The APEC nations have agreed on the expected deal (CNN/AP) on climate change and energy use.
Hmm. Note the many adjectives involve. Tentative (no one signed anything yet). Non-binding. Aspirational. Voluntary. Consensus-based.
Those words describes the deal best. The last one may jump out. The use of the term "consensus-based" implies that the alternative to this agreement, like a post-Kyoto plan involving all the nations party to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, would not be consensus-based. It is setting up the straw man, much like saying [as Pres. Bush and PM Howard have] you desire a technology-based approach implies that others do not.
The Globe and Mail reports that Canada and Japan pushed for (a voluntary) 50% emissions reduction by 2050 goal though erroneously reports that the APEC leaders agreed on a 25% reduction by 2030. The agreement, as discussed here before, is for a 25% decrease in energy intensity.
I don't particularly enjoy repeating myself on this issue of intensity-based targets. But people keeps getting it wrong. Here's the key: An intensity-based target is not inherently evil. The problem is this target much those used in US policy and past Canadian government policy is, at best, a forecast of business-as-usual for the next 23 years. As such, it appears to be designed for show, and not much else.
So, presuming the APEC nations all sign the final agreement, the question remains: which is better, a weak deal or no deal at all? Is it better to have these reluctant nations put their names on something? Or will it undermine other efforts?
Monday, September 10, 2007
Resolution at the APEC summit. Well, sort of.
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Final word on the APEC summit
Forging an international climate change agreement that includes both China and the US was never going to be easy. And even an agreement with long-term emissions reduction targets might be ignored by future governments; just look at Canada's experience with Kyoto.
As I've been saying for in the past couple posts, there will be those that call the APEC Summit a success simply because it happened. Baby steps, right? There is some logic to that argument. Unless, that is, we are at a tipping point. Not for climate change, but for international climate policy. Then, the final word from Sydney and from the meeting in Washington later this month could push the political world down the wrong path and handcuff the efforts under the UNFCCC to set binding targets.
The text of Sydney Declaration on Climate Change and Energy is not much different from the draft leaked a few weeks ago. The APEC leaders did, however, manage to lift the already comical statement about aspirational goals to the height of absurdity.
We agree to work to achieve a common understanding on a long-term aspirational global emissions reduction goal to pave the way for an effective post-2012 international arrangement.
On the mountain of international climate policy, I'd say peak is a binding emissions target. Below the snowy, windy summit, amongst the alpine grasses and rising treeline might be a goal, which by most definitions, is a non-binding target. Further down, in the cloud forest, where el sapo dorado (the golden toad of Monteverde) teeters on the edge of extinction, you mind find an aspirational goal. At the bottom, in drying rainforest, might be a common understanding, which is somewhere short of an agreement, on an aspirational goal.
Unfortunately, this APEC statement does not even reach the level of our low-lying rainforest. If our policy mountain were a oceanic volcano, an agreement to work to achieve a common understanding on an aspirational goal would lie beneath the surface of the sea, where if nothing changes, it will be joined in several decades by the once-coastal villages.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Change in the climate of the APEC summit?
You might say the best case scenario for the climate is that the Asia-Pacific leaders fail to agree on a "Sydney Declaration" today. The likely agreement, a version of which leaked a couple weeks ago, would feature some nebulous technology and trade incentives and some very weak intensity-based or "aspirational" GHG emissions goals.
Such mitigation-light is a real danger. If the APEC summit succeeds in folding China, the US, Australia, Canada and others into a weak, non-binding greenhouse gas emissions plan, the UN efforts to assemble an aggressive post-Kyoto emissions reduction policy with actual science-based goals could be scuttled. One sign of hope is the Chinese preference for a UN-based climate change framework.
Even without an agreement, the danger is that the APEC summit and the upcoming US-planned summit in Washington will further the, for lack of a better, re-branding of international emissions policy. I'm struck by the language. Take for example, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's increasingly carefully worded statements: "strategies that are comprehensive, practical and realistic". They sound sensible, unless the objective is a long-term plan that avoids dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Another example was yesterday's Washington Post, reporting the false dichotomy that the US President Bush and Australian PM John Howard support a "technology approach" over a Kyoto-style approach, as if Kyoto requires going back to horse-drawn carriages.
If anything of value comes out of the APEC summit, it is that we have reached the point where the major world leaders all feel compelled, whether by science or by politics, to at least claim a serious desire to combat climate change [one reason why he won't have a chance to join the club, Law and Order reruns or not]. And this hilarious evidence of just how much the world trusts Canadians.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
To offset or not to offset
There is lots of furor over the ethics and the efficacy of carbon offsets. Personally, I doubt the validity of many of the offsets; it is a mystery how there can be be so many opportunities to purchase carbon offsets today, yet at the same time, few major programs that are substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions. When asked, I sometimes suggest people look at purchasing offsets (from certain organizations not these lunatics) like donating money to a worthwhile cause.
Bad advice? Gar Lipow at Gristmill picked up on this story in the Times of London that makes it seem as though offset business is on a slippery slope to slavery :
When David Cameron flew to India to open a JCB factory for a party donor, green-thinking supporters could rest assured that his visit would be carbon neutral. “We are offsetting all our emissions through Climate Care,” the Tory leader wrote on his blog. “As well as planting trees, they also invest in renewable energy projects in the developing world.”
Somewhere in the Indian countryside, a farmer is about to repay Mr Cameron’s debt to the planet. Climate Care’s latest enterprise is to provide “treadle pumps” to poor rural families so they can get water on to their land without using diesel power. The pumps are worked by stepping on pedals. If a peasant treads for two hours a day, it will take at least three years to offset the CO2 from Mr Cameron’s return flight to India.
If nothing else, that paragraph captures the vast income inequality. Let the angst and arguing begin.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Arctic sea ice continues to set records
Traveling from the tropics back to the poles:
The extent of sea ice in the Arctic continues set records. This map from the National Snow and Ice Data Center from Sept 3rd shows the sea ice at 4.42 million square kilometers, already far below the lowest recorded value of 5.32 million square kilometers from Sept 20-21, 2005. The pink line on the map is the median extent.
Just incredible. If you're looking for just one sign of dramatic climate change, one that follows from our basic understanding of the climate system and the exchange of heat between the planet's surface and the atmosphere, and one that may be out-pacing all of our predictions, skip all the complicated questions about hurricane frequency and intensity, and look at the precipitous drop in the extent of Arctic sea ice. May the flag planting continue...
Monday, September 03, 2007
The odd couple: hurricanes and coral bleaching
The Atlantic hurricane season is like the baseball season. Officially, it officially begins in the spring. Every year, the fans get all riled up for opening day. They then spend the subsequent months disappointed by the lack of drama and begin calling for the team to fire its manager (or hurricane forecaster). When the summer starts to wind down, the fans are reminded, once again, that all the big (ok, regular season) games tend to happen in late August and September.
With a trail of wreckage from Dean and Felix bearing down on Honduras and Belize (right), once again we're being reminded that hurricane activity often peaks right around now. Not in June, the time of the first peak in hurricane media coverage. Not in July, when everyone starts whining about the hurricane forecast. It happens in late August and September, when ocean temperatures in the tropical north Atlantic and the Caribbean tend to peak.
Coral bleaching events also happen during the annual peak in sea surface temperatures (SSTs). There are key differences, of course. Bleaching is driven largely by anomalously warm SSTs; UV light levels play a crucial role as well, although since the two variables tend to be correlated, temperature is a decent proxy. Hurricanes, on the other hand, are driven by a variety of factors, of which, the SSTs are only one.
You could say the ongoing furor over human-induced climate change in hurricane activity - the subject of Chris Mooney's recent book - is centered on this problem. The climate change --> warmer SSTs link is more or less straight-forward to test. The warmer SSTs --> more intense or more frequent storms is not. So, for example, the role of climate change in the 2005 Caribbean bleaching event, as we did in the paper published earlier this year, can be evaluated with more certainty than evaluating the role of climate change in the 2005 hurricane season.
While the SST link to hurricanes is more complicated than that to coral bleaching, it is not a complete surprise that strong hurricanes and coral bleaching events often occur in the same places each year. This year, there's been bleaching off Oman, near the region hit by Cyclone Gonu; in northern Madagascar, an area hit by a sequence of cyclones; in Okinawa, near the areas where typhoons have passed. So, the NOAA Coral Reef Watch data products like the Hotspot or DHW animations give a picture of the development of bleaching events and also a very rough idea of places that have experienced major hurricanes (try comparing the animations to this Google map of strong 2007 hurricanes). You can see that although thermal stress on corals is too low in much of the central and southern Caribbean where Dean and Felix have passed to cause coral bleaching, but temperatures are still above normal.
Like other odd couples, the combination of a coral bleaching event and a hurricane can be an utter disaster for the inhabitants of the area (e.g., corals weakened or killed by bleaching are then broken apart by the wave activity). A paper published earlier this year found an example of an opposite effect; cold water upwelling caused by the passage of hurricanes in 2005 reduced the thermal pressure on corals in the US Virgin Islands. Of course, the 2005 hurricanes and the bleaching were both driven by the warm water, so perhaps we would not have had one event without the other.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Coral decline in the Indo-Pacific
The decline of coral reefs has entered the literary world: a recent New Yorker featured Kimiko Hahn’s poem The Fever about coral bleaching. Take a look before it disappears from the online site.
The poem includes the passage "I wonder if it’s, yet again, the ozone layer". Hopefully the author is playing off the history human impacts on the environment not suggesting ozone depletion is the cause of coral bleaching. UV light does play a role; thankfully no corals are growing on the shores of Antarctica.
The poem's appearance is well-timed. First, in the past month, there have been warm-water anomalies in Florida, in Okinawa (Ishigaki) and the Northern Mariana Islands. In each case, people on the ground reported coral bleaching was underway. The predictive ability never ceases to amaze me. You can see the temperatures maps at NOAA's Coral Reef Watch (the data is best visualized using Google Earth).
Second, the IPCC's full Working Group II report - that's the climate change impacts section - is now available. The impact of climate change on corals reefs is one of several "cross-cutting" themes including the impact of climate change on coral reefs. Rather than look flip through the 20 chapters of the full report for information about corals, you can just read the case studies at the end (scroll down, it is before the appendix). The summary is a pretty solid survey of the science; unfortunately, since the IPCC report was finished a while back and could not include some more recent results.
Third, a terrific meta-analysis by John Bruno and Elizabeth Selig of UNC published a few weeks ago in the free (yes, free to anyone) online journal Public Library of Science documents the decline of coral cover across the Indo-Pacific. Bruno and Selig went through the arduous task of analysing every survey of coral cover conducted in the past 40 years. They found coral cover across Indo-Pacific reefs may have declined from over 40% in the 1980s to closer to 20% today. The method of averaging the data over such a large area may be questioned; there may be bias in where we choose to study corals. But the study makes it very clear that coral cover is decreasing. The paper has caused quite a stir (see Coral Bones and Climate Shifts for some accessible discussion).
The decline is believed to be caused by the usual suspects: overfishing, destructive fishing practices, disease, pollution / sedimentation, and coral bleaching due to rising ocean temperatures. The gradual decline in coral cover may seem to point to the direct human threats rather than coral bleaching, the rationale being that coral bleaching events like the 1997/1998 event are widespread and should result in step changes in coral cover (punctuated equilibrium over gradualism?). A tempting argument, but the data does not support it.
In truth, individual events are never that widespread. Coral bleaching has yet to occur in concert across globe or even across the massive and diverse region in the Bruno and Selig study. For example, the famed 1997/1998 was not really global: events occurred in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and parts of the Pacific, due in part to El Nino. The "Indo-Pacific" covers SE Asia and Australia east to Tahiti, an area largely not affected by the 1997/1998 El Nino (the W Pacific is, if anything, cooler during El Nino events; bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef happened when the Pacific flipped to La Nina conditions in 1998).
So, if bleaching was a major cause of a decrease in coral cover, a gradual decline, not a step change, in total average coral cover for a large region, or for the entire globe, is exactly what we should expect to see. That's not to say bleaching is "the" cause, rather one of the causes.
This year, the N Marianas and Okinawa. Next year?
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
The Cleantech Collective
I wanted to spread the word about the launch of the Cleantech Collective,
an exciting new online forum for people interested in or working on sustainability and clean energy:
"Cleantech Collective is a moderated online business community for clean tech investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers and concerned citizens. If that's you, sign up and start building a personal network with your peers and leading environmental experts...create a profile and promote your business...submit your own content, rate posts and leave comments... get advice you can use from the web's leading experts on clean technology."
Leak of Asia-Pacific climate policy
Apparently I’m not the only one talking about energy intensity.
The declaration – you can read it here – is a remarkably evasive document (if it is genuine...). It takes real craftsmanship to construct something like this.
A 25% reduction in energy intensity, essentially producing more income with less energy is important, yes. Especially in China and India. But is it an accomplishment? No. Like the US and Canadian targets based on emissions intensity, this target is a farce. It is destined to happen with or without a "climate" policy. The real advance, as the graph shows, would be a decrease in the greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy production.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Reporting and promoting science
Science sells these days. In the push for advertising dollars and readership, the conventional and electronic media strive to link new scientific results to the pressing issues of the day.
And, to be fair, in the push for tenure and grant dollars, we academics can be guilty of the same. The holy grail used to be getting a paper in Nature or Science. Now it is getting a paper in Nature or Science so that the paper will be reported on CNN or the BBC.
The intent, in either case, can be benign. A lot of the published science today, on subjects like climate change, is important news. But in the effort to "frame" - to use the terminology in the Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney article that created buzz earlier this year - science for public and political consumption, a lot of mistakes are being made. It ranges from the inaccurate reporting and questionable publicity of the mythical lake that would resolve the very real crisis in Darfur to outright abuse of statistics to throw stones at solid science.
Take these three recent headlines... please.
1
I call this is a "false positive". There's been a huge and unnecessary uproar over the discovery of a minor mathematical error in the NASA GISS historical temperature dataset. The error means that 1998 was no in fact the warmest year in US history, but is tied with 1934. As the NASA scientists themselves report (pdf), the error has a negligible impact on the global temperature, no impact on global rankings of the warmest years, and absolutely no impact on the evidence for human influence on the climate (see Tamino or Realclimate for details).
2) Warming will pause then full steam ahead, scientists contend
This is the "we didn't read the whole paper". These reports of a "global warming" forecast for the next decade come from a innovative short-term climate modeling study published in Science. The goal of the study was to test the ability to predict climate on decadal or shorter time-scales, a specially developed climate model that explicitly considers the frequency of large-scale atmosphere-ocean oscillations like El Nino (see Tamino). At the end of the study, after a lengthy model validation against observed data from the recent past, the authors discuss the model's predictions for the next ten years, stressing they are contingent on stochastic variables like the occurrence of El Ninos. The headlines made it seem as though the scientific community had confidently concluded that 'warming will pause' for a couple years.
3) Trees won't fix global warming
And finally, "we just didn't understand the paper". The headlines are based on research, presented at last week's ESA meeting, from Duke University's Free Air Carbon Enrichment (FACE) site, where scientists have been testing the effect of higher CO2 levels on tree growth for the past ten years. In the past, scientists had thought that higher atmospheric CO2 would effectively 'fertilize' plants. The Duke experiments showed that this fertilization effect was limited by the availability of water and nutrients (press release). In an effort to link the result to a public issue - carbon offsets - the media stories reported that new research shows planting trees won't work to combat global warming. In other words, planting trees won't take up ANY carbon. Of course it would; all that wood is made of carbon, where else could it come from? The Duke research only showed that there won’t be an extra growth bump because there’s more CO2 levels in the air, not that there won't be any growth at all.
This is the danger of popularizing science. As we saw with the coverage of the Darfur Lake, more attention was given to the initial headline than to the later reports that the 'lake' did not in fact hold any water. Unfortunately, with such quick turnaround in reporting, it is vital that all of us, the one's doing the research, the one's writing the press releases and the one's writing the news story, get it right the first time. It's not a trivial task. But otherwise, these misrepresentations (about global temperature) or misintepretations (about short-term climate prediction) or mistakes (about trees and carbon) make it into the public consciousness.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Arctic sea ice about to set record / Photo of the week
In case you missed it, William Chapman of the University of Illinois reported last week (on his site Cryosphere Today) that Arctic sea ice has, or will very soon, reach an all-time low, breaking the previous record low in 2005. 
Skeptics are awaiting the results of the sea ice's blood test.
The news reminded me of this photo of the east coast Greenland I took a few weeks ago. This is well south of the sea ice limit, but as you can see, there are plenty of icebergs (leftovers from winter ice? Products of calving ice shelves / land ice on the coast?)
The National Snow and Ice Data Center disagrees Chapman's exact data - it uses a different averaging method - but concurs that the sea ice will reach a record minimum before the melt season is over. The Center even started a news site devoted entirely to covering the finer points of the ice melt season. It's a climate junkies dream: not only can you track the bleaching of corals and tropical storms online every day of the week, you can now watch the ice melt too. I'm waiting for the all global warming cable channel, with the 24-7 climate news ticker.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Energy intensity and the challenge that lies ahead
A passage about "energy intensity" in the, er, cheery Thomas Homer-Dixon book The Upside of Down got me thinking more about the historical trend in GHG emissions intensity.
For new readers, a couple months back I showed that the globally-averaged emissions intensity has been decreasing for decades even though the total emissions were increasing. In other words, the economy has been expanding faster than GHG emissions. Therefore, a future emissions target based on the rate of emissions per economic production, as was proposed in Canada, would allow total emissions to increase.
History Database of the Global Environment (similar analysis has been done for the recent past by the IPCC's WG III and by Informetrica for Canada alone).
The graph shows that the emissions per unit energy - the blue line - has been relative stable since the Industrial Revolution. The energy intensity- the green line - mirrors the original emissions intensity curve. It peaked in the 1920s and has been decreasing since.
In other words, the emissions intensity has been falling for the past eighty years because we’ve been producing more stuff with less energy not because we’ve become more efficient, emissions-wise, at producing energy. Over the past three decades, world energy production has actually became less GHG efficient due largely to increased energy use in Asia. Emissions intensity decreased during this time only because, as a planet, we were able to produce more income with less energy.
The graph is useful for articulating the challenge that lies ahead. Since it will take time to rebuild the existing energy production infrastructure ("slow turnover of capital stock"), becoming more energy efficient, producing more stuff with less energy is critical to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the short-term. That's the green line. But to achieve the long-term emissions reductions (ie. like these proposals) required to avoid dangerous interference with the climate, we'll need to move the blue line. In other words, we'll need to radically change the way be produce, not just use, energy. And, again, with the slow "turnover of capital stock", we need to start planning as soon as possible.
Monday, August 06, 2007
US Energy Bill passes, for now
The US Congress passed the broad and controversial Energy Bill on Saturday. President Bush has threatened to veto the bill over the cuts in oil subsidies and the 15% renewable portfolio standard (RPS) for utilities.
The utilities' anti-RPS argument is that renewable energy potential is low in some parts around the country. It has caught on with the media. As CNN puts it:
Utilities in Southeast and Midwest states that lack wind currents needed to justify new wind turbines would have to pay billions of dollars in penalties to comply with the rules.
Yes, wind energy potential varies geographically. The South would be at a disadvantage if wind were the only form of renewable energy available. The midwest, however, should have some of the highest wind energy potential in the country. And as long as the planet is receiving energy from the sun, there will be at least some wind currents everywhere.
Friday, August 03, 2007
US Congress to debate Energy Bill
The US Congress is debating an Energy Bill today (HR 3221 – read it here). It is different from the recently passed Senate Energy Bill in a number of ways.
Otherwise, the bill is a grab-bag of different projects, many good (testing photovoltaic roofs), many oddly specific (no incandescent lights on coast guard vessels), many that will be labeled pork barrel (money for some rather specific biofuel programs) and many that will cause a double-take (a line item study on ice sheets!).
And then there is this:
Sec. 6102. MANAGEMENT OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS… so as to achieve zero net annual greenhouse gas emissions from the agencies by fiscal year 2050.”
Yep, the bills says all US government operations are to be carbon neutral by 2050. As the NY Times reports, that would include the Pentagon. Let’s just hope this isn’t used as an argument to shift to nuclear, rather than conventional, warfare.
That is one area where Iraq is leading the US; as Eli points out, if the present trend continues, electricity generation in Baghdad will become carbon neutral by the end of 2008.
UPDATE: President Bush has threatened to veto the bill.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
A good tool for calculating your emissions
If you're looking for a carbon calculator, try this one put together by the Berkeley Institute for the Environment (thanks to Atmoz for the tip). Unlike most of the calculators out there, it does more than multiply the # of miles your drive and fly by some factors and spit out in answer. It considers several forms of transport, home heating and electricity, the food you eat and even how you spend the rest of your money, then compares your results to the American and world average.
My estimated personal emissions in the past year were nothing to be proud of, thanks almost entirely to twice flying halfway around the planet and back. Coming back always gets you. I take little solace in the fact that my emissions total was still less than the average American, even in the transport category. Instead, I take two lessons: a) studying the effect of climate change on the environment often contributes to the problem, no surprise there, and b) transportation is so stunningly inefficient in this country that someone can circle the planet twice and still produce less greenhouse gas emissions than the average American.
As for the calculator, my only beef is the, er, beef. Emissions from consuming red meat and consuming dairy are similar (per $ spent), so a lacto-ovo vegetarian may end up with similar or higher food-related emissions than a regular at Mel's Char Palace. From all the research we've done, dairy is much more efficient, in terms of the grams of feed required to create a gram of food, for the simple reason that milking doesn't kill a cow. This point that seems to be missed a lot; the source of greenhouse gas emissions from meat is not the animal itself, but all the energy that went into growing the crops that are then fed to the animal.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Still no lake beneath Darfur
As Chevy Chase would say, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
In case you missed it, there is no miracle lake lying under the sands of Sudan. Unintentional or not, the development of the lake story is like a case study in Spin 101.
First, a (presumably unintentional) misleading press release. Second, some seriously sloppy media coverage. As the Columbia Journalism Review puts it "no reporter stopped to ask, is there water in the lake?" Third, the initial story finally gets the deserved, well-researched debunking in Nature, but it is too late, it is last week's news already. The result: the real story receives virtually no media attention.
I'm surprised the science blogosphere hasn't been screaming more about this. Wonder how all those scientific mistruths, like the crazy arguments used by climate change 'skeptics', entered the public conscience? Here you go. Ancient Lake Darfur, Exhibit A.
Dead Zone in Gulf is third largest since 1985
Though I'm reticent to link to any news article under the cable-TV-news-ish heading "Planet in Peril", CNN reports that this summer's Gulf of Mexico dead zone has been measured at about 20, 460 km2 in size. That makes it the third largest since measurement began in 1985.
The hypoxic zone was expected to be unusually large this year because of the high flux of nitrogen -- the nutrient that fuels the high productivity on the continental shelf that leads to the consumption of oxygen from the bottom waters -- from the Mississippi River this spring. The blame can likely be placed on the weather and possibly even the increase in corn planting (due to high prices / ethanol demand).
Now off to grab my cape. The planet is in peril.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
The mythical lake beneath Darfur
A news article in Nature mercifully explains the reality behind these crazy new stories about a "lake" underneath Darfur.
It is not a lake. Despite what was reported last week, nobody is going to drill down a few metres under the sand and find a massive body of freshwater. What the Boston University scientists found, using ground-penetrating satellite observations, was essentially an underground depression that signifies that a body of water likely existed underneath northern Sudan at sometime in the past.
Every aspect of the publicity of this story was disturbing.
First, the press release from Boston University was misleading, at best. It should have been explicit, right up front, that the scientists discovered a dry ancient lake bed beneath the sands, and hope that water from that lake might still be found in the adjoining rock.
From Nature:
The media's portrayal of a lake that actually contains water now stems from the way the Boston group presented its claims, says Mohamed Abubuker, an official at the Ministry of Irrigation and Water Resources in Khartoum. "The general public in Sudan, and even some very high-ranking officials, came to believe that what has been discovered is literally a lake — perhaps even with fish in it," he says. "The way El-Baz presented his efforts helped consolidate this misconception. It was like a political rally for a presidency run-up rather than
a scientific portrayal of facts."
El-Baz contests this allegation. "It is incomprehensible for anyone to think it is a physical lake," he says, adding that he consistently made it clear that his argument was that the lake's water would have seeped through the sandstone substrate to accumulate as groundwater, and that drilling the sandstone under and around the ancient lake could yield fresh water.
Even the coverage and Sudanese response is all an honest misunderstanding, this is what happens publicity of science trumps the science itself. It is clear from the strong negative reaction from other geologists and scientists with expertise on the region that there are legitimate concerns about the study's conclusions:
Geologists argue that the rocks beneath and around the ancient lake are no more likely to hold water than those elsewhere in the Nubian aquifer. "Nearly everywhere it is present in Egypt the Nubian sandstone is water-bearing, so it is a matter of simple common sense that it would be the first place to look for significant groundwater reserves in Sudan," says Neil Sturchio, a geologist at the University of Illinois in Chicago, who describes the lake story as "hype".
There may actually be less chance of finding substantial water in the lake vicinity in northern Darfur than elsewhere on the aquifer. Although the porous, water-retaining sandstone aquifer is up to 3,500 metres thick at its northern fringes in Egypt, it thins to just a few hundred metres in northern Darfur, its southernmost reach.
Second, the press release begat these buoyant but almost comically naive stories about science saving Darfur. Even if Lake Superior was discovered five metres below the surface, it would not alone "bring peace" to the region. As was discussed here last week, the drying of the Sahel helped set the climate, there's a reason that word has dual meanings, for the current conflict. But it is not simple cause and effect. Opening a faucet won't end things tomorrow.Is this merely a series of mis-communications? Is it a case of well-meaning people hoping to help an embattled part of the world? Or it it a case of scientists seeking publicity and of a hyperactive media not properly vetting stories? You tell me.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
New online voice on coral reefs and climate change
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg's new blog Climate Shifts is a welcome addition to the online coverage of climate change and coral reefs. Ove is one of the world's top experts on the subject; his 1999 paper on climate change and coral bleaching (in the Aussie journal Marine and Freshwater Research) helped bring the problem to the attention of the public and other scientists, myself included.
The comments after recent post on the ridiculous documentary "The Great Barrier Reef Swindle" (not to be confused with the equally ridiculous "The Great Global Warming Swindle", how about the great title swindle?) reflects the contentious debate with the coral reef science community on the right way to discuss the existential threat climate change appears to pose to many of the world's reefs. Some experts think we're fixing the place settings on the Titanic, so to speak, by not screaming about the climate change threat more. Others disagree.
Our friend Caspar Henderson in the UK picked out the astute comment from Charles Sheppard, who literally wrote the book on Indian Ocean corals. I'll do the same:
I think the media (and some simple scientists it seems!) can’t grasp the difference between species extinction (as in Dodo, Sabre-Tooth Tiger etc) and ecological extinction (as in the system is too broken to work any more). One remaining oak tree in a clear-felled mud-scape is not species extinction of the oak, but the forest doesn't do foresty things any more.
I have recently returned (again) from a very heat stressed region of the coral reef world - Arabian/Persian Gulf - and dived for many hours on once rich reefs. I saw a live coral at intervals of perhaps 20 or 50 metres apart, the rest being dead. That is zero coral cover to the nearest whole number, but it is still not species-extinct. You would need to measure cover to about 0.0001% to register a positive number there. But then, to how many decimal places do we need to measure ‘dead’? Answer: to many, if you are looking to confirm species extinction, but none at all if you want to determine whether you still have a reef.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Pros and cons of the US Senate Energy Bill
A couple provisions in the last month's US Senate Energy Bill - technically the Renewable Fuels, Consumer Protection, and Energy Efficiency Act of 2007 - received most of the attention:
i) the increase in CAFE standards, and
ii) the renewable fuels standard.
It turns out both provisions have some quirky loopholes that were missed in much of the mainstream media coverage so far.
1. CAFE standards
With all the political hurdles, any change in CAFE standards is an accomplishment. As this well-researched article in Salon carefully explains, the actual goal -- that automobiles sold in 2020 average 35 mpg -- may not be worthy of that much praise.
First, it sets a rate of increase could be matched or surpassed without any policy:
It takes about a decade for the nation's vehicle fleet to turn over -- for new cars to replace old ones -- so any change to CAFE takes years to have a real impact on the average fuel economy of vehicles on the road... if you averaged the mileage of the most fuel-efficient cars, trucks, SUVs and minivans sold in the U.S. today, you'd already get a combined mileage of 31 miles per gallon... cars that Toyota sells in the United States almost meet the 2013 standard already, getting just shy of 35 miles per gallon... In Japan, the current average is 45 miles per gallon.
Second, the bill gives automakers one big out:
If the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration can show that it's not "cost effective" for automakers to meet the 35 mpg goal, then it won't have to require them to do so.
These new CAFE provisions may actually get weakened further by the US Congress (where Democratic lawmakers from the automobile-producing states hold some sway). Efficiency will increase a bit without regulation simply due to current market pressures. But, as our carrot-munching friend noted in a comment here, without tougher standards or regulation, people may not have enough incentive to shift from the "safer" large vehicles towards smaller more efficient vehicles.
2. Renewable Fuels Standard
The bill sets a new target of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022. Opponents of corn-based ethanol cheered the "capping" of its production at 15 billion gallons.
As part of some ongoing research, a colleague and I read through the renewable fuels portion of the bill for the section on corn. Actually, we just searched for the "corn". Nothing. We tried "maize". Nope.
You see, there is no cap specifically on corn. The target is for 21 billion gallons of "advanced fuels". The remainder, 15 billion, can be conventional ethanol. Flipping back to the beginning of Bill reveals that "advanced" means "fuel derived from renewable biomass other than corn starch." That's where the news of a 15 billion cap came from.
It'll be interesting to discover how this standard will be interpreted. Does a small conversion of corn cellulose or non-starch parts of the corn plant (i.e. relative to the use of the starch in the grain) allow corn-based ethanol production to be included as an advanced fuel? Will conventional fuels created from sorghum, a crop similar to corn grown in drier parts of the US, or from durum wheat be considered advanced fuels?
Perhaps the intent of the authors in structuring the Bill in this manner was benign. At the very least, the language is very curious.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Drying in Darfur
The recent UN Environment Program Report on the role of the environment in the
Environmental degradation, as well as regional climate instability and change, are major underlying causes of food insecurity and conflict in Darfur – and potential catalysts for future conflict throughout central and eastern Sudan and other countries in the Sahel belt. Setting aside all of the social and political aspects of the war in Darfur, the region is beset with a problematic combination of population growth, over-exploitation of resources and an apparent major long-term reduction in rainfall. As a result, much of northern and central Darfur is degraded to the extent that it cannot sustainably support its rural population.
The Sahel region of the Sudan, including Darfur, has been drying for decades. After reading the report, I obtained the available historical rainfall data from El Fasher in Darfur from the WMO. The anomaly (annual rainfall minus 1950-2004 mean) illustrates the story told in the UNEP report.
Rainfall from 1985-2004 (the last twenty years available) was 40% lower than rainfall in the 1950s and 1960s. As rainfall decreased, the agriculturalists moved into more marginal lands leaving less space for the nomadic pastoralists. This caused overgrazing in other lands and increasing conflict for land.
There are debates as to the cause of the decrease in rainfall. It is some combination of warming ocean temperatures (shifting the monsoon), possibly related to climate change, and feedbacks from land use change. Whatever or not human-induced climate change has played a direct role, Darfur is certainly an example of how climate change in general can contribute to conflict and human suffering.
No, please, you go first
The mixed reception to the Live Earth extravaganza points to curious lingering question about the public ability to take action on climate change. For all the “what you can do to fight climate change” lists, a survey published last month suggests the real problem is convincing people that individual actions will add up.
The report “What assures consumers on climate change?” published by Consumers International in June found that 75% of people in the US and UK are concerned about climate change but don't see how personal action would make a difference. The report was flavour of the day in the ADD-blogosphere a couple weeks back and forgotten far too quickly.
This conclusion from the report says something about what broad community events, like Live Earth, could maybe accomplish:
... the current strategy of using more information to shift individuals one-by-one from a position of concern to one of action, is having limited impact. Such approaches only work where individuals feel that they are acting as part of a community which reciprocates and endorses their action. This may mean their immediate community of like minded peers, their national community including government and big business or even the global community. To get people to act in the confusion of an information rich world requires that they see that others are acting.
I still think it should have been held on Labour Day.
The aftermath of Live Earth
Over the weekend, the Live Earth concerts took a rhetorical beating in the press. You may not like the style of reporting, but you have to admit news like this does have a point (not all the news was negative; One World has a good story about momentum being generated in China).
Now it turns out that the prime-time Live Earth package on NBC had fewer viewers than a rerun of Cops and the animated film Monsters, Inc. Really. It seems like more people wrote columns criticizing Live Earth than tuned in to it on television.
Maybe the biggest problem with Live Earth was the timing. The date - July 7 or 7-7-07 - is pleasing the superstitious numerologists but otherwise impractical. Why hold the event in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere summer, when far fewer people here are watching television, surfing the internet or following current events at all? Any buzz generated by Live Earth was destined to wilt in the summer heat. Next time, hold the concert on Labour Day.
Then again, to paraphrase the voice in Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will criticize.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Fires rage across the western US
Astounding. South Dakota, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona. The map on the left is the dewpoint across the US. It is high across much of the east, where we're enduring a stretch of humid weather (high of 36 C in Princeton today). But quite low out west, reflecting the dry conditions.
Has the epidemic of wildfires reached the point that we need to talk about the summer fire season the way we talk about the hurricane season? Should we be as concerned, or maybe even more concerned, about the migration to the edge of the national forests as the migration of people to the coasts in the southeast?
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Friday, July 06, 2007
The Poverty/Conservation Equation
I’m writing this on a flight back from South Africa, where I participated in a symposium (#18) on integrating poverty alleviation into conservation goals at the Society for Conservation Biology annual meeting. You read that right. Yours truly, who works at one of the world’s wealthiest universities, and lives in one of the wealthiest communities in one of the world’s wealthiest countries, flew many thousands of miles to Africa to lecture about poverty.
I tossed and turned about going. I was convinced by two things. First, that the meeting was held in Africa for the first time was a major triumph and presented a great opportunity for a lot of African scientists and conversation practitioners who would not otherwise attend an SCB meeting. Second, the line-up of participants from around the conservation world that were attending the symposium (hey, hypocrisy’s hip, everyone’s doing it!) was a sign that conservation was finally willing to address the, er, elephant in the room.
Conservation is based on a funny mix of actual ecology and unabashed romanticism of nature. The initial goals - save endangered species, etc. - while well-intended, often put the endangered wild horse before the cart. There’s no sense ‘saving’ the remaining orangutans if the forests in which they normally live are entirely replaced with oil palm plantation. The field matured. Species conservation gave way to habitat conservation. Hard science is now being used to set conservation goals, locally and globally, and to optimize the design of protected areas.
Now it’s time to take the next step. It is no secret that most of the world’s biodiversity hotspots targeted for conservation by international organizations lie in developing countries in the tropics. Not only is it unconscionable to protect the environment in developing nations without addressing the lives of the people, essentially modern-day colonialism, experience has shown it doesn’t work very well. In much of the tropics, conservation and poverty alleviation must go hand-in-hand
The symposium included presentations on things like uniting poverty measures and biodiversity measures to set global conservation goals, the development of a “water” poverty index, an analysis of the effectiveness of several African projects to meet environment and development goals, and various combined environment and development programs in countries like China (surprised me, too). My talk was a spin on the short paper “The inequity of the global threat to coral reefs”, I co-authored with David Potere here in the Office of Population Research. It was intended to provide some perspective from the marine realm.
For reefs, one of the problems is perception. To people outside the tropics, coral reefs are colourful, exciting, charismatic, part of our Disney-fied image of tropical paradise. In reality, there are hundreds of millions of people in some of the world’s poorest and most isolated countries that depend on coral reefs every day. My feeling is that this raises two issues, one of equity, one of efficacy.
First, though many of the threats to coral reefs originate in the developed world, it is poor people in the developing world that will pay the price. In the paper, we use climate change as an example. Like greenhouse gas emissions, both overfishing (for food or the aquarium trade) and tourism-oriented coastal development are paced by the developed world. When indigenous reef-dependent communities shift from subsistence living to the cash economy (i.e. start selling fish or relying on tourist dollars), whatever traditional systems of ecosystem management existed tend to get overwhelmed.
Second, nowhere is conservation more dependent on addressing poverty than in those same reef-dependent communities. Even if, as a conservationist, you didn’t care at all about the local population, protecting the coral reef from human pressure will require things like educating people, creating alternative livelihoods and reforming waste management, the very same things necessary to improve the health and wellbeing of the people.
Here’s hoping this is the start of a real change in the way we think about and practice conservation.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Where does all that carbon go? Part II
Last week, Tamino at Open Mind, Eli at Rabbet Run and I began an experiment in mob-blogging’ about the carbon cycle. Following on our initial posts, profilic Eli has posted a couple interesting CO2 concentrations maps that highlight forest fires and fossil fuel emissions.
For a refresher on where all the carbon goes, the graph at right shows the IPCC's breakdown of the resting place, for now, of fossil fuel emissions over the past 25 years. The atmospheric build-up is measured (see Tamino's post) and the ocean uptake in well-constrained by measurement: that allows us to back-out the land uptake.
The drawback to this logic is that the land is both a prominent anthropogenic carbon dioxide source (e.g., deforestation, biomass burning) and a prominent carbon dioxide sink (e.g., net regrowth of vegetation). The positive uptake by land means that the sink is greater than the source. That, however, could change in the future, which would mean a larger fraction of carbon emissions would remain in the atmosphere. To answer that, it helps to study where the net carbon uptake occurring on land, and why?
One culprit is carbon’s chemical sibling nitrogen, that’s #7 on your periodic table if you’re scoring at home. Like many siblings, carbon and nitrogen are quite co-dependent, and, one might argue, a bit resentful about the whole thing. Carbon fixation - photosynthesis, plant growth – is limited by the availability of nitrogen. Though only up to a point. If there’s too much nitrogen, things get saturated, and the carbon-based plants pout and refuse to grow more.
You might find it strange that nitrogen is limited, given that N2 or di-nitrogen gas makes up the majority of the atmosphere. However, N2 is unreactive. It only becomes available to plants when converted to reactive form by microbes. In the process of making fertilizer and burning fossil fuels, we not only have increased the rate at which this conversion happens, leaving more nitrogen in our soils and waterways, we've emitted nitrogen in other reactive, gaseous forms, like nitrogen oxides or NOx. (eli, thanks for the suggestion - ed)
The IPCC map to the right shows nitrogen oxide (NOx) concentrations in the lower atmosphere. Notice the high levels above and downstream of North American, Europe and China. Deposition of this nitrogen could be increasing carbon fixation in forests.
A recent paper in Nature found just that: nitrogen fertilization, not forest regrowth after logging, may explain the majority of the net carbon sink in northern forests. The authors used chronosequences – yes, that’s a real word, not some star trek science word referring to data taken from a forest with trees of varying age that can be used to represent different stages of tree growth – to estimate mean carbon uptake at sites across the northern hemisphere.
By integrating uptake over entire rotations (from planting to forest replacement), the authors were able to get a more complete representation of carbon uptake by forests. Using that data, they found a strong relationship between nitrogen deposition and carbon sequestration, implying nitrogen fertilization may be driving the land carbon sink.
Nitrogen oxide emissions and nitrogen deposition are expected to increase in the future without tougher air pollution policies here and especially in Asia (see this paper). That could increase the carbon sequestration in northern forests, presuming those forests do not become N-saturated. Of course, hopefully the world will reduce NOx emissions and improve air quality. Unfortunately, that could also reduce carbon uptake and thus allow a larger fraction of carbon emissions to stay in the atmosphere.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Return to carbon-land
Thanks to new, serious long-term climate change policies in the province of Saskatchewan and the state of Minnesota, I've had to update the carbon-land map. The original was a play on the Jesusland cartoon circulated after the '04 US election.
Expect more states to leave carbonland in the coming months. My current home state of New Jersey, already a member of the States United for Climate due to participation in RGGI, also just set one of the most aggressive emissions reductions policies in all of North America.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Where does all the carbon go?
This is the first in a series of group posts by a few of us bloggers interested in the science of climate change. For our first “mob” post, Tamino at Open Mind, Eli at Rabbet Run and yours truly here at Maribo are all writing about the carbon cycle and atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Much of the discussion on Maribo centers around the science politics of setting a short- and long-term GHG or carbon emissions target in order to stabilize atmospheric concentrations and avoid ‘dangerous’ climate change.
The emissions targets depend on how much - and for how long - the carbon dioxide we emit actually remains in the atmosphere. We need to understand the ability of the planet to take carbon out of the atmosphere, and how that itself is sensitive to climate change. The figure (IPCC WG1, Fig. 7.4) shows the annual fraction of fossil fuel emissions that remained in the atmosphere (black line is a five year mean). I'll come back to this.
The atmosphere is often compared to a bathtub. The emissions of carbon dioxide – the flow into the bathtub – are currently greater than the uptake of carbon – the flow out the drain. So carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmospheric tub.
Personally, I like to say emissions are currently faster than the planetary uptake. Over geological time, millions of years, carbon is removed from atmosphere by weathering of rock and by burial in marine sediments. Burning fossil fuels releases this ‘fossil’ carbon to the atmosphere; deforestation and biomass burning quickly releases carbon that was stored over decades or centuries in trees. We’ve effectively sped up the flow of carbon into the atmosphere.
The increase in atmospheric CO2 since the Mauna Loa record began in the 1950s is only about half (~55%) of fossil fuel emissions. The rest has been absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems.
The ocean ‘sink’ is best understood and easiest to measure. It can be almost entirely explained by the dissolution of CO2 in sea water, the reason the pH of the oceans is declining. Since solubility of CO2 decreases with temperature, much of this uptake has occurred in cold waters of the Southern Ocean. Other potential, but currently negligible on a global scale, ocean sinks include increases in photosynthesis by plankton [and deep-water burial of the ‘fixed carbon’] and changes in ocean circulation.
So we know with good confidence that about 30% of fossil fuel emissions have been absorbed by the oceans and the remainder by terrestrial ecosystems. The remainder must be taken up by terrestrial ecosystems.
The land sink is more challenging to quantify. We know there has been a net uptake of carbon on land. The knowledge of anthropogenic emissions and good estimate of the ocean sink allow us to infer this total land uptake or land sink. So that means carbon uptake by photosynthesis by terrestrial ecosystems is greater than carbon emissions by those ecosystems, from respiration, but also from disturbances like fires and deforestation.
Notice that I did not include deforestation as a CO2 sources above – just fossil fuel emissions. Deforestation is responsible for about 20% of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions; fossil fuels and the like for the other 80%. But since I’m talking about the net exchange of carbon between land and the atmosphere, carbon emissions from deforestation is folded into the equation.
Anyhow, field observations, including forest inventories, satellite observations of terrestrial productivity, data from ‘flux’ towers at specific locations, and modeling point to a few key players:
- Re-growth of forests on abandoned farmland in the Northern Hemisphere has led to a net uptake of carbon (at least until the trees reach maturity)
- Higher concentration of atmospheric CO2 can increase rates of photosynthesis and hence carbon uptake (“CO2 fertilization”).
- Deposition of nitrogen, emitted by burning of fossil fuels and application of fertilizer, may also be unintentionally ‘fertilizing’ forests
Knowledge of the sinks lets us calculate how anthropogenic CO2 emissions translate into increases in atmospheric concentration. Eli’s post provides a model for doing some simple experiments.
Why does this matter? Our understanding of the modern-day carbon cycle underpins to all that stuff about climate policy that you read, see, hear and smell in the news. Right now, we emit about 8 Gt of C per year, and that translates to, as Tamino points out, an increase of about 2 ppm of CO2/year in atmosphere. But what if climate change alters that way the oceans and the land take up carbon? Then the model has to change.
This is one of the great challenges in climate change science AND climate change policy. To work out what percent reduction is necessary to hit a stabilization level, we need to understand carbon cycle feedbacks: how will climate change alter the fraction of emissions that remain in the atmosphere? Here are three (of many) possible feedback effects:
ii) Drying in the tropics: Reduced rainfall in the Amazon would reduce carbon uptake and increase carbon release through fires
iii) Ocean circulation: A slowing of ocean circulation could limiting productivity in the surface ocean and sinking of carbon (via increasing stratification – topic for another day)
One way to get at these questions is to examine the year-to-year variability in CO2 growth in the atmosphere. What you see in that IPCC figure at the top of the post is that the rate of uptake by the planet varies widely year to year, from less than 20% of emissions, to over 70% of emissions.
There are a few interesting features. The year-to-year variability mostly originates from tropical forest. For example, you can see high airborne fractions or high growth rates during El Nino events (e.g., 1997-1998, 1972-3, 1982-3) due to related droughts (less C uptake) and fires (more C release). That’s not too surprising. It does serve as a warning: future drying in the tropics, due to climate and/or deforestation, could reduce the carbon sink.
In the past, most of the general circulation or climate models used in the IPCC assessments did not included a complete carbon cycle. The atmospheric CO2 concentrations were imposed based on externally generated scenarios. With a complete representation of the carbon cycle, we could instead impose emission, and allow the model to simulate the change in concentrations and uptake by land and oceans.
The latest IPCC assessment includes a comparison of some ‘coupled’ climate-carbon cycle models. All the models predict a decrease in the sink or an increase in the fraction of emissions that remain in the atmosphere. But more on that next time.
Monday, June 11, 2007
The aftermath of Gonu
Maybe comprehensive coverage of a human tool of a storm in the Middle East is too much to expect of a N. American news media obsessed with things like, as a commenter on Chris Mooney's blog wrote, Paris Hilton going to prison?
In searching for updates on post-Gonu flooding in Iran, I found few articles that focused on anything other than oil prices. Those few that did had the "we interrupt this tale of human suffering for breaking news on oil prices" dynamic going. Is it really too much to ask that the news on oil prices and the news on the dead from Cyclone Gonu at least be divided into separate, maybe adjoining, articles?
Try this schizophrenic headline from an Environment News Service story this morning: "Cyclone Gonu kills 70, leaves oil ports unscathed". Sure, headlines today are rarely poetry. At best, they are a way to convey the most information in that least words. And maybe that is all the editors consciously aiming to accomplish by adding the comma and second sentence fragment. Sub-consciously? Might as well just add replace the comma with "but, don't worry, it".
For a short bit of news on the aftermath in Iran, try Reuters and this Iranian news service. The blog sadaboutgonu, mentioned in comments below, has a fascinating set of photos and video from Oman.
Saturday, June 09, 2007
The G8 statement on climate change
The G8's climate change declaration has been called "a major step forward" (Tony Blair), an "important step" (Stephen Harper), a "big success" (Angela Merkel), a "very substantial coming together" (Tony Blair, he's good with the quotes) and "a bold, audacious plan that will unite the world against the problem of climate change" (George Bush).
Ok, I made that last one up. It is rather sad that the US agreeing to seriously consider greenhouse gas reduction targets is a big success. That shows how low the bar has been set for international climate negotiations with the Bush Administration. Ever been told you will be seriously consider-ed for a job? Did you get the job?
You can read the text of the agreement yourself. The very first item on climate change (#40) contains this statement: "Tackling climate change is a shared responsibility of all". True. There are more like this (#53):
We therefore reiterate the need to engage major emitting economies on how best to address the challenge of climate change. We embrace efforts to work with these countries on long term strategies.
True again. But in policy-speak, these statements mean the US refuses to accept a hard emissions target unless China and India accept a similar target (something both countries have already rejected, and that would be unfair). The stalemate will continue unless the US Congress overwhelmingly passes legislation in the fall, and there's so much political pressure that President Bush does not use his veto power. The real battle for international climate policy could happen not (at the UN negotiations) in Indonesia this fall, but on the floor of the US House.
In the end, I suppose the G8 declaration is a step forward, in that at least the Bush Administration is not rejecting the science, and is recognizing that someone out there might want to do something about greenhouse gas emissions. If I were the leaders of the other G8 nations, I would not be too proud, however. It sure looks like they just got bullied one more time by the Bush Administration.
More on Gonu
The remnants of Cyclone / Hurricane Gonu have caused severe flooding in southern Iran. The overall death toll on Oman and Iran has passed 70, including 12 killed in Iran from flash floods. These are places not accustomed to severe rainfalls. Based on the little decent news coverage (not to defend the source) I was able to find, it appears the Iranian villages were unprepared for a deluge of this size.
This image (scroll down) shows the cyclone tracks in the northwest Indian Ocean since 1985. Notice no storms passed into the Gulf of Oman (upper left). The global image on Wikipedia shows just how rare it is for cyclone to even approach the Arabian peninsula or Iran.
The anamously warm sea surface temperatures off Oman played a role in steering the cyclone on that unusual track. NOAA's Coral Reef Watch has a "bleaching watch" for the coast of Oman. That means sea surface temperatures are nearing a level at which some coral bleaching may occur. Since both can be driven by warm ocean temepratures, the concurrence of intense hurricanes and coral bleaching is not so unusual; the largest coral bleaching event in the Caribbean took place in 2005, also the strongest hurricane season.
Given that this blog is devoted in large part to climate change science and policy, I'm normally wary of writing about a specific storm or weather event as it can give the false impression that one could reasonably argue that that storm or event is a clear result of climate change.
In this case, I'm writing about the storm because it is a rare event, because of the human impact, and because, frankly, the North American news coverage has been just abominable. CNN.com interrupts its coverage of the human toll to discuss oil prices. This is a direct quote:
At least 35 people were dead, most of them in Oman, and 30 were missing.
The storm spared the region's oil installations, and oil futures fell Friday on a wave of profit-taking that followed a surge in prices a day earlier. News that Cyclone Gonu had spared major oil installations in the Gulf of Oman also alleviated supply concerns. Light, sweet crude for July delivery fell 62 cents to $66.31 U.S. a barrel in morning trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange after dropping as low as $65.55 early in the session.
At least 32 Gonu-related deaths were reported in Oman, including members of police rescue squads, and 30 others were reported missing, police said. Rescue teams were searching for victims using helicopters and boats, he said.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Hurricane Gonu strikes Oman and Iran
This is an amazing, rare and possibly devastating event. Thanks in part to the warm surface temperatures (NOAA Coral Reef Watch anomaly data) in the northwestern Indian Ocean, Cyclone / Tropical Storm Gonu veered north into Oman and is moving into Iran.
As Jeff Masters' wunderblog explains, it may be entirely without precedent in the observed record. And, sadly, that means the region is underprepared. The only predictable part of this: the news coverage seems to be more concerned about the impact on oil infrastructure and oil prices than the impact on the people living there.
Hopefully, not too many commentators will be tempted to scream "aha - it must be global warming" and, if anything, stick to some reasonably informed winking.
China, the G8 and emissions intensity
Earlier, this week China announced a vague climate change policy that includes no GHG emissions targets. While hardly a surprise, the refusal to consider any emissions targets, or even any aspirational emissions goals pretty much destroyed whatever little chance there was that UK, Germany, Japan and the G8 countries would oppose the US effort to block the use of hard emissions targets.
China may be one place where the intensity-based metrics make some sense. With low per capita emissions and a smaller historical contribution to emissions, forcing China to drastically restrict economic development would hardly be a globally equitable solution to climate change.
As I discussed a couple weeks ago, China’s GHG emissions intensity rose in the past decade. China is at the stage of development where “carbon” generation is outpacing economic development. In terms of carbon efficiency, you can imagine China being around where the West was back in 1920s, before the global peak in emissions intensity (see the global intensity graph)
So at least new Chinese policy calls for a 20% decrease in energy intensity, the energy consumption per $ of GDP. Whether that policy has any teeth, or whether the emissions data is trustworthy, who knows? But it is a start.
The Canadian government proposal that G8 countries adopt intensity-based targets is ridiculous for Western nations. Europe, Japan, Australia and North America passed their peaks in emissions intensity, or lows in carbon efficiency, decades ago. For those countries, targets have to be based on the actual emissions.
For China and other rapidly developing nations, however, setting initial targets based initially on the “carbon” efficiency or intensity of the economy may be the only sensible solution to the global policy stalemate. Perhaps the only global plan that is equitable is one in which: i) the U.S., Europe, Canada and other Annex 1 nations accept hard caps on their own emissions, and ii) China and other developing nations use intensity-based targets until the per-capita emissions reach some threshold, beyond which hard emissions caps should be applied.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Exporting a bad idea to the world
First, the US proposes setting a global GHG emissions "goal" - an object to which effort or ambition is directed, rather than a "target" - an amount set as a (minimum) objective. Then, the effort to undermine the push for a global emissions agreement at the G8 Summit was savaged, by foreign governments, by Democrats and by commentators, like a tofurkey at a Greenpeace rally.
Now, quel horreur, the Canadian PM says his government wants to play peacemaker (CBC).
Prime Minister Stephen Harper told a German business audience Monday Canada won't meet its Kyoto targets to lower greenhouse gas emissions, but can be a world leader in battling climate change.
And here it comes:
Harper did say he believes his government's plan for intensity-based targets to limit greenhouse gas emissions will be more effective than setting overall reduction targets.
I was so dumbfounded by this, I double-checked on the CBC's French language service:
Selon la solution canadienne, il n'y aurait pas une réduction draconienne des gaz à effets de serre, mais l'encouragement de mesures moins polluantes dans chaque unité de production industrielle.
That's right. Canada is championing the emissions intensity policy as the solution to it all. Could it work? Only if the intensity-based targets, not aspirational goals, are set such that total emissions actually decline. However, that is not the case in the Canadian policy.
The joke is, er, the tragedy is, not only has the Canadian policy been ridiculed by experts across the spectrum, it is not even original. It was lifted, almost digit for digit, from the equally toothless American policy.
Let's hope the rest of the world looks at this graph. And that someone out there has a calculator that can do compound interest.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Ok, this biofuels thing has gone too far
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican farmers are setting ablaze fields of blue agave, the cactus-like plant used to make the fiery spirit tequila, and resowing the land with corn as soaring U.S. ethanol demand pushes up prices.
The switch to corn will contribute to an expected scarcity of agave in coming years, with officials predicting that farmers will plant between 25 percent and 35 percent less agave this year to turn the land over to corn.
