In a recent post on Climate Progress, the prolific Joe Romm highlighted a video of famed climate change skeptic and US Senator James Inhofe explaining that "God's still up there".
Thank God the Senator from Oklahoma is here to promise us that that the Almighty will override at a planetary level the laws of physics He created and simply stop human-emissions of heat-trapping gases from ravaging his Creation. Now if we can only get Inhofe to tell God to stop all cancers and traffic accidents, too.
The post goes on to say that "this fundamentalist, anti-scientific tripe, far from disqualifying Inhofe, puts him in very good company with other leading conservative politicians". This includes a representative (John Shimkus, R-IL) who challenges the possibility of sea level rise because of God's covenant with Noah, that the Earth will not flood again.
Like Romm, I'm obviously no fan of Senator Inhofe's attacks on climate science not his efforts to obstruct climate policy. For all we know, Inhofe's comments are a calculated ploy to bring in religious viewers. Regardless, Romm's religious line of attack, all too common in scientific and activist discourse, is self-defeating and unproductive. It is also a lost opportunity to discuss the role religion plays in the average person's understanding of climate change.
First, from a purely practical perspective, denigrating Conservative climate skeptics as religious wingnuts is certain to alienate many other religious Christians who may actually be more open to accepting the scientific evidence for the effect of human activity on the climate. Matt Nisbet has argued this point, with respect to climate and other issues, many times on his blog Framing Science.
Second, the comments of Inhofe and the other Christian conservatives quoted in the post provide a window for us scientists and communicator into why so many people in the US and other parts of the world often have difficulty accepting, at a gut level, that human activity is changing the climate. As I've argued in Climatic Change and on the web, the notion that humans can change the climate goes against thousands of years of belief that the weather and climate is controlled by the gods, or the Judeo-Christian God. However much one might dislike and distrust Inhofe, his comments provide an opportunity for education and discussion of the public perception of climate change, an opportunity that is lost when the fangs come out.
To use just one example, Rep Shimkus' assertion that sea level rise won't happen because God promised Noah never to flood the Earth again is not some fringe claim by one crazy, fundamentalist congressman. Ask an elder in almost any Pacific Island nation about sea level rise and you'll get the same answer. And why not? The Bible and the flood narrative are a core part of their belief system - as it is for millions of people in North America. You're unlikely to alter your audience's belief in God's covenant not to flood the earth again with a 45 minute lecture or a 400 word blog post that is dismissive of the audience's belief system.
Community leaders in the Pacific figured this out and took action. The churches gathered together to develop literature and sermons that reconcile their people's strong religious beliefs with the seemingly heretical notion that the climate is changing and the seas are rising because of human activity. Their ideas are crystallized in the 2004 Otin-taii declaration, named after the Kiribati hotel where it was signed. The approach has been effective.
If you really want to effect change, you need to understand how different people, who have had different experiences, interpret the world. You need to work together to find common ground, as the churches have done in the Pacific. Attacking is easier than understanding. It also does more harm than good.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Let's try understanding, not denigrating, those who cite religion as a reason to doubt climate change
Monday, September 28, 2009
Ketsana and crying wolf about climate change
Ketsana is a deadly reminder that a tropical storm does not need to be powerful, by the conventional measure of wind speed, to do immense damage. Unfortunately for the people of the Philippines, another tropical storm may be on its way.
The image at right (thanks to Jeff Masters) shows the rainfall rate from NASA's TRMM satellite just before Ketsana passed Manila. Note the area in white is off the scale of the chart. The storm dumped one third of a meter of rain on Manila in less than six hours, flooding out much of the city, killing at least 140 people, and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.
The combination of intense rainfall and a dense population living on deforested slopes has led to a tragedy reminiscent of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Although Mitch was a far more powerful storm, it was the flooding not wind damage that led to thousands of deaths in Honduras.
The climate policy talks in "nearby" Thailand have led to a number of sloppy media reports and climate activist statements about the role of climate change in Ketsana. For once, I actually agree with Roger Pielke Jr, that people need to stop crying wolf about climate change and extreme events. Asking about climate change after a prolonged summer heat wave that could have come right out of a doubled CO2 regional climate model simulation is reasonable. The effort to draw a link between climate change and tropical storms during a rather middling storm year (in terms of power) is scientifically questionable. When the storm in question has had such a terrible human tool, it is also a bit tasteless.
For those wanting to help in the recovery, donations are being accepted through the Philippine Red Cross.
Important viewing on corals
It is worth taking the time to watch Charlie Veron's talk "Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row?", presented at the British Royal society earlier in the summer. A version of this talk inspired Chris Turner's terrific article in this month's issue of the Walrus.
Veron literally wrote the book about corals. His three volume tome Corals of the World has a prominent place on the shelf of every coral reef scientist. In 2008, he published a paper in the journal Coral Reefswhich posited that CO2-related changes in ocean chemistry, like what is happening today, may have contributed the five mass marine extinctions in the geological record. It was awarded the best paper of the year by the International Society of Reef Sciences.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Dust storm in Australia
Southeastern Australia is recovering from the worst dust storm in decades, that damaged farmland and practically closing down Sydney and the surrounding area.
The satellite image, from NASA's terrific Earth Observatory web-site, shows the brown dust cloud stretching from Queensland far south into New South Wales, before it moved off the coast.
The storm was made possible by a dry and record hot August, conditions that may continue thanks to the development of El Nino conditions in the Pacific. The western Pacific, including Australia, Papua New Guinea, and some western Pacific island countries, typically experience dry weather during El Nino event due to longitudinal shift in the major pressure systems. For example, during the 1997/98 El Nino, there were extensions fires in PNG, droughts in Australia, and major food shortages and lost agricultural productivity in Fiji.
Framing climate policy
Here are the headlines to stories about the Chinese president's speech at this week's UN meeting, from the three largest Canadian newspapers:
China diminishes hope for global climate deal (Globe and Mail)
China steps up as climate change leader (Toronto Star)
China, U.S. urge action on climate change (National Post)
Perhaps effective leadership on climate change policy is in the eye of the beholder.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
An argument for climate policy
Today's NY Times describes the new carbon capture and storage system developed for the Mountaineer coal-burning power plant in West Virginia. This important nugget is in the middle of the story:
American Electric Power’s plan is to inject about 100,000 tons annually for two to five years, about 1.5 percent of Mountaineer’s yearly emissions of carbon dioxide. Should Congress pass a law controlling carbon dioxide emissions and the new technology proves economically feasible, the company says, it could then move to capture as much as 90 percent of the gas.
The challenge in agreeing on emissions policy, in the US, in Canada, and worldwide, is often used as an argument for an alternative "technology-based approach". In reality, it is a false dichotomy. Technology in the absence of emissions policy is unlikely to work.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Important listening and reading on the oceans
A week ago, CBC's Quirks and Quarks did a full one-hour episode on the state of the world's oceans. The show is a one-stop shop for learning about dead zones, ocean acidification, coral bleaching (my bit), overfishing and the Pacific Garbage Patch.
The October issue of Canadian literary magazine the Walrus also has a long meditation by Chris Turner on the "anthropocene", ocean acidification and the fate of the Great Barrier Reef, based in part on the thoughts of the dean of corals Charlie Veron.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
The slippery slope to slime
Overfishing and increasing ocean dead zones are thought to be leading us on a oceans dominated by fleshy algae and jellyfish, a trend coined the "slippery slope to slime" by Jeremy Jackson. This photo is from Fast Company:
fishermen in the Sea of Japan are tormented by invasive swarms of Echizen Kurage (Nomura's jellyfish), a giant jellyfish that weighs up to 450 pounds and measures two meters wide... The students capture Nomura's jellyfish in fixed fishing nets from a lake in Fukui prefecture, an area plagued by the swarms.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Catching a breath
Maribo's going to be quiet for about ten to twelve days. After the short hiatus, we'll be back with some more on climate change adaptation, the Canadian policy conundrum and some interesting new research papers.
The problem with an intensity-based target for the oil sands
Earlier this week, the Toronto Star reported that the Harper government is planning to release a carbon trading system which will use intensity-based targets for the oil and gas sector. Yesterday, we took a trip down memory lane, looking at op-ed about climate policy from 2004. Let's look at one from 2006, where I warned that the Harper government will try to use the trick of intensity-based targets.
At first glance, the intensity concept is logical and appealing. It appears to address both economic growth and the climate by making the economy more greenhouse gas “efficient” over time. A couple minutes with a calculator, or a morning of Economics 101, will reveal a hole in the intensity plan so big you can drive a Hummer through it.
The math in my 2006 article was based on the Bush administration plan to reduce greenhouse gas intensity by 18% by 2012. My conclusion?
Canadians should be wary of any similar Conservative policy that uses words like greenhouse gas intensity and claims to address both economy and the climate. When the announcement is made, have a calculator handy.
A real emissions policy is one that addresses emissions. Canada may have failed to date in the implementation of Kyoto. But it is not too late to try.
There is still over five years to reduce emissions at home, to negotiate investments in emissions reductions in other countries and to purchase emissions credits from overseas. The other Kyoto signatories and the rest of the world will respect a concerted effort that comes up short more than a plan that can be debunked in two minutes with a $10 calculator.
The irony is had the Alliance-Conservatives not strongly opposed controls on greenhouse gas emissions over the past decade, the current Conservative government may not be in what they term an impossible position. That is the lesson of climate change: we all need to think ahead.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Canada: Five years, three elections, and still no climate policy
With the distinct possibility of yet another Canadian election this fall and news the Conservative government, after several years in power, is just now working on a climate policy, and a policy that would "favour" the oil sands (more on this tomorrow), it's interesting a look at a column I wrote five years and three elections ago. Or was it four elections? I'm losing count.
The following is the opening of my June 2, 2004 op-ed in the Globe and Mail:
The real issues at election time are often the ones our political leaders work hardest to hide. There is no greater skeleton in the electoral closet than climate change and the Kyoto Protocol.
The Martin government seems to wish climate change would just go away. Facing a disgruntled electorate, the government fears even mentioning climate change could turn some voters toward the anti-Kyoto Conservatives. At the same time, the Conservatives also wish to avoid the issue for fear of alienating any pro-environment Liberals angry with the Martin government. As a result, only the NDP and the Green Party have dared utter the word "Kyoto."
The disappearance of prominent environmental issues at election time is hardly a new phenomenon. In the battle for votes, everyone longs to appear green, but will not advocate any policy that might be perceived, correctly or not, as damaging to the voter's wallet.
This election in particular has fallen prey to the opportunistic notion that scoring a favourable headline in the morning paper on the issue of the day is more important than presenting an integrated vision for the country. The result is fragmented political platforms in which environmental issues are the big losers.
The high price of gasoline provides a perfect opportunity to promote the need for higher automotive fuel efficiency, more funding for public transit, and reduced smog in our cities. These are issues of interest to all Canadians; dealing with them would help reduce Canada's greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, the debate focuses entirely on which party can deliver lower gas prices.
The problem for the Liberals and the Conservatives is that climate change is one environmental issue that will not go away.
Still true after all these years? This was the conclusion:
Canada is responsible for a small fraction of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and cannot stop climate change alone. But a serious Canadian effort to meet the Kyoto commitment and promote future climate policy could provide much-needed international leadership and restore this country's green reputation - which has been sullied by the passivity of the previous decade.
Will Canada become a leader in preventing dangerous climate change, in promoting new energy technologies, higher fuel efficiency, improved urban infrastructure and sustainable international development? Those are the issues that should inspire an election.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Communicating climate change in an unscientific world
Greenfyre's has a new post reminding people to take reports of public skepticism about climate change into context, like public literacy on other scientific issues. This is one theme of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book "Unscientific America".
Those of us communicating about climate change with the public tend to forget that the very notion that humans can change the climate is a major paradigm shift. For thousands of years, we believed that climate (or weather, in general, the sky) was something controlled by gods. So to believe that human activity is changing the climate requires a real paradigm shift. This was the subject of an essay of mine in Climatic Change a couple years ago.
One hundred and fifty years after Darwin published the Origin of the Species, many people are still struggling to accept the theory of evolution. The figure above, taken from a recent presentation of mine, shows the fraction of Americans who believe in Darwin's theory is only slightly greater than the fraction that believes in ghosts. The point of showing this in a presentation is not that North Americans are scientifically illiterate - though that may be in fact be the case - but that changing fundamental beliefs can take time. From Climatic Change:
From Galileo to Darwin, science is full of examples where new discoveries challenged traditional beliefs. If history is a guide, it can take decades or centuries for the new science to become the new orthodoxy. The battle over public acceptance of natural selection is still being fought 150 years after the publication of the Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The potential for human-induced climate change may not belong on a list of the most fundamental scientific discoveries of last 500 years. Like those discoveries, however, it does challenge a belief held by virtually all religions and cultures worldwide for thousands of years. This long view of history needs to be reflected in campaigns to educate the public, who do not have the benefit of years of graduate training in atmospheric science, about the science of climate change.
The mistake that's often made in climate change communication is assuming that the science should just intuitively make sense to people. What can help is to acknowledge, really address it, not spend thirty seconds, right off the bat in every presentation, that what we are saying may be hard to "believe" in part because if challenges traditional ways of thinking. That's why we use science to carefully examine whether humans are changing the climate, and the results are conclusive [ed's note: original post mistakenly had "inconclusive"!]
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Should I fly or should I type?
From the Economist, with irony:
AVIATION has long been blamed for its share of anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, some travellers now ask themselves whether their flight is strictly necessary and, if they decide it is, salve their consciences by paying for the planting of trees. These, so they hope, will absorb the equivalent of their sinful emissions. But you, dear reader, are indulging right now in activity that is equally as polluting as air travel: using a computer.
According to a report published by the Climate Group, a think-tank based in London, computers, printers, mobile phones and the widgets that accompany them account for the emission of 830m tonnes of carbon dioxide around the world in 2007. That is about 2% of the estimated total of emissions from human activity. And that is the same as the aviation industry’s contribution. According to the report, about a quarter of the emissions in question are generated by the manufacture of computers and so forth. The rest come from their use.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Does Canada have a Minister of the Environment?
Is Jim Prentice the Environment Minister? Or still the Industry Minister?
This is from the National Post commentary on Petro-China's $2 billion investment in the oil sands:
Environment Minister Jim Prentice is no fan of a single-buyer market for exported bitumen, which actually sells at a discount in the U. S. compared with Middle East oil despite coming from a friendly neighbour. He'd like competition injected into the system.
"Doesn't it help Canada's exporters to have alternative market choices?" he noted in a recent interview.
"We need transportation mechanisms to ship it to the West Coast. Refineries in the U. S. have limited capacity and we don't have anywhere else to sell it. Having the capacity to ship it to the West Coast would keep everybody honest, so I think it's good policy."
Mr. Prentice, you are the Minister of the Environment. In case you need a reminder, this is the mandate of Environment Canada:
to preserve and enhance the quality of the natural environment; conserve Canada's renewable resources; conserve and protect Canada's water resources; forecast weather and environmental change; enforce rules relating to boundary waters; and coordinate environmental policies and programs for the federal government.
Could you at least pretend to be interested in the environmental implications of expanding extraction in the oil sands and/or building a pipeline to the Pacific?
Monday, August 31, 2009
More on climate change adaptation
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed a few days back, Bjorn Lomborg offered a list of ways that technology can fight global warming. Lomborg, the fingernail scratching across the climate scientist's blackboard, has rightfully upset a number of experts by once again playing loose with the facts and language. Bill Chamedies from Duke does a fine job pointing out Lomborg's most egregious errors and deceptive sleights of hand.
There's one seemingly innocuous passage in the op-ed that touches on the very concern I expressed in the previous post on adaptation:
A group of climate economists at the University of Venice led by Carlo Carraro looked closely at how people will adapt to climate change. Their research for the Copenhagen Consensus Center showed that farmers in areas with less water for agriculture could use more drip irrigation, for example, while those with more water will grow more crops.
We could also build levees in New Orleans strong enough and high enough to withstand a category five storm. That doesn't mean it will happen. The challenge of climate change adaptation is not identifying what is technically possible. It is overcoming the cultural, organizational, political and economic hurdles to implement that which is technically possible.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Climate change adaptation and the lessons of Hurricane Katrina.
The fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall in the Gulf Coast passed this weekend with news about the state of the New Orleans economy, the ongoing recovery effort, and a presidental radio address. The common thread in all of the analysis is the magnitude of the challenge in coordinating and implementing better "hurricane preparedness" plan for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
The potentially catastrophic impact of a category three or stronger hurricane on New Orleans was no secret before Katrina hit. The knowledge that the levees and storm protection systems were inadequate to withstand a large storm surge did not spur investment to improve the infrastructure, restore the coastal wetlands and/or a prepare a better emergency management plan. Four years hence, despite the very real evidence of Katrina, the US government is still struggling to ensure New Orleans is protected from another category three or stronger hurricane.
This is the challenge of adapting to climate change. This is why I argue that "adapting to climate change is far more difficult and far more expensive than most people and most supposed experts assume."
There are really two separate questions to ask. First, are we capable of adapting to climate change? Second, will we actually implement the adaptation activities?
Forget for a moment the scientific uncertainty about how climate change will affect hurricane frequency and strength. Instead, think simply about today. Think about adapting our society and our infrastructure to deal with hurricanes, or another climate event, that happen under the background natural variability in the climate system.
Are we as a society investing the time and the money to construct the social and physical infrastructure required to minimize the impact of hurricanes (or other extreme events)? Moreover, are we investing even more time and money to construct the social and physical infrastructure in developing nations that are currently far more vulnerable to extreme events?
Finally, are these efforts successful?
Look at how difficult it is for the wealthiest country in the world to develop the necessary protection in one of its own cities. Even if the will is there, and the money is there, it may not happen. President Obama's address dealt with the challenge of coordinating such a large effort:
To complete a complex recovery that addresses nearly every sector of society, we have prioritized coordination among different federal agencies, and with state and local governments. No more turf wars – all of us need to move forward together, because there is much more work to be done. I have also made it clear that we will not tolerate red tape that stands in the way of progress, or the waste that can drive up the bill. Government must be a partner – not an opponent – in getting things done.
This is, again, in a wealthy nation four years after a storm that any meteorologist or atmospheric science student could have told you would happen one day. Now imagine doing this not just at home, but also for other less-developed countries through complex international aid, with imperfect knowledge of the future climate. Adapting to climate change will not be simple. Even with the ability and the resources, it might not happen.
That is the message of point #3 in the three themes of Maribo post.
The path of Tropical Storm Danny
I'll have more on what we should be saying about climate change shortly (there are couple interesting responses at the Energy Collective cross-post) .
The model projections at right show that fourth named tropical storm of the Atlantic season is expected to take a path quite similar to that of Bill, interesting given how El Nino events are thought to effect hurricane tracks in the Atlantic. On the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina striking the Gulf Coast, tropical storm Danny will likely be reaching New England and the Maritime provinces of Canada.
Monday, August 24, 2009
What we should be saying about climate change
Some end of summer thoughts. Consider these the three new themes of Maribo:
1. Climate change is not an "environmental" problem. The non-linear, multi-factorial and time-varying dynamics of the climate system make the problem of climate change radically different from most classic "environmental" problems. As such, we can learn more about how to address climate change from studying other grand societal challenges, like poverty or racism, than other environmental problems.
2. In general, we have a very poor understanding the effect of climate variability, climate events or "shocks", and climate change on our lives. In the western world, this comes in part from being largely isolated from the everyday reality of weather and climate. It is also comes from wrongly placing different types of climate change impacts (precipitation, sea level rise) and climate change impacts of different regions (droughts in the prairies, droughts in sub-saharan Africa) into separate mental boxes. In an interconnected, globalized world, the rain doesn't have to stop falling in your neighbourhood for you to be affected.
3. Adapting to climate change is far more difficult and far more expensive than most people and most supposed experts assume. This comes from spending too much time and effort estimating the costs of mitigation here in the developed world, and too little looking the efficacy of local development and especially international development projects. More on this later.
I plan to return to these three themes, especially #3, again and again.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Bill moves up the east coast to Canada
Hurricane Bill is expected to weaken as it passes north over cooler water but will probably still have hurricane strength as it reaches Nova Scotia tomorrow. Heavy waves appear to be the biggest danger from the storm.
The predicted path has it reaching the tiny French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon (yes, there are two islands belonging to France just off the east coast of Canada) before making landfall in Newfoundland. It is not often than a hurricane strikes the Rock; interesting that it is happening during this El Nino-influence hurricane season.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Are new trains, like Vancouver's Canada Line, the solution?
I arrived back in Vancouver at the beginning of the week, just in time to be among the first passengers on the new train connecting the airport and the city of Richmond with downtown.
The $2 billion “Canada Line” train link was built more or less as part of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic bid. Hence the patriotic name that offers no indication what part of Vancouver the train line actually services.
At first glance, the Canada Line is the type of transportation initiative that environmental activists and climate campaigners should celebrate. A new train should equal fewer vehicle trips which should equal fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Right?
Unfortunately, in many cases, seemingly positive and well-intended developments like new transit infrastructure or new government programs to encourage the purchase of fuel efficient vehicles are often rather economically inefficient means to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Some of this has to with design. For example, if a new subway or elevated train line replaces existing bus routes, the reduced bus traffic may lead to an increase in the number of cars on the road.
The biggest challenge, however, might be that new transit lines and hybrid car rebates preach to the converted. Local transportation expert Stephen Rees explains that the train lines in Vancouver may be well-intended, but are mostly expensive projects that have not significantly increased the fraction of the population using public transit. Similarly, a recent UBC study concluded that the majority of people buying hybrid cars were not motivated by the government rebates. In other words, the rebates mostly went to people who were already intending to purchase a fuel efficient or hybrid car. [I won't even get into the arguments about the US 'cash for clunkers' program].
I certainly enjoyed being able to ride the train part of the way home from the airport. Had the train line not been finished, I simply would have taken the bus the entire way, just like I have in the past. In my case, and many others, the existence of the train didn’t eliminate a vehicle trip. It just saved me one switch and about 15 minutes. The Canada Line may be a worthy long-term investment... but not if people like myself are the primary users.
In addition to building the transit infrastructure, the government needs to implement programs that increase acceptance of public transit with young people. A master's student at Simon Fraser master’s student, Elizabeth Cooper, found that the local program to provide cheap transit passes to local university students may have helped create a culture of transit use. From the Georgia Straight:
Based on the results of a survey Cooper conducted of former SFU students, the paper notes that 53 percent of former U-Pass holders are frequent transit users, averaging between one and two round trips on public transportation per week. An additional 23 percent of former U-Pass holders reported that they continue to use transit, although on an infrequent basis. This gives a total of 76 percent of former U-Pass holders remaining transit users. Survey results for SFU alumni who were not U-Pass holders provide a different picture: only 42 percent reported being frequent transit users, while 17 percent said they use transit infrequently, for a total of 59 percent. “This indicates that the pass has had success in influencing transit use postgraduation,” the paper points out.
The U-Pass program certainly does not convert everyone; many graduates complain about the high cost of public transit without a U-Pass, and revert to driving. The effect of the program does point towards the type of initiatives that may be necessary to support a robust public transit system. Any suggestions?Hurricane Bill, the Atlantic hurricane season and Pacific warming
The first Atlantic hurricane of the season, Hurricane Bill, is on its way north towards the east coast of Canada (and creating huge waves in Bermuda and the northeastern US). Forecasters expect Bill to pass the coast of Nova Scotia on Sunday and run towards Newfoundland and Labrador.
The offshore path of the first and only hurricane of the Atlantic season brings to mind an interesting paper published earlier this summer, that warrants more attention than (I think) it received. In this post a few weeks back, before I disappeared for the Ontario leg of the Canadian Summer of ’09 heat wave tour (ah, Rex Murphy, what happened to global cooling?), I briefly mentioned the paper by Kim et al. that looked at the response of Atlantic hurricane activity to different types of El Nino events.
The conventional thinking is that Atlantic hurricane activity is low during El Nino events. Basically, the increase in eastern and central equatorial Pacific Ocean temperatures that happens during El Ninos shifts upper-level atmospheric circulation, which in turn, creates wind shear in Atlantic that disrupts hurricane activity.
Kim et al. went an important a step further. They found that the relationship depends on the nature of the Pacific warming.
The above figure tells the story. When the warming occurs throughout the eastern equatorial Pacific (EPW), the more classic El Nino, there are significantly fewer hurricanes in the in the Caribbean and up the eastern seaboard of North America. When warming is centered in central equatorial Pacific (CPW), as happened in 2002 and 2004, there actually is a significant increase in hurricanes reaching North America. Central Pacific warming events basically cause less vertical wind shear.
The ongoing development of El Nino conditions in the Pacific is the major reason for predictions of a less active than normal hurricane season in the Atlantic (and an active eastern Pacific season). That Pacific surface temperature anomaly is currently centered in the eastern Pacific, which suggests that all other factors being equal, which of course they never are, there is a higher likelihood of hurricane track density depicted in Part A of the figure above.
Now one hurricane does not a season make: you could argue that Bill's track is loosely bucking that prediction. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to follow hurricane development this year, and during the next episode of central Pacific warming, to see whether Kim et al. are correct in asserting that location of all those flapping butterflies in the Pacific predictably determines the development of storms in the Atlantic.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Fun with language and geoengineering
In the business section this morning's Globe and Mail, columnist Neil Reynolds describes with some excitement a new "paper" from the Copenhagen Consensus Center detailing how we can cheaply re-engineer the climate using sulphate aerosols.
To learn about the flaws in the science and the economic results reported in Reynolds' column, I recommend reading Alan Robock's fine piece on Real Climate. I won't offer more on the science here, other than to say that even if injecting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere can affordably and safely counter CO2-induced climate warming, it would do nothing to combat CO2-induced changes in ocean chemistry and its effect on marine life.
The column is a window into the increasingly deceptive labeling and branding of reports on climate change. A lot of groups are co-opting academic ("paper"), IPCC / UN ("consensus") and Obama-era ("non-partisan") language in order to gain scientific legitimacy. The language leaks out into the press, and next thing you know, a un-reviewed piece of work prepared by non-scientists from a partisan think-tank is reported as a piece of new science. This particular example is rather tame, but still worth thinking about.
The "paper" of which Reynolds' writes is not a paper in the academic sense - research is done, submitted to a journal, reviewed by peers, edited in response to the reviewers' concerns, etc. - but a solicited report not subject to peer review. The report could have some value, but it is not the same as an academic paper.
The cleverly-named "Copenhagen Consensus Center" has nothing to do with the UN meetings in Copenhagen this fall, nor does work from the Center represent a consensus of the larger scientific or economic community. The reports from this Center, like the geoengineering report in question, are writings by people invited to the Center for meetings, not exhaustive reviews of the existing literature. Again, the reports may have some value - but they do not represent a "consensus" in the IPCC sense.
Finally, the "non-partisan" American Enterprise Institute, professional home of one of the report's authors, is committed to "expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening free enterprise", a mission that naturally leads to rather partisan support to right-leaning politicians, and is in fact populated almost entirely by Republicans. Once more, a report from the AEI may may some value, but labeling AEI work "non-partisan" is playing with words.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The link between heat waves and global warming
In Saturday's Globe and Mail, Rex Murphy had yet another obtuse column speculating about global cooling, spurred by Toronto's cool, wet summer. While the errors in Murphy's supposedly ironic columns have not quite reached the level of George Will, in which a full-on intervention with the editorial board of the Washington Post now appears necessary, someone at the Globe and Mail could at least casually pull him aside and say "cut it out".
In this case, forget Mr. Murphy's apparent blindness to the constant flow of science and reporting on evidence for warming, nor the news that the combination of the decades-long warming trend and a developing El Nino event may make the next year one of the warmest, if not the warmest, year in the recorded history of the planet.
He doesn't appear to have even been reading or watching the national news. While his home and my hometown of Toronto has been cool and wet, Vancouver and western Canada have been in the midst of an unprecedented heat wave.
Fires burn throughout the BC interior. Water restrictions have placed in the Fraser Valley. On Saturday afternoon, Vancouver-ites put down the Globe and Mail to watch an impromptu lightning show upstage the planned Celebration of Light fireworks show (the photo shows the calm after the storm). That's right a thunderstorm here in placid, temperate Vancouver.
What's happening? On Sunday, I was asked the classic question "Is it global warming?" by a reporter from the local CBC affiliate.
I responded, as any climate scientist would, with a variation of Michael Tobis's old favourite: "no individual event can be attributed directly to climate change".
Yes, this the kind of weather we expect to see more frequently in the future. It won't happen every summer. And when it does happen, it won't happen everywhere. There will certainly be many summers when one part of the continent, say Vancouver, experiences typical "global warming" weather and another, say Toronto, experience old-fashioned cool summer, thanks to how the general warming trend affects upper-level atmospheric flow.
The "is it global warming?" question is bound to arise again and again over the next year. The answer is always going to be the same. Whether it is next year, ten years from now, or thirty years from now, we will not be able to definitively state with 100% certainty that a warm summer or a heat wave is due solely to climate change. That's the nature of this multifactorial beast known as the climate system.
What we will be able to say thirty years from now is that we should have spent more time trying to slow the warming trend, rather than arguing about the noise.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Newspapers in the future
"We're not in it to make money" is sadly prophetic.
Hat tip to Jennifer Jacquet
Thursday, July 23, 2009
El Nino and the likelihood of mass coral bleaching
The seasonal forecasting system recently developed by NOAA Coral Reef Watch suggests that coral reefs in the Caribbean and in part of the central equatorial Pacific (the Line Islands, including Kiritimati or "Christmas Island") are at risk of coral bleaching in the coming months due to warm ocean temperatures. The forecast is due to the seeming return of El Nino in the Pacific.
The word from the NOAA Climate Prediction Center is that El Nino conditions are expected to prevail though the winter. Climate buffs can "see" the El Nino development in maps of sea surface temperature anomalies (warm water in the central and eastern Pacific) the thermocline (deepening in the eastern Pacific, meaning less upwelling off of South America) and sea surface height (the wind reversal on the equator means higher water in the central and eastern Pacific).
Not all El Nino events are created equal, and the models currently disagree on the current trajectory. This is especially important to remember when predicting the effect that El Nino conditions may have on other parts of the planet, what we luddites call "teleconnections". For example, a terrific paper by Kim et al. in Science demonstrated clear differences between the effect of "central pacific warming" and "eastern pacific warming" - which can both be classified as an El Nino event, depending what metric is applied - on ocean temperatures and hurricane tracks in the Caribbean.
One silver lining: For people living in the central Pacific, especially the parched islands of the southern Gilberts (Kiribati) Islands like Arorae, the development of El Nino conditions hopefully also means an end to the two-year drought that has claimed many of the coconut trees.
UPDATE: More on the Caribbean bleaching threat here
Friday, July 17, 2009
Beneficial biofuels
A policy forum in this week's Science outlines the types of biofuel that could actually lead to net reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and have other societal or environmental benefits. The paper argues that current methods of growing energy-intensive biofuel crops (like corn in the US) on existing agricultural land and/or clearing land for biofuel crops (like palm oil in SE Asia) are clearly unacceptable, but that not all biofuels are inherently evil.
Here's their list of the potentially beneficial biofuels, for those without a subscription to Science:
Perennial plants grown on degraded lands abandoned for agricultural use
The two keys here are: i) using land that has not been storing large amounts of carbon, so clearing the land will not release that carbon, and ii) using land is not at all part of an existing or planned future production system so that biofuel production does not have a cascading effect on food production
Crop residues
This includes residues beyond what should be left on the field to regenerate the soil.
Sustainably harvested wood and forest residues
There is a lot of leftover from forest clearing and from pulp and paper production.
Double crops and mixed cropping systems
Fall or winter biofuel crops could be grown after the harvest of the traditional summer crops ("double" crops). This would eliminate the need to clear land and release carbon in order to grow biofuel crops. Winter or off-season cover crops are good for the soil anyway. And [the paper asserts that] biofuels grown as double crops could avoid the problem of competing for land with food production. This argument is debatable; one could also argue that we could increase double cropping to decrease land needs for food production.
Municipal and industrial wastes
Solid waste could be turned into liquid fuels. This would actually be a good solution in island nations where disposal is difficult.
Friday, July 10, 2009
The challenge of agreeing on degrees
Andy Revkin has a nice short summary of the wisdom, or lack thereof, of pledging to avoid climate warming of 2 deg C or any other threshold beyond which climate disaster looms.
The problem is that not only is there no one firm threshold, but that even if there were, there is no reason to think we could agree on it. Yes, the uncertainty in scientific predictions is part of the problem. But the real issue is that there is no such thing as a good climate and a bad climate.
Vulnerability to climate warming varies not only between communities and ecosystems, but also between different people in any one community and different species or groups of species in any one ecosystem. Beyond that, there is an important are too often neglected difference between the perceived and actual vulnerability to climate change. Your conclusion about the limits of acceptable warming comes is determined not by how you or your community will be affected by climate warming, but how you think you or your community will be affected by climate warming, and how you think you or your community can respond.
Even for a system as vulnerable to changes in climate and ocean chemistry as coral reefs, the line is hard to draw. From my recent paper on committed warming:
The overall results of this study can provide insight into the level of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations required to avoid degradation of coral reef ecosystems from frequent mass coral bleaching, a proposed definition of “dangerous anthropogenic interference” in the climate system [39]. Specific recommendations about future greenhouse gas emissions pathways and/or atmospheric stabilization levels require normative judgments about the acceptable damages to coral reefs and the metrics for characterizing those damages. A comparison of the results from the key scenarios in this study does, however, present an envelope of possible climate futures for the world’s coral reefs, presuming that the models realistically represent the response of the climate system to external forcing.
Science can give guidance on the impacts of climate change and, from that, provide some general recommendations on what level of warming might be acceptable, given different assumptions. That's a key to all science. The results depend on the assumptions. When you hear that 2 deg C is the maximum "acceptable" warming, you need to ask what are the assumptions that went into defining "acceptable". And because we will not all agree on those assumptions, we will not all agree that 2 deg C, or 1 deg C, or 1.349 deg C is the threshold beyond which danger lurks.
What we're left with is a value judgment. In this case, the 2 deg C threshold is a convenient backstop, the sort of nice round number that works in policy discussions.
Mixing mitigation and adaptation at the G8 summit
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.
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, during which the host was overseas collecting data, samples and unfortunately some sort of parasite.
Good timing, for the return home, not the parasite, since a new study of mine on climate change and coral reefs 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 decision to take action and the action itself. Using 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.
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 bleached coral can die.
Now, 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 the 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.
