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.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
A thought on the Waxman-Markey climate bill
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.
