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.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Abuse of science and logic by the National Corn Growers Association
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.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Are there really 93 months to act?
Communicating the urgency of climate change is an ongoing challenge. The problem is the time lag between GHG emissions and the climate impact, what we often refer to as "committed warming". There's also a "societal" warming commitment, caused by the lag between a decision to control emissions and the actual emissions control. That's why Jim Hansen protests the construction of new coal-fired power plants: they are a promise of future emissions and thus increase the societal warming commitment.
The latest approach is to provide estimates of how much time we have "left" to avoid dangerous climate change. Take Andrew Simms in the Guardian (please?):
Whatever the mistakes that allowed this situation to arise, there is growing international consensus that the best way out is via a green new deal policy package. Parts of the UK economy are in freefall with unemployment rising rapidly. At the same time, with less than 100 months to go before the world enters a new, more dangerous phase of global warming, there is an urgent need for the rapid environmental transformation of the economy.
100 months? I don't recall that in the IPCC. Simms' evidence is summarised here and here - there's even a ticking clock, a la the Fox TV show 24.
We found that, given all of the above, 100 months from today we will reach a concentration of greenhouse gases at which it is no longer "likely" that we will stay below the 2C temperature rise threshold. "Likely" in this context refers to the definition of risk used by the IPCC. But, even just before that point, there is still a one third chance of crossing the line.
Is this a useful PR tool? Or, in the desperation to encourage action on climate change, are the "100 hundred months" crowd causing more harm by providing false certainty in future predictions? For example, what will happen in January, 2017 if the world has not begun seriously curbing emissions -- or if it has?
Sunday, March 29, 2009
The Canadian emissions story
Earth Hour dipped electricity use in British Columbia by 1.1%. Again, a nice gimmick to raise awareness about energy use, but far far far from what's needed to tackle greenhouse gas emissions in Canada (right)
The Canadian government published a report earlier this year documenting the trends in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990, the first reporting year, up until 2006. The data reveals a lot of interesting and surprising trends and can answer some of the questions about the contribution of individual Canadian provinces raised by my recent post on change in per capita GHG emissions around the world.
Between 1990 and 2006, Alberta passed Ontario as the largest total emitter of greenhouse gases [top chart]. Alberta is responsible for 33% of emissions, despite housing only 11% of the Canadian population. Alberta alone was responsible for just over half of the total increase in GHG emissions between 1990 and 2006 [second chart].
The #2 province Ontario is responsible for 27% of national emissions but has almost four times the population. Therefore the per capita emissions in Ontario are 15 t CO2-eq / person, hardly a lofty goal, still more than three times that of China, but one quarter that of Alberta.
Saskatchewan is fourth in total emissions at 10% of national emissions, only slightly behind Quebec, despite housing only one-seventh of the population of la belle province. Saskatchewan’s carbon-intensive economy has become even more so over the past two decades. Thanks to a growing uranium and potash industries, expansion of oil production and reliance on coal power, the province of only one million people was responsible almost a quarter of the national increase in GHG emissions from 1990 to 2006.
Quebec, on the other hand is Canada’s pocket of Europe in more ways than one. Thanks to a heavy reliance on hydro power, la belle province’s per capita GHG emissions of 10.7 t CO2-eq/person are more in line with Europe than the rest of North America. Lower heating demands and increased reliance on hydro power helped make Quebec the one Canadian province where GHG emissions decreased (by 1%) between 1990 and 2006. Note the word province; this is not to slight the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, where GHG emissions decreased 17% over the same time period.
Per capita emissions [third chart] were relatively steady across much of the country between 1990 and 2006: there was a 12% decrease in Ontario, a 10% decrease in Quebec, and a 7% increase across the Maritimes. The big discrepancy is between Alberta and Saskatchewan. Alberta’s population growth kept pace with the growth in emissions – people came from other provinces to work in the oil sands operations. Saskatchewan, on the other hand, has seen a 67% increase in per capita emissions due to a declining population (this trend began to reverse in the past few years).
The carbon-intense nature of the economies of Alberta and Saskatchewan is best illustrated by a chart of the GHG emissions intensity: the GHG emissions per $ of GDP. This is shown in the final chart to the right (2006 only). In 2006, creating one dollar of GDP in Alberta required over five times the GHG emissions as in Ontario, over six times the GHG emissions as in Quebec. The high emissions intensity of Saskatchewan and Alberta leads to the interesting results that the emissions intensity appears to decrease with population.
There’s likely some economic logic to that pattern: for example, areas of higher populations and large cities are more “efficient” overall, and resource extractive industries tend to be located in areas of lower population.
These are just some of the broad patterns in the GHG data. There is much much more to analyse and discuss.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Lights dim around the world for Earth Hour
So far, aside from the stupid comments from Bjorn Lomborg ("the use of candles during the hour could actually produce more emissions than electric lights"), Earth Hour has been positively received in most of the world.
BONN, Germany (AP) — From an Antarctic research base to the Great Pyramids of Egypt and beyond, the world switched off the lights on Saturday for Earth Hour, dimming skyscrapers, city streets and some of the world's most recognizable monuments for 60 minutes to highlight the threat of climate change.
Time zone by time zone, nearly 4,000 cities and towns in 88 countries joined the event sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund to dim nonessential lights from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
An agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, is supposed to be reached in Copenhagen, Denmark, this December, and environmentalists' sense of urgency has spurred interest in this year's Earth Hour. Last year, only 400 cities participated; Sydney held a solo event in 2007.
In Bonn, WWF activists held a candlelit cocktail party on the eve of a U.N. climate change meeting, the first in a series of talks leading up to Copenhagen. The goal is to get an ambitions deal to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases that scientists say are dangerously warming the planet.
"People want politicians to take action and solve the problem," said Kim Carstensen, director of the global climate initiative for WWF, speaking in a piano bar bathed by candlelight and lounge music.
Organizers initially worried enthusiasm this year would wane with the world focused on the global economic crisis, Earth Hour executive director Andy Ridley told The Associated Press. But he said it apparently had the opposite effect.
"Earth Hour has always been a positive campaign; it's always around street parties, not street protests, it's the idea of hope, not despair. And I think that's something that's been incredibly important this year because there is so much despair around," he said.
The Chatham Islands, a small chain about 500 miles (800 kilometers) east of New Zealand, switched off its diesel generators to officially begin Earth Hour. Soon after, the lights of Auckland's Sky Tower, the tallest man-made structure in New Zealand, blinked off.
At Scott Base in Antarctica, New Zealand's 26-member winter team resorted to minimum safety lighting and switched off appliances and computers.
In Australia, people attended candlelit speed-dating events and gathered at outdoor concerts as the hour of darkness rolled through. Sydney's glittering harbor was bathed in shadows as lights dimmed on the steel arch of the city's iconic Harbour Bridge and the nearby Opera House.
And in Egypt, the Great Pyramids darkened, as did the Sphinx.
To the West, floodlights at the Acropolis in Athens were switched off and an outdoor concert was staged on an adjacent hill, which many Athenians approached in a candlelight procession. The Athens International Airport switched off the lights on one of its two runways.
In that other great ancient city, Rome, the Colosseum and St. Peter's Basilica were plunged into darkness.
In Paris, the Eiffel Tower, Louvre and Notre Dame Cathedral were among 200 monuments and buildings that went dark. The Eiffel Tower, however, only extinguished its lights for five minutes for security reasons because visitors were on the tower, said WWF France spokesman Pierre Chasseray.
"Above all in the current economic crisis, we should send a signal for climate protection," said Klaus Wowereit, the mayor of Berlin, one in a handful of German cities switching off lights at city halls and television towers for Earth Day for the first time.
Meanwhile, the Swiss city of Geneva switched off the lights on theaters, churches and monuments. Among them were the Reformation Wall, where floodlights normally illuminate 10-foot (three-meter) statues of John Calvin and other leaders of Protestantism. The city's motto engraved on either side of the statues is: "After darkness, light."
All of Spain's 52 provincial capitals turned off some lights an hour after sunset, silhouetting unlit landmarks such as the royal palace and parliament in Madrid, the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, and the Alhambra palace in Granada against darkening dusk skies.
A key 2010 football World Cup qualifier against Serbia posed a dilemma for Romanians. "Shall we watch the match or turn off the lights?," the 7plus daily asked in its main front-page headline.
The U.N. headquarters in New York and other facilities were dimming their lights to signal the need for global support for a new climate treaty.
U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-moon called Earth Hour "a way for the citizens of the world to send a clear message: They want action on climate change."
China participated for the first time, cutting the lights at Beijing's Bird's Nest Stadium and Water Cube, the most prominent 2008 Olympic venues.
In Bangkok, the prime minister switched off the lights on Khao San Road, a haven for budget travelers packed with bars and outdoor cafes.
Earth Hour organizers say there's no uniform way to measure how much energy is saved worldwide.
Earth Hour 2009 has garnered support from global corporations, nonprofit groups, schools, scientists and celebrities — including Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett and retired Cape Town Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
McDonald's Corp. planned to dim its arches at 500 locations around the U.S. Midwest. The Marriott, Ritz-Carlton and Fairmont hotel chains and Coca-Cola Co. also planned to participate.Friday, March 27, 2009
Will people participate in Earth Hour?
The optimistic organizers are hoping one billion people will switch off their lights tomorrow at 8:30 pm [your] local time. All sorts of different towns, cities and businesses are taking part. For just one example, tomorrow night's LA-Nashville hockey game is being played early so as not to conflict with the hour of darkness.
It is a gimmick, sure, but a surprisingly effective one. Last year, Earth Hour led to a measurable drop in electricity demand in participating Canadian, Australian and New Zealand cities last year. That won't solve climate change. It does at least make people think. A poll taken after last year's Earth Hour showed a majority of Canadians - across party lines - think it should happen more often.
Best "greenwashing" of the year?
And now for something completely ridiculous:
Pepsi is releasing a "Eco-fina", a more ecologically friendly version of the company's Aquafina bottled water. The Eco-Fina bottle is lighter and contain 20% less plastic. Never mind that the new light bottles will still contain plain-old tap water that has been subject to an unregulated and unnecessary purification process.
One may want to applaud the development of a new, more efficient beverage container. How about reserving that new technology for beverages that actually require a container?
This snippet from a 2006 article in the Globe and Mail neatly summarizes the inanity of the bottled water industry, especially the bottled water sold by the major beverage companies like Pepsi and Coke:
A one-litre bottle of Dasani brand water, sold at a Toronto supermarket recently for $1.59, retails for about 3,000 times the price of a litre of municipal water from nearby Brampton, where the container was filled. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. filters the municipal water and then adds minerals to improve its taste. Federal product labelling laws do not require bottlers to indicate that their products originally were tap water, but do require companies to say whether it is spring or mineral water.
Monday, March 23, 2009
A new online voice on the coral reef crisis
For the past few months, the site known as The Reef Tank has been educating the enthusiastic community of coral reef aquarium owners about marine science and the crisis facing the world's coral reefs. Their blog features an interview with me about my work on climate change and coral reefs, as well as some informative posts about ocean acidification and coral bleaching by coral reef expert John Bruno.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
A mea culpa by the Washington Post, or not
The Washington Post has published Chris Mooney's intelligent critique of the mistaken claims about climate science in recent columns by the paper's own George Will. Here's the take home message:
Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists -- following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It's also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be -- now more than ever.
Many online voices including Joe Romm and Mooney himself are applauding the Post for publishing an opinion piece that criticizes its own opinion columnist. While we applaud the implicit mea culpa, let's not forget that original fault here lies with the newspaper. A real victory will be an assurance from the Post that the editorial board will fact-check and properly vet opinion pieces, even those written by a star syndicated columnist.
Mooney's right that scientists apply critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. Guess what? We still make mistakes and misinterpret results. That's why we are required to state our methods. And that's why we have peer review.
The same should be true of the editorial page. Surely, we should expect better of a columnist like Will, that he will follow up on sources, properly weigh evidence and double check all his sources and facts. But incorrect claims about climate science or whatever subject are bound to happen, intentional or not. That's why you have editors. That's why you have an editorial process.
Don't get me wrong. George Will should be criticized for the content of his columns. As should Lorne Gunter for the unsubstantiated drivel in his climate-related columns that appear in Canada's National Post. The thing is, even if Will or Gunter changes their ways, there will be some other columnist willing to cherry-pick misleading bits of information. It's great to see an opinion piece that defines good science journalism. Now let's see an editorial policy that does the same.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Recent changes in per capita emissions
As we approach the pivotal UN climate meetings in Copenhagen this December, there will be plenty of discussion about the progress, or lack thereof, on greenhouse gas emission reductions among Kyoto signatories. The story is usually told with the graph to the write, compiled from UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) data. Shown is the change in greenhouse gas emissions (excluding land use change) by country between 1990, the baseline year for Kyoto, and 2006. The emissions are expressed as CO2-“equivalent”, an easy catch-all in which the totals for non-CO2 greenhouse gases like methane are converted into equivalent amounts of CO2. {click on the chart for a better look}
It is no secret at this point that the US and China are the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. China is thought to have matched or surpassed the US in total GHG emission in the past couple years. The comparison, of course, is unfair because there are four times as many people in China. A more equitable metric – per capita emissions – finds that the average American, Canadian and Australian is responsible for more than four times the GHG emissions of the average Chinese citizen.
The importance of describing GHG emissions per capita, rather than only total emissions by country, appears to be widely appreciated at this stage [although one might argue not widely enough, given some of the pre-Copenhagen rhetoric out there in the ether]. However, most of the cursory analyses and discussion of recent trends in GHG emissions in the media and online have focused on the total emissions metric. A lot of Canadians can repeat the statistics on emissions growth, and the difference between current emissions and the Kyoto target. But how have per capita emissions changed? {Continued after the jump}
Here’s one reason this matters. Upon first glance at the total emissions number, European nations appear to have been far more successful at controlling GHG emissions than the rest of the Annex I nations. A common criticism of claims of “progress” in Europe is that most European nations are experiencing very low population growth, even negative growth in the case of some of the former Eastern Bloc nations.
The second chart shows some crude analysis of this question. 
The chart shows the change in per capita emissions from 1990 to 2005, expressed in CO2-equivalent per capita [this was calculated from the UNFCCC GHG emissions data and population data from the United Nations]. Countries in red experienced an increase in per capita emissions. Another way of thinking about this is that, all else being equal, the change in GHG emissions in these countries is greater than can be explained by population growth alone.
The data illustrates a couple interesting trends. First, the argument that European nations have achieved more progress in slowing or reversing emissions [than the US and Canada] purely because of demographic change is not borne out by the national data in most cases. Of course, a more detailed analysis may find ways in which demographics have played an important role. Per capita emissions decreased in France, Germany, the UK, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway and Belgium, in each case by a greater percent than the total emissions decreased. [for now, I’ll exclude the former eastern Bloc nations from this discussion, since the emissions reduction there were driven more by the collapse of former Soviet industries than the slow or negative population growth].
Second, per capita emissions also declined slight (2%) in the US from 1990 to 2005 [note: no population data was available for 2006]. If Canadians need any more evidence that we and our government have failed miserably at addressing greenhouse gas emissions, as required under the Kyoto Protocol, this is it. Canada’s per capita emissions have risen 6% over a period in which America’s per capita emissions have dropped by 2%. No doubt, the addition of 4.6 million people to Canada between 1990 and 2005 has influenced GHG emissions. However, the country’s total GHG emissions are still 6% higher than could be expected from population growth alone.
It is possible that the economic crisis will change this story – in the Canadian case, the drop in resource and oil prices has slowed industrial activity in the oil sands and other regions, perhaps leading to slower increase, or even a decrease in national GHG emissions.I suspect that all the jumping up and down earlier last year about global GHG emissions being “ahead” of the scenarios used by the IPCC will go for naught, as the economic crisis is surely blunting GHG emissions growth.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Does Canada's minister in charge of science question evolution?
This story is just horrifying. Will someone please tell it is a joke?
Saturday, March 14, 2009
George Will and the lessons we can learn from Greenland
Followers of the climate news online are no doubt aware of the web-plosion caused by an error-filled column by Washington Post op-ed columnist George Will.
Will's Feb 13th op-ed drew online outrage and letters to the Post ombudsman, which begat an article by the NY Times Andrew Revkin contrasting Will's multiple, egregious errors with an erroneous slide used by Al Gore in a climate presentation, which begat heated [and deserved!] criticism of Revkin for drawing false equivalence, which begat spats about the people like Matthew Nesbit quoted in Revkin's article, which together begat another equally dubious Will op-ed, which begat more outrage, and which all eventually begat yet another a set of posts dissecting or defending Roger Pielke, who is like the black hole of the climate blogs, eventually absorbing all the energy of the surrounding community.
There are many important things to take away from this dispute, not the least of which being that even the most reputable newspapers clearly do not properly fact-check opinion pieces (ie. Will). The problem with Will's climate skeptic talking points - make no mistake, these are oft-repeated points - is not just the numbers. It is the lesson you draw from those numbers.
Case in point, Will's recent comments about the Vikings:
Now, it seems to me there is a 100 percent certainty that at any moment the planet is warming or it is cooling. That's what it does. There are cycles well-recorded through history. The climate was once warm enough for Greenland to be called "Greenland" for a reason -- the Vikings farmed there.
No doubt, there are factual and contextual concerns with this statement. First of all, the island is called Greenland for a number of possible reasons, including i) the southern coastal regions where the Norse landed is green; it is now, it was then, and ii) green may be a misrepresentation of 'grunt', the Norse word for ground. Second of all, yes, the Vikings did in fact farm in Greenland, the Greenlandic people think climate change will allow them to expand farming once again. One shouldn't get carried away with the term "farm". The Viking weren't growing corn and soybeans and tomatoes and lettuce -- they grew hay to feed to animals.
The real issue here is what we can learn from history. Will and others skeptical of the human role in climate change repeat this meme about Greenland presumably to advance two related points:
a) that the climate varies naturally over time,
b) that climate change scientists ignore point (a).
Point (a) is a red herring. Of course the climate varies naturally over time. However, just because there is natural climate variability doesn't mean that other forces, like greenhouse gas emissions, have no effect on the climate, or that current trends are due to natural variability. That's why we do research, that's why we build models based on physics and chemistry.
Point (b) is wrong, and very telling.
The Norse in Greenland is one of the most important case studies in climate and history. In my course of the global climate system, I spend a half a lecture talking about the what happened to the Norse settlements in Greenland.
Greenland was settled around 985 AD by the Norse. Other than the Inuit and the modern Danes, this was the only successful human settlement of Greenland. The environment was too harsh for cereal cultivation so the Norse relied on pastoralism, growing hay for sheep and cattle, and trade with other Norse colonies.
The Norse settlements flourish until the mid-1300s AD. Then the population began to decline. They lost contact with Norway. By 1500 AD, there were no Norse left in Norway.
What happened?
The climate changed - cooled by 1-2 deg C. The increase in sea ice made trade difficult. The cooler weather damaged hay yields, possibly already declining due to overgrazing. There were conflict with the Inuit, who were better adapted to the colder climate. In other words, climate change helped trigger the complete collapse, to use Jared Diamond's term, of the Norse society in Greenland (note the word "helped": climate is rarely the sole cause of societal collapse).
The lesson from the "Vikings farmed in Greenland" is not just that the climate has varied in the past. That's obvious, that's something for which we have decent data, and again, it does not prove or disprove the human role in current climate change. Once again, the fact the climate can change naturally does not mean that it is the only way the climate can change.
The real lesson of the "Vikings farmed in Greenland", the one that appears in textbooks, that one that appears in history courses, climate courses, archaeology course, you name it, is that a lack of resilience in the face of a changing climate can lead to the breakdown of a society.
Will and the others who repeat the Greenland was meme are not missing the facts. They are missing the point.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
By boat, by train, by plane, by bike
Good Magazine published this fun comparison of fuel per passenger required to travel 560 km (350 mi) by various modes of transportation, including the fuel used to create the food that fuels the walker and the cyclist.
The winner? The cyclist at 912 miles per gallon, or 0.26 L/100 km.
The cruise ship at the top of the chart gets a rather sad 0.009 mpg. So if cram more than 101,133 passengers on the ship and don't feed any of them, you may be able to can match the efficiency of a bicycle (ignoring how the mass of all those people would reduce the fuel efficiency of the ship).
Saturday, March 07, 2009
The great disruption
Thomas Friedman hits on a point that is not getting nearly enough attention:
What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”
We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...
Is it about time to unite the financial collapse with ecological collapse?
“Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we’re living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets,” argues Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.”
One of those who has been warning me of this for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment — when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once — “The Great Disruption.”...
Often in the middle of something momentous, we can’t see its significance. But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker — the year when ‘The Great Disruption’ began.
Friday, March 06, 2009
Photo of the week
In the past year, I've heard from a couple colleagues who work in the Caribbean about the large spread of lionfish, a colorful reef fish native to the Indo-Pacific. It is thought that a few lionfish were accidentally introduced through a broken tank at a large private aquarium in Miami and/or by some hobby aquarium owners.
You can find them now in many parts of the Caribbean, apparently including Cuba, where I spotted this fellow under a rock a couple weeks back. I'm definitely not an expert on lionfish, but you don't need to be an icthyologist to spot this aptly named species!
A welcome new addition to Caribbean reefs? Not quite. As if Caribbean coral reef ecosystems were not already under enough pressure, lionfish are invasive predators that are capable of removing much of the native reef fish stock and altering ecosystem dynamics [any experts wish to elaborate in the comments?].
If you are interested, the US Geological Survey has a terrific Google Map showing all the reported sightings across the Caribbean, including the recent sightings in the Florida Keys.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Making a list of scientists and checking it twice
The meme about a list of "scientists" who disagree with the IPCC consensus made its way to the Coral List, a list-serv maintained by NOAA and read by by a range researchers, educators, divers and marine park managers. There are a few of these lists floating around out in the ether, the most infamous being the US Senator Inhofe's 650 club. So every once in a while a line about a list of scientists almost as long or longer than the list of IPCC authors appears in an op-ed piece in a newspaper, a post on a reputable web site, or in a discussion on a good service like the Coral-List.
This is my argument (to the Coral-List) about the folly of these lists of, based on an article I wrote for Worldchanging:
The goal of the list-makers is ostensibly to show there are more "scientists" who doubt the IPCC consensus than who participate in the IPCC. This misses the point of the IPCC effort entirely. The IPCC was not created to get the views of ~2000 climate scientists. It was created to have those ~2000 climate scientists summarize the findings of the entire scientific community.
Let’s say you are worried about your health. Maybe you’ve noticed an elevated body temperature, and it is beginning to affect the way you function.
You go to the doctor. The doctor gives you a diagnosis, based on her or his expertise. To be safe, you might get a second opinion. Most of the time, that’s enough. But this diagnosis is a frightening one. And you want to be thorough. So you make a call to the United Nations.
The UN assembles a team of a couple thousand of top doctors from around the world, with a range of specialties. The team of doctors does a comprehensive review of all the scientific literature on your condition and charges medical centers around the world to run sophisticated computer models simulating your health. The information is assembled into a massive technical report. A draft report is then made available for any doctor in the world to review. Thousands of
people review aspects of the report and provide criticism that is factored into the final draft. The team of doctors also then meets with representatives from different countries around the world to produce a summary of the report in less technical language that reflects the
most important and statistically significant findings. Five years later, you are given that summary.
That is how the IPCC reports and the “Summary for Policymakers” reports are produced. They are the end-point of an exhaustive review of scientific literature by a group of top scientists and a long peer review process. They are not alarmist. The findings contained in the reports
actually tend to be quite conservative, because they arise out of a wide body of research and adhere to strict statistical conventions. For example, the projections for sea level rise are lower than in many climate studies because of reported uncertainty in the understanding
of ice sheet dynamics.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Fuelling the future
In the latest issue of Momentum, a new magazine out of the University of Minnesota, I argue that "our cars aren't alone in needing a new diet". Here's the opening:
It’s been a tough couple of years for the public relations staff in the biofuels industry.
The production of biofuels from crops like corn has been blamed for everything from driving up global food prices and deforestation in the Amazon to depleting oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico (not to mention raising the price of tequila).
Even the basic purpose of today’s commercial biofuels production has been called into question.
A study by researchers at the University of Minnesota, published last year in the journal Science, found that if previously undeveloped landscapes are cleared for biofuels production, then those biofuels emit more greenhouse gases than gasoline and diesel. Policymakers and the public are now asking if it’s efficient or ethical to use croplands to feed machines rather than people.
There’s one obvious place to look for an answer. In North America, we have been feeding the majority of our crops to machines for decades. These elaborate, protein-producing devices are best known by their common names: cows, pigs and chickens...
Click here for the full article. Or continue after the jump.Eating animals is hardly new. Our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors relied on meat for a large proportion of their protein intake. But the advent of agriculture and rise in population after the end of the last ice age led humans to settle in villages and shift to a more energy-efficient, grain-based diet. Over time, meat would be reserved for those who could afford the land and workforce required to raise animals.
Diets in the developed world changed again with the discovery of fossil fuels, especially oil. This cheap source of energy allowed us to produce nitrogen fertilizers, transform crop genetics, fuel agricultural machinery and transport agricultural products around the world. Buoyed by high crop yields and newfound agricultural wealth, we began feeding large quantities of grain and oilseeds to our farm animals.
Today, the average American eats as much as 275 pounds of meat each year, up from 197 pounds in the early 1960s.
Feeding the literally billions of cattle, poultry and pigs now requires a large proportion of the world’s—and mainly America’s—croplands. More than two-thirds of the American corn, soybean, sorghum, barley and oats harvest is used to produce animal feed. That’s more than two-thirds of the fuel used to operate machinery, more than two-thirds of the agricultural chemical use and subsequent water pollution, and more than two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions from croplands.
In the coming decades, the demand for both animal feed and transportation fuels is expected to rise sharply as Asia and the developing world become wealthier. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, per capita meat consumption in China has doubled since 1990, and it could double again.
Can our agricultural system meet this increasing demand while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions, tropical deforestation and water pollution? The solution may be switching to more efficient machines.
Like the cars we drive, the animals we eat have wide-ranging efficiencies. Beef cattle are the SUVs of animal agriculture. Renowned energy expert Vaclav Smil calculated that the U.S. agricultural system uses 32 kilograms of feed to produce 1 kilogram of edible beef. Poultry is the fuel-efficient compact of the animal world, with around one-eighth the feed ratio of beef.
The good news is that Americans have been slowly shifting their diets from beef toward more efficient forms of food production. Since the 1970s, per capita beef consumption has decreased 20 percent, while per capita poultry consumption increased by 40 percent. And more and more Americans are forsaking beef or all meat out of health concerns.
A more aggressive move toward poultry, dairy and vegetable-based diets could greatly decrease the land, energy and fertilizer needed to feed the population. In turn, this change would decrease direct greenhouse gas emissions from food cultivation and nutrient pollution to waterways. My own research indicates that reducing beef consumption in American diets would also reduce nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi River and shrink the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
Changing diets would also free up productive croplands for cultivating second-generation biofuels based on unfertilized grains, oil crops or grasses. This newly available land would help eliminate concerns that diverting productive croplands to biofuels cultivation causes the clearing of native vegetation and the release of stored carbon elsewhere in the world.
In a carbon-constrained world, food efficiency may be just as important as fuel efficiency.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Levelling the science of sea-level rise
One of my biggest pet peeves with the climate change communication world is widespread use of sea-level rise ‘maps’. There are countless maps and animations out there. Think the simulated flooding of New York in An Inconvenient Truth or, for a local example, the Sierra Club’s post-Greenland map of Vancouver in which my home becomes coveted waterfront property. Anyone with a digital elevation dataset and some GIS skills can draw a map of what land will “disappear” if the sea level rises by 6 m, or 6 km for that matter.
Leave aside for now the uncertainty about future rates of sea-level rise, the usual beef with graphic representations of sea level rise. Spend a few weeks in a coral atoll and you’ll know the real problem with these simplistic graphics. The sea is not actually level. And there’s no scientific reason to think that the rise will be. A part of this issue is tackled in a terrific new paper by Mitrovica et al. in last week’s Science.
The paper estimates the regional variation in sea level rise that would occur from the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). Unlike the brute force mapping exercises, Mitrovica et al. consider the actual physics of the ice melt, including gravitational attraction of the ice sheet, migration of shorelines and the effect of all that ice on the Earth’s rotations. For example:
The rapid melting of ice sheets and glaciers leads to a sea-level change that departs dramatically from the assumption of a uniform redistribution of meltwater (4). An ice sheet exerts a gravitational attraction on the nearby ocean and thus draws water toward it. If the ice sheet melts, this attraction will be reduced, and water will migrate away from the ice sheet. The net effect, despite the increase in the total volume of the oceans after a melting event, is that sea level will actually fall within ~2000 km of the collapsing ice sheet and progressively increase as one moves further from this region. Each ice reservoir will produce a distinct geometry, or fingerprint, of sea-level change... Although the physics of fingerprinting has been embraced in studies of past sea-level change, it has been largely ignored in discussions of future projections.
The conclusion which drew media attention (the Globe and Mail) and a bold-ed and italicized post from Joe Romm is that sea-level rise from melting of WAIS will be higher along will the coastlines of North America, including cities like Washington, DC, New York, and Vancouver.
The media coverage is not wrong, but misses the point. The paper demonstrates how melting of an ice sheet leads to uneven sea level rise, using WAIS as an example. In reality, if all of WAIS were to melt, so presumably would some or all of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the East Antarctica Ice Sheet and the mountain glaciers. The melting of all that other ice would also influence the geography of sea level rise. The take home message of the paper is not we need to start sandbagging along English Bay beaches here in Vancouver. The message is that the scientific community – and I assume by extension the environmental community – needs to remember that the oceans’ rise will not be level. The concluding sentences of the paper:
Any robust assessment of the sea-level hazard associated with the loss of major ice reservoirs must, of course, account for other potential sources of meltwater, namely Greenland, the East Antarctic, and mountain glaciers. Nevertheless, future projections should avoid simple, eustatic estimates and be based on a suitably complete sea-level theory.
Amen to that.
[You can give thanks for this post to my father, who notified me of the Mitrovica et al. press coverage, and who many of you know through the macro-economic advice he periodically delivers in the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and on the CBC. Forget my deranged comments on economics – he is the one they really should be calling to fix the federal budget.]
Friday, February 06, 2009
Cuts to research funding
From occasional commenter crf:
"could you comment on the way the Genome Canada story is taking hold in the press, about Genome Canada, as reported in the Globe, being "The only agency that regularly finances large-scale science in Canada" (Carolyn Abraham, Globe and Mail Jan 29, 2009)"
I wish I could explain this bizarre episode. The government cuts all funding to Genome Canada, the agency which helped make Canada a leader in genetics research, and exactly the type of organization capable of creating the "shovel-ready" projects that everyone says are required to stimulate the economy [the US Senate just made a similar dubious decision, cutting funding for NSF, NOAA, etc. from the stimulus package].
The Canadian media did a nice job of picking up on the story. But the editors and reporters repeatedly make what should be an obviously wrong statement that Genome Canada was "the only agency that regularly finances large-scale science". Er, NSERC anyone?
Let me be clear: the mistake is not the important issue here -- the important issue is the government decision. It is a sad sign of how "truthiness" is infecting reporting in the internet age. Say something enough times and it becomes true in people's minds. Maybe that works? You could argue that a similar dynamic explains why the same thoroughly debunked arguments against the science of climate change (it's the sun! co2 lags temperature! the hockey stick is broken! mars is warming too!) keep re-appearing.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Auditor General questions Canada's climate policy
Say what you will about the Canadian system of government, but it excels at producing investigations, inquiries and audits. For example, Canada's auditor general regularly issues reports on whether government policies are achieving the proposed results.
The following are excerpts from a report just released by Canada's Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, the auditor charged with evaluated federal policies to control air (pollution and greenhouse gas) emissions. They reveal a depressing lack of effort and commitment even to the weak emissions reductions policies of the current government.
1.35 In its March 2007 Budget, the federal government announced a transfer of $1.519 billion to provincial and territorial governments under the Clean Air and Climate Change Trust Fund. The Trust Fund is an element of Turning the Corner, a government initiative described by Environment Canada as "Canada's plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution." Both the 2007 Budget and Turning the Corner state that the Trust Fund will yield real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and other air pollutants. No expected reductions from the Trust Fund were quantified in these documents.
1.39 Analysis supporting Environment Canada's expected greenhouse gas emission reductions is weak. There are problems in how the 80 megatonnes of expected reductions against the Trust Fund for the years 2008 to 2012 were derived. The Department conducted almost no analysis to support that figure, and did not perform key types of analysis. The little analysis it did undertake is based on flawed assumptions—for example, that all provinces and territories face identical opportunities, challenges, and economic conditions for achieving emission reductions. Since the basis for the estimate is flawed, we cannot determine what a reasonable range of expected results should have been.
1.40 Environment Canada cannot monitor or verify the Trust Fund results. In our December 2008 Auditor General's Report, Chapter 1, A Study of Federal Transfers to the Provinces and Territories, we note that the provinces and territories frequently have no legal obligation to spend sums transferred to them through a trust fund for the purpose announced by the federal government. Provinces and territories also frequently have no legal obligation to report to the federal government on how the money was spent and what was achieved. Environment Canada has acknowledged that the provincial and territorial governments are accountable only to their own constituencies for expenditures and results under the Trust Fund, not to the federal government. The Department has not developed and implemented even a voluntary system for monitoring greenhouse gas emission reductions under the Trust Fund. Nevertheless, Environment Canada made a claim of expected results in 2007 and repeated it in 2008, knowing that the nature of the Trust Fund makes it very unlikely that the Department can report real, measurable, and verifiable results.
1.59 Estimates by Environment Canada indicate that the Public Transit Tax Credit will lead to negligible reductions in Canada's greenhouse gas emissions. Equally questionable is the impact of the Clean Air and Climate Change Trust Fund, which transfers over $1.519 billion to the provinces and territories to help them lower greenhouse gas emissions. Environment Canada has estimated that the initiative will lead to emission reductions totalling 80 megatonnes from 2008 to 2012. However, it has arrived at that figure on the basis of flawed analyses. The government has stated that it does not intend to monitor whether targets are achieved because it does not have access to the necessary information and cannot control what the recipient governments do with the funding. Environment Canada made a claim of expected results in 2007 and repeated it in 2008, knowing that the nature of the Trust Fund makes it very unlikely that the Department can report real, measurable, and verifiable results.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Skepticism about corals and rising CO2
The recent spate of "skeptical" climate change reporting and posting - which I personally feel is largely weather and opportunity-based - have included some serious misinterpretations and misrepresentations of coral reef science. For example, Climate Shifts tells the story of an amusing report from the "Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change".
The latest screed comes from Watts up with that goes after the threat of rising CO2:
This does indeed sound alarming, until you consider that corals became common in the oceans during the Ordovician Era - nearly 500 million years ago - when atmospheric CO2 levels were about 10X greater than they are today.
What follows is a graph of temperature and CO2 over the past several hundred million years which I'll let the geologist argue over.
Now like the author of that post, I'm not one of the world's experts on reef development. So, instead, let me defer to one. This is a quote from the beginning of Charlie Veron's Corals of the World (page 33-34), the three volume tome found on the shelf of pretty much every reef scientist out there:
By the Middle Ordovician, complex algae and invertebrate reef communities had become widespread and reef biota had diversified... Reef development reached a peak in the Devonian Period and even after all this time, what remains today of those reefs are sometimes of awesome size... Corals were seldom the dominant organisms of Devonian reefs although rugose corals are often abundant in them and have a wide variety of growth-forms. Tabulate corals, which were a less varied group, mostly occupied protected or inter-reef environments.
There were reefs during those earlier era. Read on:
Unlike the Scleractinia (ed - the order of stony corals found today), both these groups of corals made excellent fossils becauase their skeletons were made of calcite, a far more stable form of calcium carbonate that the aragonite skeltons of Scleractinia.
Yes, corals evolved over time. Today's coral species date back in the tens not the many hundreds of millions of years. The type of calcium carbonate (aragonite) today's corals secrete is more sensitive to changes in the CO2 or carbonate concentration, no doubt in part because those corals have persisted through a period in which CO2 was lower than today.
Any reef experts wish to comment?
Update: A reader reminded me of this recent article by Veron in the journal Coral Reefs. The author hypothesizes that high CO2 /acidification may have caused some of the major marine extinction events in the geological past. It also addresses the very question of whether corals could have persisted in a high CO2 world in the past:
Two possibilities present themselves: (1) Reefs may not have proliferated at all
during CO2 highs; they may just appear to have survived because they were able to resume growth when levels fell. (2) The high apparent CO2 levels of ancient times may be
an artefact of a lack of data and measuring method.
Veron also again addresses the fact that today's corals are different:
Reef proliferation in the distant past during periods when atmospheric CO2 may have been high could mean that the reef builders and consolidators were better adapted to these conditions and could exploit the enhanced calcification and photosynthesis promoted by warmer sea surface temperatures without adverse effects. Many organisms in the ancient oceans would have been more tolerant to acidification through their dependence on calcitic skeletons rather than aragonite or high-magnesium calcite. There may have been other aspects of coral biology that allowed ancient corals to tolerate water chemistries that are lethal to today’s Scleractinia. If so, it would be more than interesting to know what those physiological mechanisms were.
