislating their own alternative policies: 27 different carbon floor prices, coal taxes, carbon taxes.”

Climate skeptics are gloating: “The EU has been the global laboratory testing the green agenda to see how it works,” writes Walter Russell Mead. The vote “means that the guinea pig died; the most important piece of green intervention in world history has become an expensive and embarrassing flop.  It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of this for environmentalists everywhere; if the EU can’t make the green agenda work, it’s unlikely that anybody else will give it a try.”

Climate hawks are depressed: in an interview with Spiegel Online, Felix Matthes says it will have grave consequences and predicts, with Hans ten Berge, a re-nationalization of climate policy: “The decision means the end of a European approach to climate policy. The paradox is that all the politicians who are constantly calling for more harmonization of climate policy in the EU and internationally are sending the policy back to the national level. That is an enormous step backwards -- also for global climate policy. Even China is now starting to pursue emissions trade. South Korea and Australia have already implemented it, and California has started a very ambitious system.”

* * *

This chart from The Economist gives a longer view of the price movement:

April 19, 2013

Carbon Bubbles

A report last year from Carbontracker, in London, draws attention to the financial solvency of major fossil fuel producers. Its study, Unburnable Carbon, has had a big impact. Bill McKibben, of 350.org, has rallied students at the nation's leading colleges and universities, 250 at last count, to demand that their schools' endowments divest from the 200 companies listed on world stock exchanges that hold fossil fuel reserves. (The divestment would take place over a five year period.) The divestment movement raises a lot of questions, but here I want to focus on the Carbontracker report, both in the way of summarizing its conclusions and pointing to some weaknesses therein.   

According to Carbontracker, “The total carbon potential of the Earth’s known fossil fuel reserves comes to 2795 GtCO2 [gigatons of carbon dioxide]. 65% of this is from coal, with oil providing 22% and gas 13%. This means that governments and global markets are currently treating as assets, reserves equivalent to nearly 5 times the carbon budget for the next 40 years. . . .We estimate the fossil fuel reserves held by the top 100 listed coal companies and the top 100 listed oil and gas companies represent potential emissions of 745 GtCO2. This exceeds the remaining carbon budget of 565 GtCO2 by 180 GtCO2.”

 

Such reserves, the report notes, cannot be burned if the world is to stay within its carbon budget. "Only 20% of the total reserves can be burned unabated, leaving up to 80% of assets technically unburnable."
 

This has profound implications for the world’s energy finance structures and means that using just the reserves listed on the world’s stock markets in the next 40 years would be enough to take us beyond 2°C of global warming. This calculation also assumes that no new fossil fuel resources are added to reserves and burnt during this period – an assumption challenged by the harsh reality that fossil fuel companies are investing billions per annum to find and process new reserves. It is estimated that listed oil and gas companies had CAPEX budgets of $798 billion in 2010. In addition, over two-thirds of the world’s fossil fuels are held by privately or state owned oil, gas and coal corporations, which are also contributing even more carbon emissions.
 

Given that only one fifth of the total reserves can be used to stay below 2°C warming, if this is applied uniformly, then only 149 of the 745 GtCO2 listed can be used unmitigated. This is where the carbon asset bubble is located. If applied to the world’s stock markets, this could result in a repricing of assets on a scale that would dwarf past profit warnings and revaluation of reserves.

 

Let us extrapolate a bit from Carbontracker's figures, which are admittedly astounding in showing the scale of the challenge. If we are to stay below two degrees of warming, the world can burn only 886 GtCO2 from 2000 to 2050. That is “the global carbon budget.” But in the first decade of this century the world used up over a third of its budget, having burned, according to one calculation, some 282 GtCO2, with land use change adding another 39 GtCO2. So that reduces to 565 GtCO2 the carbon budget for the years 2011-2050. Ignoring the “land use change” factor for the moment, that basically indicates that 28.2 GtCO2 was the amount burned per year in the first decade. In the next four decades, the amount would have to fall by half (565/40), to average 14.125 GtCO2 per year. Barring catastrophe, of course, an immediate reduction of fossil fuel use by half is impossible, so one would have to imagine a sharply descending line like that projected by Greenpeace in a recent report, with emissions in 2050 far below the 14.125 figure. (See further here.)

Carbontracker then asks fossil fuel companies--together with regulators and pension funds--to consider the following questions in stating and understanding their financial accounts:  

• Which of the assets you have an interest in are amongst the 20% of fossil fuel reserves we can afford to burn in the next 40 years?

• If you sanction capital expenditure on finding and developing more reserves, just how likely is it that those new reserves can ever be burned?

• What discount rates would it be prudent for investors to use when valuing reserves? Are historical discount rates too optimistic given the likely haircut to reserves values that corporate owners of fossil fuels are likely to have to take?

Furthermore, as the regulators of the capital markets will need to look closely at disclosures and reporting requirements around how reserves are presented, accountants and auditors will need to revise guidelines on how value is recorded:

• If not all reserves that are exchange listed can be burnt, how should auditors account for these stranded assets?

 

• What assumptions need to be reviewed in order to create a reliable assessment of which assets are contingent or impaired?

* * *

Carbontracker undoubtedly raises a set of important questions, but its approach also has some serious limitations.

First, it mixes together the reserves situation for coal, oil, and gas in a way that is distorting. Coal reserves are enormous and constitute, as Carbontracker notes, some 65% of the carbon potential of proven fossil fuel reserves. But the "reserves to production" ratio for coal is far larger than for natural gas or for oil. BP pegs the reserves to production ratio for coal at 112 years, 63.6 for natural gas, and 54.2 for oil, and even those aggregate figures conceal important regional variations.

Second, the fossil fuel reserves of companies listed on stock exchanges account for only 26.6% of total fossil fuel reserves.

Both of those points are relevant to the movement to divest from fossil fuel companies. The former raises the question whether it makes sense to focus on all fossil fuels. There are trade-offs among all fuel sources in terms of environmental impact, but King Coal is undoubtedly the dirtiest and most productive of CO2 emissions. Surely some discrimination among fossil fuels is desirable: Is there really no room to replace coal with natural gas in electricity generation? Are we to build more dams, produce more biofuels, or build more nuclear reactors to make up for the lost production? I just don't see "no fossil fuels," never, ever, as a viable energy policy.

The second point reflects a sigificant real world conundrum: pressure on the western oil majors, if effective, could simply redound to the benefit of the National Oil Companies (or NOCs), which hold some seventy five percent of world oil reserves. (Some studies put the figure even larger, at 90 percent.) The majors are much diminished from their former days of glory in control of the world oil industry; the nationalizations of the 1970s saw to that. Aiming at them illuminates only a limited portion of the intended target.

But the biggest reservation about Carbontracker's approach--and the approach, as well, of those who have followed its methodology in the divestment movement--is its one-sided focus on the supply side.

Unless we make heroic assumptions about the complete transformation of energy infrastructure in a short period of time, the sectors of the economy that depend on energy consumption would clearly be greatly affected by a radical reduction in fossil fuel use, perhaps even more than the fossil fuel producers themselves. Leave aside that oil-service firms, like Halliburton, do not fall under the proscription of Carbontracker or the divestment movement; what about oil refineries, steel producers, automakers, airliners? What would be their enterprise value under the assumption (a radical reduction in fossil fuel use) that Carbontracker is applying to the 200 companies it singles out? Since the entire economy is fossil fuel dependent, it seems strange that Carbontracker, ostensibly concerned with such things as fiduciary responsibility and the accurate reporting of assets, should be so incurious about the implications of its projections for the larger financial structure.

***

The challenges posed by the energy transition are undoubtedly enormous, and Carbontracker's calculations have the merit of drawing attention to the contradiction between "business as usual" approaches and the forecasts of impending doom coming from climate scientists. If its financial analysis seems rather otherworldly (with no adequate discussion of alternative supply, likely demand, and expected price), it nevertheless raises vital questions.

Carbontracker does not call the fossil fuel companies evil, but rather actuarially unsound. However, the divestment movement, which has run with Carbontracker's report, has not hesitated to denominate them as such. By contrast, I object to any approach that draws a ring of fire around the fossil fuel companies and denominates them as wicked, while in effect leaving the consumers of energy off the hook. Such an approach seems to me unbalanced and myopic. It also ignores the fact that the provision of energy, in the modern industrial civilization we inhabit, provides indispensable contributions to human welfare. We have excellent grounds for believing that such consumption, on current trends, will likely produce grim environmental consequences in the future, but also ample reason to believe that going cold turkey from fossil fuels would produce delerium tremors in the patient, and probably kill him. A resolution to this profound dilemma, distant though such a resolution may now appear, is one of the great challenges of the coming century, but I resist the idea that absolutist strategies constitute progress in dealing with it.


April 13, 2013

Phoenix Descending

The four horsemen of Phoenix’s Apocalypse, writes William deBuys at TomDispatch, are heat, drought, windstorms, and fire. DeBuys, who is the author of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (Oxford, 2011) actually adds a fifth horseman—the political disorganization and social fragmentation that will make for an incoherent and divisive response to these travails. Phoenix is a sort of Ground Zero for such inter-locking vulnerabilities, but the entire American Southwest is implicated in the scary future projected by DeBuys:  

. . . Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time -- New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy -- may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures -- grids going down, levees failing, back-up systems not backing up. As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns: infrastructure failure interdependencies. You wouldn’t want to use it in a poem, but it does catch an emerging theme of our time. 

Phoenix’s pyramid of complexities looks shakier than most because it stands squarely in the crosshairs of climate change. The area, like much of the rest of the American Southwest, is already hot and dry; it’s getting ever hotter and drier, and is increasingly battered by powerful storms. Sandy and Katrina previewed how coastal cities can expect to fare as seas rise and storms strengthen. Phoenix pulls back the curtain on the future of inland empires. . . . 

[I]n Phoenix there are all too many “reasons” primed to collaborate and produce big problems, with climate change foremost among them, juicing up the heat, the drought, and the wind to ever greater extremes, like so many sluggers on steroids. Notably, each of these nemeses, in its own way, has the potential to undermine the sine qua non of modern urban life, the electrical grid, which in Phoenix merits special attention. . . . 

It goes without saying that Phoenix’s desert setting is hot by nature, but we’ve made it hotter. The city is a masonry world, with asphalt and concrete everywhere. The hard, heavy materials of its buildings and roads absorb heat efficiently and give it back more slowly than the naked land. In a sense, the whole city is really a thermal battery, soaking up energy by day and releasing it at night. The result is an “urban heat island,” which, in turn, prevents the cool of the desert night from providing much relief. 

Sixty years ago, when Phoenix was just embarking on its career of manic growth, nighttime lows never crept above 90°F. Today such temperatures are a commonplace, and the vigil has begun for the first night that doesn’t dip below 100°F. Studies indicate that Phoenix’s urban-heat-island effect may boost nighttime temperatures by as much as 10°F. It’s as though the city has doubled down on climate change, finding a way to magnify its most unwanted effects even before it hits the rest of us full blast. . . . 

Heat . . . is a tricky adversary. It stresses everything, including electrical equipment. Transformers, when they get too hot, can fail. Likewise, thermoelectric generating stations, whether fired by coal, gas, or neutrons, become less efficient as the mercury soars.  And the great hydroelectric dams of the Colorado River, including Glen Canyon, which serves greater Phoenix, won’t be able to supply the “peaking power” they do now if the reservoirs behind them are fatally shrunken by drought, as multiple studies forecast they will be. Much of this can be mitigated with upgraded equipment, smart grid technologies, and redundant systems.  But then along comes the haboob. 

A haboob is a dust/sand/windstorm, usually caused by the collapse of a thunderstorm cell. The plunging air hits the ground and roils outward, picking up debris across the open desert. As the Arabic name suggests, such storms are native to arid regions, but -- although Phoenix is no stranger to storm-driven dust -- the term haboob has only lately entered the local lexicon. It seems to have been imported to describe a new class of storms, spectacular in their vehemence, which bring visibility to zero and life to a standstill. They sandblast cars, close the airport, and occasionally cause the lights -- and AC -- to go out. Not to worry, say the two major utilities serving the Phoenix metroplex, Arizona Public Service and the Salt River Project. And the outages have indeed been brief.  So far. 

Before Katrina hit, the Army Corps of Engineers was similarly reassuring to the people of New Orleans. And until Superstorm Sandy landed, almost no one worried about storm surges filling the subway tunnels of New York. 

Every system, like every city, has its vulnerabilities. Climate change, in almost every instance, will worsen them. The beefed-up, juiced-up, greenhouse-gassed, overheated weather of the future will give us haboobs of a sort we can’t yet imagine, packed with ever greater amounts of energy. In all likelihood, the emergence of such storms as a feature of Phoenix life results from an overheating environment, abetted by the loose sand and dust of abandoned farmland (which dried up when water was diverted to the city’s growing subdivisions). 

In dystopic portraits of Phoenix’s unsustainable future, water -- or rather the lack of it -- is usually painted as the agent of collapse. Indeed, the metropolitan area, a jumble of jurisdictions that includes Scottsdale, Glendale, Tempe, Mesa, Sun City, Chandler, and 15 other municipalities, long ago made full use of such local rivers as the Salt, Verde, and Gila. Next, people sank wells and mined enough groundwater to lower the water table by 400 feet. . . . 

Longer term, the Colorado River poses issues that no amount of tribal water can resolve. Beset by climate change, overuse, and drought, the river and its reservoirs, according to various researchers, may decline to the point that water fails to pass Hoover Dam. In that case, the CAP [Central Arizona Project] would dry up, but so would the Colorado Aqueduct which serves greater Los Angeles and San Diego, as well as the All-American Canal, on which the factory farms of California’s Imperial and Coachella valleys depend. Irrigators and municipalities downstream in Mexico would also go dry. If nothing changes in the current order of things, it is expected that the possibility of such a debacle could loom in little more than a decade. . . . 

Phoenicians who want to escape water worries, heat waves, and haboobs have traditionally sought refuge in the cool green forests of Arizona’s uplands, or at least they did until recently. In 2002, the Rodeo-Chediski fire consumed 469,000 acres of pine and mixed conifer on the Mogollon Rim, not far from Phoenix. It was an ecological holocaust that no one expected to see surpassed. Only nine years later, in 2011, the Wallow fire picked up the torch, so to speak, and burned across the Rim all the way to the New Mexico border and beyond, topping out at 538,000 charred acres. 

Now, nobody thinks such fires are one-off flukes. Diligent modeling of forest response to rising temperatures and increased moisture stress suggests, in fact, that these two fires were harbingers of worse to come. By mid-century, according to a paper by an A-team of Southwestern forest ecologists, the “normal” stress on trees will equal that of the worst megadroughts in the region’s distant paleo-history, when most of the trees in the area simply died. 

Compared to Phoenix’s other heat and water woes, the demise of Arizona’s forests may seem like a side issue, whose effects would be noticeable mainly in the siltation of reservoirs and the destabilization of the watersheds on which the city depends. But it could well prove a regional disaster.  Consider, then, heat, drought, windstorms, and fire as the four horsemen of Phoenix’s Apocalypse. As it happens, though, this potential apocalypse has a fifth horseman as well. 

Rebecca Solnit has written eloquently of the way a sudden catastrophe -- an earthquake, hurricane, or tornado -- can dissolve social divisions and cause a community to cohere, bringing out the best in its citizenry. Drought and heat waves are different. You don’t know that they have taken hold until you are already in them, and you never know when they will end. The unpleasantness eats away at you.  It corrodes your state of mind. You have lots of time to meditate on the deficiencies of your neighbors, which loom larger the longer the crisis goes on. . . . 

It is a truism that communities that do not pull together fail to surmount their challenges. Phoenix’s are as daunting as any faced by an American city in the new age of climate change, but its winner-take-all politics (out of which has come Arizona’s flagrantly repressive anti-immigration law), combined with the fragmentation of the metro-area into nearly two dozen competing jurisdictions, essentially guarantee that, when the worst of times hit, common action and shared sacrifice will remain as insubstantial as a desert mirage. . . .

* * *

William deBuys, "Exodus from Phoenix," TomDispatch, March 14, 2013

See here for images of the haboob that descended on Phoenix in 2011.

Carbon Taxes, Please

Juslin Gillis of the New York Times plans a monthly column on climate change, answering charges that the Times had downgraded its environmental coverage; his first entry, “In Search of Energy Miracles,” explores the ideas of Lockheed Martin, Bill Gates, and Chinese scientists for new forms of nuclear power. Go to the piece for details on that; here I want to draw attention to his overall framework:  

Beyond the question of whether they will work, these ambitious schemes pose a larger issue: How much faith should we, as a society, put in the idea of a big technological fix to save the world from climate change?  

A lot of smart people are coming to see the energy problem as the defining challenge of the 21st century. We have to supply power and transportation to an eventual population of 10 billion people who deserve decent lives, and we have to do it while limiting the emissions that threaten our collective future. 

Yet we have already poured so much carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere that huge, threatening changes to the world’s climate appear to be inevitable. And instead of slowing down, emissions are speeding up as billions of once-destitute people claw their way out of poverty, powered by fossil fuels.  

Many environmentalists believe that wind and solar power can be scaled to meet the rising demand, especially if coupled with aggressive efforts to cut waste. But a lot of energy analysts have crunched the numbers and concluded that today’s renewables, important as they are, cannot get us even halfway there.  

Gillis goes on to describe and assess the various efforts to improve nuclear power, giving a not especially hopeful verdict, but offering sage counsel with regard to the parameters of energy policy and climate change:  

Two approaches to the issue — spending money on the technologies we have now, or investing in future breakthroughs — are sometimes portrayed as conflicting. In reality, that is a false dichotomy. The smartest experts say we have to pursue both tracks at once, and much more aggressively than we have been doing.  

An ambitious national climate policy, anchored by a stiff price on carbon dioxide emissions, would serve both goals at once. In the short run, it would hasten a trend of supplanting coal-burning power plants with natural gas plants, which emit less carbon dioxide. It would drive investment into current low-carbon technologies like wind and solar power that, while not efficient enough, are steadily improving.  

And it would also raise the economic rewards for developing new technologies that could disrupt and displace the ones of today. These might be new-age nuclear reactors, vastly improved solar cells, or something entirely unforeseen.  

In effect, our national policy now is to sit on our hands hoping for energy miracles, without doing much to call them forth. . . .

Amen.

The New Abolitionists

These mugshots from the Guardian of the "climate change abolitionists," a.k.a. "climate hawks,"  show the leading figures, from Bill McKibben in the upper left to Jeremy Grantham on the lower right. Clicking on the picture will take you to the Guardian site, where there are brief biographies.

Andrew Winston, in the accompanying piece at the Guardian, writes of the new abolitionists:  "Climate abolitionists are not fighting to eliminate growth. Eradicating slavery did not rid the world of cotton or tobacco, and moving away from carbon will not mean abandoning human and economic development – in fact, it will help ensure it. What we want to abolish is our outmoded, broken economic and energy systems that threaten our survival, in part because they put no value on human and ecosystem inputs and impacts. We're seeking a new way of powering our world that will save vast sums of money (variable costs of near zero), avoid the significant health impacts of burning dirty fossil fuels, and conserve our planet's ability to support not only our entire $70tn economy, but our very existence."

See also Joe Romm's take on the "new abolitionists," of which he is one (just to the left of Grantham).

Arctic Death Spiral

This disturbing graphic, via Climate Progress, shows the decline in the volume of Arctic Sea Ice from 1979 to 2012.

 

 

A more finely grained look is provided in the innovative video of Andy Lee Robinson:

Click for Video