The climate change discussions at the G8 Summit have been a blank canvas upon which media outlets and commentators can project their judgments on the state of climate change policy. Is the story the agreement on a 2 deg C threshold? The lack of agreement with China and India? The refusal of Russia and Canada to pledge their own countries to an 80% reduction in GHG emissions by 2050? The disagreement over the baseline year for calculating emissions cuts?
Many of the more thoughtful articles have focused on the efforts to negotiate with developing nations on adaptation and development issues (that's a broken Kiribati seawall in the photo). The Globe and Mail, for example, ran a frontpage story entitled “Obama bends to bring emerging nations on side” complete with an unsubtle full fold photo of the back of US President’s rapidly graying head (a welcome to the world of climate change policy?).
The G8 leaders have pledged to help developing countries meet costs associate with reducing emissions. The reporting and (at least some of) the actual G8 discussion was mixing two quite different issues. First, how and how much to help emerging economies like China and India now responsible for a large fraction of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions reduce those emissions without slowing their development. Second, how to help developing countries more vulnerable to climate disasters adapt to climate change.
These are not the same things, and they will require different policies and different pots of money. The first is more about trade policy, setting environmental standards, etc. The second is more about international aid. We need to help countries like Kiribati or Mali, adapt to climate change far more than we need to help those countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Neither task will be easy. Most policy discussions implicitly assume that getting the emerging economies like China to slow, stabilize or reverse emissions growth will be harder than helping the Kiribatis and the Malis adapt to climate change. The assumption comes in large part from ignorance of the hands-on, day-to-day challenge of international aid projects, especially those aimed at the often nebulous goal of increasing the adaptability of a different society to outside pressures, whether climate change, other environmental change, or global trade. In the end, we may discover that bringing China into an emissions policy is actually far easier than deciding whether, how, where and when to build sea walls in Kiribati.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Mixing mitigation and adaptation at the G8 summit
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Climate change deal from the G8 summit?
[UPDATED POST]. The G8 has agreed on limiting warming to 2 deg C... but not on the emissions target that would limit warming to 2 deg C. Canada continues to fudge with the baseline year for calculating emissions change, an important issue given the rise in emissions since 1990
Coverage and criticism of the failure to reach a consensus on climate policy at international meetings like the G8 summits tend to focus, for good reason, on emissions reductions. The lede from the NY Times:
As President Obama arrived for three days of meetings with other international leaders, negotiators dropped a proposal that would have committed the world to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by midcentury and industrialized countries to slashing their emissions by 80 percent.
On top of emissions reductions, any post-Kyoto agreement, or any side agreement between individual nations like the US and China, will include funding for climate change adaptation in the developing world. As difficult as it will be to reach a global agreement on emissions reductions, it may actually be even more difficult to reach an agreement on funding for adaptation.
The emissions targets are promises in the politically-distant future; Canadians, for one, have seen how a promise of emission reductions can go for naught if there are no serious penalties tied to those targets. The funding for climate change adaptation in the developing world. on the other hand, is real money that comes out of existing budgets and shorter-term forecasts. And a system for adaptation funding is ripe for abuse, as happens with international aid.
First and foremost, we need to work on the emissions reductions policy. But let's not assume that agreeing on how and how much to funding adaptation will be easy.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Abuse of science and logic by the National Corn Growers Association
The National Corn Growers Association released a report arguing that there is no connection between the use of nitrogen fertilizers on corn in the Midwestern US and the seasonal “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.
There is no point mincing words about what this “analytical white paper”. It is the corn equivalent of irrational climate change skepticism. This is one truly shoddy piece of work. I encourage others in the scientific community to respond either independently or to append the critique offered here.
First, let’s review the actual science.
The “dead zone” in question, discussed many times before on this blog, is generated most summers on the continental shelf of the northern Gulf of Mexico. Nutrients originating in the Mississippi River Basin in the spring fuel the production of algae (primary production) in the surface waters along the continental shelf. The algae die and sink to the bottom, or something else eats the algae and the fecal matter from the something else sinks to the bottom. All that organic matter needs to decompose, and the process of decomposition (respiration) consumes oxygen. So the bottom waters on the continental shelf during the summer become very depleted in oxygen, or “hypoxic”.
Scientific research over the last few decades has shown that the increase in nitrogen flow from the Mississippi and neighbouring Atchafalaya Rivers since the 1950s has driven the development of these large seasonal periods of hypoxia. The evidence comes from basic ecological theory on nutrient limitation, lab experiments, tracking of the Mississippi River plume, long-term data analysis, sediment cores, isotopic analysis and mathematical modeling. While other nutrients like phosphorus and silica are important, nitrogen is the primary culprit.
There are many possible explanations for the increased flow of nitrogen out of the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin (MARB) including fertilizer use, manure use, NOx emissions from cars and sewage. A simple nutrient budget shows nitrogen fertilizer use in the MARB has increased 20-fold since the 1950s. And today, most of that nitrogen fertilizer is applied to corn fields. Measurements and mathematical modeling of nitrogen loss from corn fields show that corn production is a primary source of nitrogen to the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, and hence, a primary driver of the development of what's come to be called the “Dead Zone”.
The author of the NCGA report (from the consulting firm StrathKirn Inc.) attempt to counter the mass of scientific evidence with the following largely baseless and unscientific arguments. Basically, he throws a bunch of stuff at the wall to see if anything sticks. I’ll go one by one through the report's chain of five incorrect and comically inconsistent assertions:
Assertion #1: Oxygen levels on the continental shelf are not low in comparison to other parts of the ocean.
This is misleading and irrelevant. First, the large regions of upwelling in the open ocean have low oxygen concentration due to high primary production. There’s no sense in contrasting the naturally and persistently low oxygen levels in the eastern Pacific to the intermittent, seasonal hypoxia on the continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico. Second, even if there were some sense in this comparison, the data resolution of these maps is far too poor to capture a hypoxia area, which, while among the largest in the world, is still at its largest on the order of 20,000 km2 [here’s a test – can you clearly delineate New Jersey on that map?]. The global map of marine nitrogen concentrations is even more ridiculous. The data is far too coarse to capture the plume of the Mississippi River.
Assertion #2: Hypoxia doesn’t affect the fishery (not there is any hypoxia).
The report shows no change in fish catch over the years. As Steve Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin mentioned in an e-mail, the problem is the report analyses data on fish landings, not fishing effort. The boats may come back with the same weight in fish – but it takes more time and money to get those fish.
Assertion #3: Nitrogen from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya doesn’t cause the hypoxia (not that the hypoxia affects the fishery, or that there is any hypoxia in the first place).
This argument is advanced through a series of graphs relating annual nitrogen export, annual river flow and the annual extent of the hypoxic zone. There are a number of problems here. The nitrogen and flow data are shown only since 1985, despite data existing back to the 1950s. If the graph went back thirty years, you’d see the 2-3fold increase in nitrogen export occurred between the 1950s and the 1980s. Instead, the author reports no evidence of a trend in nitrogen of hypoxia since 1993. That’s not the issue – the issue is the hypoxic zone began growing large in the 1980s because fertilizer use increased between the 1950s and the 1980s, and further increases in corn planting, say for ethanol production, may further increase the average annual extent of hypoxia.
The other glaring problem with this argument is that the report uses no statistics whatsoever. For example, after a chart of nitrogen export and hypoxia extent since 1985 is this unsupported passage:
Again, there appears to be an association between water flow and the amount of nitrite (NO2) plus nitrate (NO3), but these do not relate well to the size of the hypoxic zone (except that they are all low in the year 2000). Thus, many of the statements about the relationship between water flow, nitrogen, and the size of the hypoxic zone are inaccurate.
Some actual statistical analysis, or frankly, just eyeballing the graph, would suggest that there is a significant relationship between the annual nitrogen export from the MARB and the annual extent of the hypoxic zone. It is not a perfect one-to-one relationship between nitrogen and the extent of hypoxia because of how the weather effects mixing of oxygen in the Gulf, the load of other nutrients and a myriad of other mitigating factors. If the author had done any research, they’d find proper statistical analysis and explanations in dozens of published papers, including this one of from my own work, a 2007 paper in Limnology and Oceanography:
Between 1985 and 2004, there is a significant relationship (r2 > 0.61) between midsummer hypoxia area and the May + June nitrate flux (Fig. 1). The strength of this relationship is limited by a number of other variables, including the advection of sub-pycnoclinal waters on the continental shelf, summer tropical storms that increase vertical mixing, recycling of N sequestered in shelf sediments during previous years, and the input of other nutrients such as phosphorus (Rabalais et al. 2002; Scavia et al. 2003; Wawrik et al. 2004).
Assertion #4: Not very much nitrogen is applied to corn (not that nitrogen causes hypoxia, or that hypoxia affects the fishery, or that there is any hypoxia in the first place).
The report displays a graph illustrating that non-crop uses of nitrogen fertilizer, like fertilizer used on lawns, is equal to or greater than the use of nitrogen fertilizer on corn. The problem, or I should say, the most glaring problem? It is national data. Over 90% of the corn grown in the US, and over 90% of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to corn in the US, is grown in the MARB. A 1999 EPA report estimated that non-agricultural fertilizer use is only 5% of total U.S fertilizer use - and that percentage of total fertilizer use in the major producing states of the Corn Belt.
Assertion #5: No nitrogen runs off of corn fields (not that much nitrogen is applied to corn, or that nitrogen causes hypoxia, or that hypoxia affects the fishery, or that there is any hypoxia in the first place).
The report proudly claims that the same amount of nitrogen is now removed during the corn harvest (i.e. in the grain) than is applied as fertilizer, so there can’t be any extra nitrogen left over to run off into the river. Fertilizer use efficiency has indeed increased over the years thanks to genetic technology and improved management. In other word, farmers are getting higher yields with the same amount of nitrogen fertilizer. That is positive news.
But the calculation in the paper is full of flaws. To name just one: the contention that fertilizer inputs = crop outputs = no nitrogen runoff only makes sense if fertilizer were the one and only source of nitrogen to the crops. For one, there is the mineralization of nitrogen in the soil – plant matter on the ground is naturally broken down by microbes, a process that released nitrogen from the plant matter to replenish the soil. This is a fundamental part of soil chemistry. The whole reason the Midwest is good land for growing corn is the high natural mineralization rates!
Final take-home message of the report: The US has a lot of golfers.
The report concludes that all other analyses are ignoring all the fertilizer applied to lawns and present maps and data to support this conclusion. The calculations are extremely suspect. First, the author assumes that the fraction of land devoted to lawns is greater in the MARB than in the rest of the country. Analysing the lawn data, eyeballing the national map, or simply reflecting about the fact that 4/5ths of the US population live outside the MARB, shows that this is a ridiculous assumption. Second, the report assumes that all the fertilizer not applied to corn, wheat, soybeans or cotton – which amounts to about 25% of annual fertilizer sales - is applied to lawns. This ignores all other crops grown in the United States, as well as all the fertilizer applied to rangelands and forests.
The report goes on to argue:
Since most lawns are cut and mulched there is relatively little removal of N, unlike the grain in corn. Consequently, a major portion of the N applied to lawns may be available for leaching… the net N available for leaching per acre is almost infinitely higher for lawns than from corn.
Not only does this argument incorrectly imply that no plant residue whatsoever is ever left behind after harvest to replenish the soil, it ignores the fact that unlike lawns, many corn fields are artificially drained by pipes or drainage tiles, such that excess nitrogen easily leaches to the nearest stream.
All told, the NCGA report is an embarrassment.
There are some legitimate outstanding questions about the nitrogen-hypoxia problem and definitely some legitimate critiques of the media coverage. In particular, the coverage often gives the mistaken impression that corn is the only source of nitrogen, that the hypoxic zone covers a large fraction of the Gulf of Mexico, that water at all depths is hypoxia, and that hypoxia is a permanent phenomena, rather than a seasonal occurrence. The NCGA could have issued on a report on those real concerns. Instead, it issued this dishonest mess of half-truths and pseudo-science.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Quote of the week
And then there is We the People. Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway. You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon. That will get the Senate’s attention. Play hardball or don’t play at all.
- Thomas Friedman, July 1
All the grassroots organizers that came out for Obama during the campaign should get to work. Canadians too. Europeans as well. If those of you outside the US want to see action in our own countries [ie. Canada] and want to see meaningful international policy [ie. Europe], you need the US to pass this the Waxman-Markey bill. Yes, it is horribly flawed. It is also the only hope right now for meaningful US political action on climate change.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
A thought on the Waxman-Markey climate bill
Yesterday, the US Congress narrowly passed a bill to control greenhouse gas emissions. The Waxman-Markey bill will install a cap and trade system, set a renewable portfolio standard and pay for a number of other related, and unrelated, programs and pork. If it can make it through the Senate, the bill we become law.
Like every piece of legislation passing though the congressional treatment plant, Waxman-Markey was heavily diluted over the past few months. The pundits, NGOs and lobby groups have argued over the merits of passing a weakened cap-and-trade system which will set a low carbon price and give away the majority of the permits.
The pro argument: It's far better than what we have, which is nothing.
The con argument: It's not even close to what we need.
They're both right. We -- I write "we" deliberately because US greenhouse gas emissions affect the entire planet, US decisions and policy sets a precedent for the world, and, as a Canadian, my own government will remain paralysed without US action. We need this bill and we need to be having this argument. We need political "realists" that see this bill as an accomplishment. And we need "purists", scientists, activists, etc., shouting that the bill won't avoid the dangerous impacts of climate change. If the commentators were all "realist", the bill would be even weaker. If they were all "purists", a climate change bill would not pass until water was flooding the Capitol Building.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Turning down the volume
While I was doing field work in Kiribati a few weeks ago, I started reading Voltaire’s Bastards, the 1992 polemic by Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul about the failure of reason in western society. You know, some light reading for the beach.
Saul steps back from the sniping between right and left to ask whether our deference to reason and structure has created an unthinking, technocratic society. It’s amazing this book was written before the internet transformed communications and before politics became a marketing exercise. This quote, speaking about how things of changed since the time of John Locke, could be talking about the inanity of the online debates between climate skeptics:
Facts at that time were such rare nuggets that no one realized how they would multiply. Everyone believed them to be solid and inanimate – to be true fact. No one yet understood that life would become an uncomfortable, endless walk down a seashore laid thick with facts of all sizes and shapes. Boulders, pebbles, shards, perfect ovals. No one had begun to imagine that these facts were without any order, impose or natural – that facts were as meaningful as raw vocabulary without grammar or sentences. A man could pick up any fact he wished and fling it into the sea and make it skip. A practiced, talented arm could make it skip three, perhaps four times, while a lesser limb might make a single plunk with the same concrete proof of some truth or other. Another man might build with these facts some sort of fortress on the shore.
As for Locke, he certainly did not think that facts would rapidly become the weapons, not only of good men but of evil mean, not only of truth but of lies.
Gavin Schmidt over at Real Climate has a terrific post about the repetitive spiral of blogging. In his case, the subject is debunking the climate skeptics. The basic conceit could apply to blogging as a whole. The popular politic blogs suffer from a more severe case of this affliction, rehashing the same issues over and over again, creating an urgency that often does not exist in reality.
Personally, I've found it difficult to re-enter the blogosphere after spending a couple months conducting field work in Fiji and Kiribati. This happens every time I step away, whether to do field work, to finish other work, or just for a break. I've found it more challenging this time because of the very "groundhog day" nature of the online climate discussions of which Gavin writes.
Thanks to technology, anyone armed with either a few good sound-bites or an important sounding title can become an expert these days (link to IPCC “expert reviewer”). We end up with these shouting matches, on air and online, with both sides throwing out numbers and figures without any real context. The good lines, sound-bite or video clip enter the echo-chamber and get repeated, cited or linked over and over again. And voila, the steadily increasing ratio of commentary to original research and reporting.
This craziness is why we should appreciate institutions like the IPCC. With this all war of context-free facts, figures and soundbites being fought 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year, sound summaries of the actual original research are more necessary than ever.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Coping with Commitment: New study on the challenge facing coral reefs
Maribo's back from a long hiatus, in which the host was overseas collecting data, samples and I fear some sort of parasite. Just in time, as a new study of mine on climate change and coral reefs just appeared in PLOS-One today (link - no subscription required).
As many of the regular readers have heard before, one of the biggest challenges posed by climate change is the timing. First, you have the time lag between greenhouse gas emissions and the climate effect of those emissions.
Basically, it takes time for the big complicated mix of atmosphere, ocean, land and ice to come to equilibrium. That’s why you sometimes here the climate compared to a big ship. You can hit the brakes but it will take a while for ship to actually come to a stop. Similarly, even if we froze emissions today, the climate would continue to warm a bit, because that warming is physically built into the system. This is often referred to as "committed warming".
Society may impart a second warming commitment. There is a lag between the any societal decision to take action and the action itself. Back to the ship analogy, it takes time for the officers on deck who first see the iceberg to relay the message to the captain. In other words, even if we decided to drastically emissions tomorrow, those reductions would not occur for some time. Hence all the hysteria about the construction of new coal-burning power plants. Since coals plants may last for decades they come with a considerable emissions “commitment”.
The new study looks at the implications of “committed warming” for conserving the world's coral reefs.
Committed warming is a critical issue when it comes to coral reefs. The dangerous impacts of climate change on coral reef are expected to occur sooner than most other prominently discussed climate change impacts (e.g. ice sheet melt, rainfall shifts in the topics).
Why? Water temperatures, only 1-2 degrees Celsius over the usual summer maximum temperatures can cause bleaching of corals and some other reef organisms. Bleaching, described here many times, is the paling of the corals caused by a breakdown of the symbiosis between the reef-building animals themselves and the colourful algae that live in the coral tissue. A bleached coral is still alive, but is deprived of its primary energy source. If the conditions persist, the corals can die.
Corals can grow back after a bleaching event, just as trees grow back after a fire, but it takes time. If bleaching events happen too often – say, because of ocean warming - most corals and the ecosystem as a whole will be unable to recover. Now, combine that with the rise in CO2 levels reducing the ability of corals to actually build reef, and you’ve got one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet.
This new study evaluates the “committed" frequency of bleaching events, and what it all means for coral reef conservation and for climate policy. The results show that the physical commitment alone is enough to make bleaching events harmfully frequent at over half of the world’s reefs by the end of the century. A possible additional commitment, caused by the time required to shift from a “business-as-usual” future to a GHG “mitigation” future, may cause over 80% of the world’s coral reefs to experience harmfully frequent events by 2030.
There is a possible silver lining. Thermal adaptation of 1.5 degrees C, whether via biological mechanisms, coral community changes or extreme management interventions, could postpone the forecast for 50-80 years in the “business-as-usual" case. That could provide time to change the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions and then prevent the majority of the world's reefs from experiencing harmfully frequent bleaching events this century.
Let's be clear. This is no panacea - the ecological costs of proposed adaptive mechanisms and the implications for climate policy are outlined in the discussions. Here's the final paragraph:
In summary, the results of this study indicate that a combination of greenhouse gas mitigation and improved coral reef management will be required to avoid the degradation of the world’s coral reef ecosystems from frequent mass coral bleaching events. Actions that enhance reef resistance and reef resilience - including protection of bleaching-resistant reefs, reduction of other stressors, and possibly even more radical suggestions like “seeding” reefs with more temperature-tolerant species of Symbiodinium – may be necessary to help coral reef ecosystems endure through the committed warming over the next several decades. These management actions, while important, will alone prove to be insufficient to protect coral reefs through the latter half of the century. The difference between the future scenarios presented in this study demonstrates that protecting the world’s coral reefs from increasing thermal stress will require a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over the next several decades.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
The media and scientific responsibility
Here are some long thoughts to chew on while Maribo's on hiatus the next few weeks. Comment moderation has been removed, so discuss away, and please play nice.
One of the challenges teaching about climate change is that the students are privilege to all the bad information available online and in other forms of media. Climate science is not unique in this sense; the 24-7 game of broken telephone known as the internet is a challenge for instructors of all sorts of scientific and non-scientific disciplines (just ask a psychology professor).
The science of climate change, however, unlike many but not all other subjects taught in universities, has been subject to organized and now well-documented disinformation campaigns by political groups, the oil and gas lobby, the coal industry, etc., what I call the skeptic industrial complex. It is hard for the uninformed reader to distinguish between the real science and the skeptics. Worse, it is hard for the uninformed reader to distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable skepticism - I'll come back to that.
The web of misinformation and disinformation poses a particular challenge when teaching about climate science and climate change to non-science students, as I do, because one cannot easily fall back on the scientific language of mathematics - the equations and the calculations best suited to check claims found in print and online. There's no one correct approach to this problem. Wary of leaving students hanging, wondering what they read online is reputable, and what is not, I try to make finding errors in the "climate news" a regular part of class.
There were no shortage of teachable moments the past few months, including the George Will fiasco at the Washington Post, the error-filled testimony by Will Happer before the US Congress, and the recent NY Times Magazine story about physicist Freeman Dyson's climate 'skepticism', many of which led to loud online debates. For the last assignment of this semester, my students critiqued one of Will's erroneous op-eds and a similar erroneous op-ed by the National Post's Lorne Gunter (for a little Canadian content). So the students did what anyone in a coffee shop with free wireless could do and what the editors of the two Posts did not do: they looked at the actual data and the original scientific reports.
Suffice to say, the students unanimously concluded that Will and Gunter's claims - that i) Arctic sea ice was not declining, ii) in the 1970s there were widespread scientific warnings about global cooling, and iii) global warming had "stopped" - were all wrong and should not have been published. The students also largely agreed with Chris Mooney's argument about the need to "learn to share some practices with scientists -- following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence."
The point: Don't take skepticism sitting down. Use it.
Will's columns provided us with an amazing teachable moment. So much so, that I'd argue that reason and climate science have come out the winner despite his repeated the same erroneous claims not once, not twice, but three time. This is not to dismiss the serious problems of his obstinacy and his seeming immunity from any editorial process. But think about what has transpired. Letters and e-mails about Will's erroneous columns force the Washington Post's ombudsman to respond. The Post published Mooney's response and a letter from the head of the WMO. When Will struck again, the Post's own reporters specifically outlined out Will's mistakes. And now the Post has now published an editorial slap to Will's false claims about Arctic Sea ice.
Five years ago, ten years ago, no one writes the ombudsman, no one calls for editors to resign, no reporters speak ill of columnists, and no editorial page publishes an op-ed implicitly criticizing its own columnist. The grassroots response worked. And the editors, albeit slowly, are getting the message. Bad science reporting won't be tolerated.
Of course, the scientific community must also act responsibly. The lack of responsibility is the core problem evident from the coverage of Freeman Dyson and from Princeton physicist Will Happer's congressional testimony.
Scientists are given the title of PhD or professor for being an expert in some field or fields of study. With that title comes great responsibility. Only those of us with the particular field know the boundaries of that field. A theoretical physicist like Dyson knows he is not an expert in terrestrial carbon cycling [and qualified to claim that trees can soak up all the extra CO2]. A physicist that specializes in optics knows that he/she is not conducting research on atmospheric radiative transfer [so as to claim that CO2 will not result in further warming] . But members of the public, journalists, political leaders, etc. without the benefit of years of specialized training in theoretical physics or whatever discipline to know the boundaries of that discipline. So they trust the words of a revered physicist on a subject outside his/her domain.
Scientists have a platform, by virtue of their perceived expertise. Scientists must use that platform responsibly.
And, listen, we all screw up at times. After all, we are people. We have opinions on a wide range of issue just like everyone else. And many of those opinions and ideas are half-baked or poorly informed. We need to draw a line between what is said casually to family, friends and colleagues, when not speaking from particular expertise, and what is said to reporters and members of Congress, when our qualifications are all that matters.
The key is to keep one's arrogance in check. Look, Dyson and Happer are undoubtedly brilliant scientists. But it is, after all, rather arrogant to conclude that the entire comunity of highly qualified scientists is wrong about their area of expertise based on a few back of the envelope calculations.
Thursday, April 09, 2009
The tragedy of the commons
I'm struck by a snippet from a NY Times article on how a US climate change bill will play in regions powered by coal. The quote from this particular family is repeated here not to pick on these individuals, but to capture the communication challenge that lies ahead:
About 130 miles to the northwest, Wendi Wood, a teacher, and her husband, Lee Wood, a fourth-generation farmer, live near the small town of Clarence with their three teenagers. Their six-bedroom house is four years old, and they, too, have many appliances, including seven televisions.
Electricity costs them about $280 in winter, $360 in summer. After the fall harvest, they dry grain in a silo; then the bills run $600 a month.
“Electricity is a major factor in what we can afford,” Ms. Wood said. She wants Washington to fight climate change, but said, “Don’t hurt the rural farmer and rural America to do it.”
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
GM's two-wheeled car of the future
Who else looked at this and thought "no wonder GM is broke"?
The odd two-wheeled tuk-tuk of the future is part of GM's plan to "remake itself as a purveyor of fuel-efficient vehicles".
I suppose you can give GM credit for finally being visionary and partnering with Segway to re-imagine urban transportation, even if that vision involves machines eeriely similar to those used by the immobile, sloth-like future humans in Disney's Wall-E.
Here's a radical idea for future urban transportation. Our legs.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Setting an example by bicycle
This short profile of a basketball player who cycles to work will probably be dismissed by most as a piece of NBA green-washing or climate branding. Call it a puff piece, that the player may have a Hummer at home, fine. Nonetheless, this little story encapsulates the challenge of shifting norms, of adopting an energy efficient lifestyle after years of celebrating excess. Laugh, sure. But cultural change has to start somewhere.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Are there really 93 months to act?
Communicating the urgency of climate change is an ongoing challenge. The problem is the time lag between GHG emissions and the climate impact, what we often refer to as "committed warming". There's also a "societal" warming commitment, caused by the lag between a decision to control emissions and the actual emissions control. That's why Jim Hansen protests the construction of new coal-fired power plants: they are a promise of future emissions and thus increase the societal warming commitment.
The latest approach is to provide estimates of how much time we have "left" to avoid dangerous climate change. Take Andrew Simms in the Guardian (please?):
Whatever the mistakes that allowed this situation to arise, there is growing international consensus that the best way out is via a green new deal policy package. Parts of the UK economy are in freefall with unemployment rising rapidly. At the same time, with less than 100 months to go before the world enters a new, more dangerous phase of global warming, there is an urgent need for the rapid environmental transformation of the economy.
100 months? I don't recall that in the IPCC. Simms' evidence is summarised here and here - there's even a ticking clock, a la the Fox TV show 24.
We found that, given all of the above, 100 months from today we will reach a concentration of greenhouse gases at which it is no longer "likely" that we will stay below the 2C temperature rise threshold. "Likely" in this context refers to the definition of risk used by the IPCC. But, even just before that point, there is still a one third chance of crossing the line.
Is this a useful PR tool? Or, in the desperation to encourage action on climate change, are the "100 hundred months" crowd causing more harm by providing false certainty in future predictions? For example, what will happen in January, 2017 if the world has not begun seriously curbing emissions -- or if it has?
Sunday, March 29, 2009
The Canadian emissions story
Earth Hour dipped electricity use in British Columbia by 1.1%. Again, a nice gimmick to raise awareness about energy use, but far far far from what's needed to tackle greenhouse gas emissions in Canada (right)
The Canadian government published a report earlier this year documenting the trends in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990, the first reporting year, up until 2006. The data reveals a lot of interesting and surprising trends and can answer some of the questions about the contribution of individual Canadian provinces raised by my recent post on change in per capita GHG emissions around the world.
Between 1990 and 2006, Alberta passed Ontario as the largest total emitter of greenhouse gases [top chart]. Alberta is responsible for 33% of emissions, despite housing only 11% of the Canadian population. Alberta alone was responsible for just over half of the total increase in GHG emissions between 1990 and 2006 [second chart].
The #2 province Ontario is responsible for 27% of national emissions but has almost four times the population. Therefore the per capita emissions in Ontario are 15 t CO2-eq / person, hardly a lofty goal, still more than three times that of China, but one quarter that of Alberta.
Saskatchewan is fourth in total emissions at 10% of national emissions, only slightly behind Quebec, despite housing only one-seventh of the population of la belle province. Saskatchewan’s carbon-intensive economy has become even more so over the past two decades. Thanks to a growing uranium and potash industries, expansion of oil production and reliance on coal power, the province of only one million people was responsible almost a quarter of the national increase in GHG emissions from 1990 to 2006.
Quebec, on the other hand is Canada’s pocket of Europe in more ways than one. Thanks to a heavy reliance on hydro power, la belle province’s per capita GHG emissions of 10.7 t CO2-eq/person are more in line with Europe than the rest of North America. Lower heating demands and increased reliance on hydro power helped make Quebec the one Canadian province where GHG emissions decreased (by 1%) between 1990 and 2006. Note the word province; this is not to slight the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, where GHG emissions decreased 17% over the same time period.
Per capita emissions [third chart] were relatively steady across much of the country between 1990 and 2006: there was a 12% decrease in Ontario, a 10% decrease in Quebec, and a 7% increase across the Maritimes. The big discrepancy is between Alberta and Saskatchewan. Alberta’s population growth kept pace with the growth in emissions – people came from other provinces to work in the oil sands operations. Saskatchewan, on the other hand, has seen a 67% increase in per capita emissions due to a declining population (this trend began to reverse in the past few years).
The carbon-intense nature of the economies of Alberta and Saskatchewan is best illustrated by a chart of the GHG emissions intensity: the GHG emissions per $ of GDP. This is shown in the final chart to the right (2006 only). In 2006, creating one dollar of GDP in Alberta required over five times the GHG emissions as in Ontario, over six times the GHG emissions as in Quebec. The high emissions intensity of Saskatchewan and Alberta leads to the interesting results that the emissions intensity appears to decrease with population.
There’s likely some economic logic to that pattern: for example, areas of higher populations and large cities are more “efficient” overall, and resource extractive industries tend to be located in areas of lower population.
These are just some of the broad patterns in the GHG data. There is much much more to analyse and discuss.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Lights dim around the world for Earth Hour
So far, aside from the stupid comments from Bjorn Lomborg ("the use of candles during the hour could actually produce more emissions than electric lights"), Earth Hour has been positively received in most of the world.
BONN, Germany (AP) — From an Antarctic research base to the Great Pyramids of Egypt and beyond, the world switched off the lights on Saturday for Earth Hour, dimming skyscrapers, city streets and some of the world's most recognizable monuments for 60 minutes to highlight the threat of climate change.
Time zone by time zone, nearly 4,000 cities and towns in 88 countries joined the event sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund to dim nonessential lights from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
An agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, is supposed to be reached in Copenhagen, Denmark, this December, and environmentalists' sense of urgency has spurred interest in this year's Earth Hour. Last year, only 400 cities participated; Sydney held a solo event in 2007.
In Bonn, WWF activists held a candlelit cocktail party on the eve of a U.N. climate change meeting, the first in a series of talks leading up to Copenhagen. The goal is to get an ambitions deal to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases that scientists say are dangerously warming the planet.
"People want politicians to take action and solve the problem," said Kim Carstensen, director of the global climate initiative for WWF, speaking in a piano bar bathed by candlelight and lounge music.
Organizers initially worried enthusiasm this year would wane with the world focused on the global economic crisis, Earth Hour executive director Andy Ridley told The Associated Press. But he said it apparently had the opposite effect.
"Earth Hour has always been a positive campaign; it's always around street parties, not street protests, it's the idea of hope, not despair. And I think that's something that's been incredibly important this year because there is so much despair around," he said.
The Chatham Islands, a small chain about 500 miles (800 kilometers) east of New Zealand, switched off its diesel generators to officially begin Earth Hour. Soon after, the lights of Auckland's Sky Tower, the tallest man-made structure in New Zealand, blinked off.
At Scott Base in Antarctica, New Zealand's 26-member winter team resorted to minimum safety lighting and switched off appliances and computers.
In Australia, people attended candlelit speed-dating events and gathered at outdoor concerts as the hour of darkness rolled through. Sydney's glittering harbor was bathed in shadows as lights dimmed on the steel arch of the city's iconic Harbour Bridge and the nearby Opera House.
And in Egypt, the Great Pyramids darkened, as did the Sphinx.
To the West, floodlights at the Acropolis in Athens were switched off and an outdoor concert was staged on an adjacent hill, which many Athenians approached in a candlelight procession. The Athens International Airport switched off the lights on one of its two runways.
In that other great ancient city, Rome, the Colosseum and St. Peter's Basilica were plunged into darkness.
In Paris, the Eiffel Tower, Louvre and Notre Dame Cathedral were among 200 monuments and buildings that went dark. The Eiffel Tower, however, only extinguished its lights for five minutes for security reasons because visitors were on the tower, said WWF France spokesman Pierre Chasseray.
"Above all in the current economic crisis, we should send a signal for climate protection," said Klaus Wowereit, the mayor of Berlin, one in a handful of German cities switching off lights at city halls and television towers for Earth Day for the first time.
Meanwhile, the Swiss city of Geneva switched off the lights on theaters, churches and monuments. Among them were the Reformation Wall, where floodlights normally illuminate 10-foot (three-meter) statues of John Calvin and other leaders of Protestantism. The city's motto engraved on either side of the statues is: "After darkness, light."
All of Spain's 52 provincial capitals turned off some lights an hour after sunset, silhouetting unlit landmarks such as the royal palace and parliament in Madrid, the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, and the Alhambra palace in Granada against darkening dusk skies.
A key 2010 football World Cup qualifier against Serbia posed a dilemma for Romanians. "Shall we watch the match or turn off the lights?," the 7plus daily asked in its main front-page headline.
The U.N. headquarters in New York and other facilities were dimming their lights to signal the need for global support for a new climate treaty.
U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-moon called Earth Hour "a way for the citizens of the world to send a clear message: They want action on climate change."
China participated for the first time, cutting the lights at Beijing's Bird's Nest Stadium and Water Cube, the most prominent 2008 Olympic venues.
In Bangkok, the prime minister switched off the lights on Khao San Road, a haven for budget travelers packed with bars and outdoor cafes.
Earth Hour organizers say there's no uniform way to measure how much energy is saved worldwide.
Earth Hour 2009 has garnered support from global corporations, nonprofit groups, schools, scientists and celebrities — including Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett and retired Cape Town Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
McDonald's Corp. planned to dim its arches at 500 locations around the U.S. Midwest. The Marriott, Ritz-Carlton and Fairmont hotel chains and Coca-Cola Co. also planned to participate.Friday, March 27, 2009
Will people participate in Earth Hour?
The optimistic organizers are hoping one billion people will switch off their lights tomorrow at 8:30 pm [your] local time. All sorts of different towns, cities and businesses are taking part. For just one example, tomorrow night's LA-Nashville hockey game is being played early so as not to conflict with the hour of darkness.
It is a gimmick, sure, but a surprisingly effective one. Last year, Earth Hour led to a measurable drop in electricity demand in participating Canadian, Australian and New Zealand cities last year. That won't solve climate change. It does at least make people think. A poll taken after last year's Earth Hour showed a majority of Canadians - across party lines - think it should happen more often.
Best "greenwashing" of the year?
And now for something completely ridiculous:
Pepsi is releasing a "Eco-fina", a more ecologically friendly version of the company's Aquafina bottled water. The Eco-Fina bottle is lighter and contain 20% less plastic. Never mind that the new light bottles will still contain plain-old tap water that has been subject to an unregulated and unnecessary purification process.
One may want to applaud the development of a new, more efficient beverage container. How about reserving that new technology for beverages that actually require a container?
This snippet from a 2006 article in the Globe and Mail neatly summarizes the inanity of the bottled water industry, especially the bottled water sold by the major beverage companies like Pepsi and Coke:
A one-litre bottle of Dasani brand water, sold at a Toronto supermarket recently for $1.59, retails for about 3,000 times the price of a litre of municipal water from nearby Brampton, where the container was filled. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. filters the municipal water and then adds minerals to improve its taste. Federal product labelling laws do not require bottlers to indicate that their products originally were tap water, but do require companies to say whether it is spring or mineral water.
Monday, March 23, 2009
A new online voice on the coral reef crisis
For the past few months, the site known as The Reef Tank has been educating the enthusiastic community of coral reef aquarium owners about marine science and the crisis facing the world's coral reefs. Their blog features an interview with me about my work on climate change and coral reefs, as well as some informative posts about ocean acidification and coral bleaching by coral reef expert John Bruno.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
A mea culpa by the Washington Post, or not
The Washington Post has published Chris Mooney's intelligent critique of the mistaken claims about climate science in recent columns by the paper's own George Will. Here's the take home message:
Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists -- following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It's also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be -- now more than ever.
Many online voices including Joe Romm and Mooney himself are applauding the Post for publishing an opinion piece that criticizes its own opinion columnist. While we applaud the implicit mea culpa, let's not forget that original fault here lies with the newspaper. A real victory will be an assurance from the Post that the editorial board will fact-check and properly vet opinion pieces, even those written by a star syndicated columnist.
Mooney's right that scientists apply critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. Guess what? We still make mistakes and misinterpret results. That's why we are required to state our methods. And that's why we have peer review.
The same should be true of the editorial page. Surely, we should expect better of a columnist like Will, that he will follow up on sources, properly weigh evidence and double check all his sources and facts. But incorrect claims about climate science or whatever subject are bound to happen, intentional or not. That's why you have editors. That's why you have an editorial process.
Don't get me wrong. George Will should be criticized for the content of his columns. As should Lorne Gunter for the unsubstantiated drivel in his climate-related columns that appear in Canada's National Post. The thing is, even if Will or Gunter changes their ways, there will be some other columnist willing to cherry-pick misleading bits of information. It's great to see an opinion piece that defines good science journalism. Now let's see an editorial policy that does the same.
