Drought and ethanol crunch U.S. corn crop

There's a lot of fear-mongering in the media about the impact of the U.S. drought on food production and what that means for the future. A look at the crop supply data, available from the USDA feed grains yearbook, tells the full story, and it is not about food, nor is it entirely about the drought.

The U.S. shifting from fueling animals with corn to fueling cars with corn. I wrote about this a few years ago in a piece in Momentum Magazine, and my colleague Chris Kucharik and I alluded to this inevitability in our 2008 paper on corn ethanol production and the Gulf of Mexico 'Dead Zone'.

Corn production has close to doubled since the early 1980s due to technology, fertilizer and the like increasing crop yields, and to an ethanol-driven increase in planted area over the past decade. Thanks to the increase in production, the U.S. was, until a couple years ago, able to produce all the corn ethanol without really denting the total amount of feed produced (or the amount of what I've labelled sweeteners and others, which includes high-fructose corn syrup, seeds, glucose / dextrose, floor waxes, xathan gum, pens, lecithin, breakfast cereals, adhesive tape, etc; OK, I admit, I made one of those up, but seriously, only one, and I could be wrong, that one may actually come from corn).

Now, ethanol production is coming at the expense of feed and exports. Last year, feed production was the lowest since 1995, which was a low corn production year, and exports were at the lowest since 2006. In the 2008 paper, we predicted this would happen simply because of land availability. There's only so much productive cropland not already needed to for other grains and oils that can be used to produce high-yielding corn. In order to reach the goal of 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol per year, corn would have to be diverted from its other major uses, namely feed and exports. I'd like to claim I was brilliantly prescient, but the math was pretty straight-forward (though very very time-consuming to do properly, a reminder that science is often about the grunt work, not the exciting discovery).

This year, despite the devastating drought, there's still plenty of corn being produced. Total corn production is right at the level of the middle of the last decade (the 2003-2007 average, to be precise). The supply issue is about ethanol, which is expected to use up almost 42% of this year's corn crop (figure at left). The drought is exacerbating the effect of ethanol production on the availability of crops for other uses. According to the USDA's preliminary estimates for the 2012/2013 crop year (the last set of data on the chart above, listed as 2012 for convenience), the drought will drop overall corn production by about 13% from the previous year, but ethanol production will only drop by 3%. Feed production  will be the lowest since the 1988 drought, a low level not generally seen since the 1970s. Similarly, exports will be the second lowest since 1980. The tight supply of feed and decline in exports, together with speculation about those same two things, is affecting prices, which can in turn affect food availability in other parts of the world.

There's been much talk of whether this year's drought and any impending price-driven food crisis can be linked to climate change. That's impossible to answer definitively. Instead, we should think about the following: This year is an example of how poor climate change mitigation decisions - corn ethanol production, an answer that was looking for a question - can make the world less resilient to climate change.

Read More...

Summary only...

Proposed pipelines undermine Canada's climate target for 2020

A New York Times editorial argued that the U.S. should consider the climate implications of constructing pipeline, like Keystone XL, to transport bitumen from the oil sands in Alberta. As should Canada.

The carbon emissions embedded in bitumen that would be transported by the proposed pipelines across BC would not only dwarf the emissions from the province itself, as I discussed last week. It would completely undermine not just B.C.'s emissions reduction policy, but the entire country's policy. The graph shows the estimated gap (i.e. necessary reductions) between the most recent national emissions estimate (2010, 692 Mt) and the policy goal for 2020 (17% reduction, ~607 Mt). The emissions embedded in the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline (82.5 Mt) is alone almost as great as the Canadian 2020 emissions gap (85.3 Mt). Add the Kinder Morgan twinning, and the carbon emissions embedded in using the pipelines would make a mockery of any efforts to reach the federal target.

We'd be reducing emission from the country, but increasing emissions in other countries. The climate does not care whose balance sheet lists the carbon. Maybe if the federal government wants to referee this growing inter-provincial battle over the pipelines, it needs to be willing to talk climate.

Read More...

Summary only...

Pipelines would dramatically increase carbon emissions from BC, depending how you count

The provincial dispute over the construction of pipelines across British Columbia is centred on issues about royalties, land rights, and the local environmental impacts, namely the risk of oil spills along the BC coastline or the pipeline route.

Carbon emissions received little attention in the coverage of this looming BC-Alberta dispute. The annual flow of carbon through the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, presuming it is fully operational, is equivalent to more than all current greenhouse gas emissions from British Columbia, home to 4.5 million people. Add the proposed addition to the Kinder Morgan pipeline, as well as current oil exports from the province, and the total oil exports is equivalent to almost 2.5 times current BC emissions and 3.5 times the provincial emissions target for the year 2020.

True, carbon exports are not usually counted in emissions budgets. The emissions are credited to jurisdication where that carbon is actually oxidized to create carbon dioxide.

That carbon might not count on our balance sheet, but maybe responsibility is about more than the finer points of accounting. After all, the climate does not care where the carbon is burned.

Read More...

Summary only...

Coral reef decline disproportionately impacts the developing world

The International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS), on right now in Cairns, Australia, is generating headlines about the plight of the world's coral reefs in the face of climate change and ocean acidification. Perhaps we should call it ocean change.

Amid the Disney movies and all the colourful documentaries about coral reefs, it is easy for people in the mid-latitudes to miss the fact that coral reefs provide valuable "services" - food, shoreline protection and income - to millions and millions of people most of whom are in the developing world. For a paper in Bioscience five years ago, David Potere and I calculated the number of people living close to coral reefs. The map below shows coral reef locations in red, with dot size exaggerated for viewing purposes, and the per-capita GDP shaded in green. According to our analysis over 63 percent of the people were living within 100 km of coral reefs, a total of 415 million people, reside in countries with a per capita GDP less than US$5000 (in 2003 dollars).  


In the past few years, scientists have finally woken up to this fact, and though I am not there, I can tell you that a lot of the work at conferences like ICRS is now devoted to the human implications of coral reef decline and to finding good adaptation strategies.

Read More...

Summary only...

Corals vs. Climate: Slideshow from the Kiribati research

A short article and slideshow telling the story of my recent Kiribati coral reef field trip is now up on the Scientific American website. Check it out!

In the May Scifund campaign, we raised $1800 from 32 different donations to support the local coral reef monitoring expenses like fuel and stipends for the local researchers.

Thanks to all the generous donors!

I'm hoping to raise enough money for the local team to conduct regular monitoring of the reef sites. If you're interested in contributing to this effort, please get in touch. I'll be setting up a system where small, tax-deductible donations to UBC will be routed to Kiribati to support the monitoring and hopefully some training sessions.

(Image: A large Porites or boulder coral off the coast of Bikati Island in Butaritari Atoll)

Read More...

Summary only...

The north, melting

Arctic sea ice may be on pace for a record low this summer:

And, according to new analysis by Jason Box, Greenland's becoming increasingly less reflective because of all the melting ice:

Read More...

Summary only...

New paper on water use in the Amazon features a video abstract

This new paper spearheaded by recent UBC graduate Michael Lathulliere looks at how "green" water - the stuff evaporated from the soil or transpired by plants - flows are changing in Mato Grosso, a Brazilian state experiencing serious agricultural expansion. But rather than read the abstract, you can watch it. The journal Environmental Research Letters has recently begun asking authors to make short videos describing their new manuscript. Here is Mike's short video lecture on the project:

Read More...

Summary only...

How Canada has changed since the 1992 Rio summit

To really understand how much Canada - and the world - has changed, its worth comparing the Canadian government summary of the original 1992 Earth Summit to its submission to the 20th anniversary summit held in Rio last week. I looked through these a few days ago while preparing some thoughts for CBC Radio's BC Almanac discussion of Canada and Rio+20.

The broad history is well known. In 1992, Canada was seen as a leader, arguably the leader, on environmental issues at the international level, particularly issues related to the atmosphere. Canada had come off a decade during which it hosted the famous Montreal summit that led to a ban on CFCs (Montreal Protocol), hosted a groundbreaking climate change summit in which the government urged international efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions, and pushed the US extremely hard to deal with the sulphur dioxide emissions which were causing acid rain. Much of this happened under a Conservative government that was reviled at the time by people on the political left at the time as the most right wing in Canadian history. Canadian Maurice Strong was even selected to be the Secretary General of the Rio Earth Summit.

The five point agenda laid out by then PM Brian Mulroney, seen above with Jacques Cousteau at Rio in 1992, was forward-looking, environmentally-minded, and beyond anything, internationalist. The goals were to help developing nations formulate plans, to ratify international conventions, to take action on international aid and related debt, to integrate sustainability into the goals of all existing international institutions, and to pursue an Earth Charter.

Fast-forward twenty years and you find a changed Canada, but also a changed world. Canadians negotiators went into the Rio+20 summit arguing for only voluntary initiatives in the final document, "green" growth indicators which were intensity-based, no new international organizations or institutions be created (arguably defensible given the overhead), and less focus on providing financial and technical aid to the developing world. The Canadian government hoped to shift the focus instead two two issues: energy and the oceans. Energy is obviously in the Canadian interest. Oceans did get more attention at Rio+20, but Canada actually voted against the proposed plan to create a system for protecting the open ocean from exploitation.

People like to blame all this solely on our current government. Certainly, the Conservative majority government is responsible for tilting Canada inward and avoiding any concrete policy action on issues like climate change. The times have also changed.

We have to be careful waxing nostalgic about the original Earth Summit. The bar was much lower in 1992. The world was just beginning to grasp the global issues like climate change and declining biodiversity. Creating the organization and setting goals was an accomplishment.

Now, that's not enough. People expect action. Agreeing to binding targets is a lot more difficult, politically, than agreeing to create an organization that will talk about binding targets. The final document from Rio+20 contained only vague platitudes and commitments. Much of this stems from the reluctance of major players, certainly including Canada, to accept any responsibility for things like atmospheric pollution. But some stems from what the leaders of those countries have learned in the past twenty years. Many peopel in power, including I'll guess PM Stephen Harper, have watched the supposed big accomplishment of the 1992 summit fail to achieve any environmental progess. They might not care about the lack of environmental progress; regardless they have seen the flaws in using international policy to address environmental concerns.

For example, the journal Nature just gave failing grades to the three signature UN conventions that came out of Rio: the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention to Combat Desertification and the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). To illustate just how poorly these conventions have fared, I'd actually give the UNFCCC, the origin of the Kyoto Protocol and much worldwide hand-wringing about rapidly rising greenhouse gas emissions, the highest grade of the three. At least the UNFCCC has been reasonably successful in developing a GHG emissions reporting system, no small feat, and might succeed in securing substantial financing for climate change projects in the developing world (incidentally, the developing world was still referred to as the "Third World" in the 1992 Earth Summit; like I said, times have really changed).

The lack of international progress on climate change, biodiversity and other issues since Rio does provide a reasonable argument for Canada and other nations to shy away from further international commitments: no new institutions, no new targets, and all initiatives tied to national economic growth.

That's why it might be a mistake to characterise that attitude of the Canadian government as simply anti-environment. It is more than that: it is anti-international. Twenty years ago, Canada was pursing issues that were in the international good as well as the Canadian good. We have since turned inward. At Rio+20, Canada's focused entirely on Canada's own good. Hence the lack of progress on climate policy. Our current government has determined that resource exploitation is more important - for Canada - than addressing climate change.

--
Note: I'll be back with more on Kiribati soon.

Read More...

Summary only...

Video of wrecked WWII plane in Butaritari, Kiribati

The northern Kiribati atoll of Butaritari, which we visited a few weeks ago and whose Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes are to blame for all my sore joints and muscles (it's the dengue, not age), was the captured by Japan during WWII as part of a Pacific defense strategy. During U.S. attacks in 1942 and 1943, at least a couple Japanese planes were downed. The remains of one can't be missed by a visitor: it sits right on the shore next to the government station. The other is out in the lagoon.

On our last day, I asked a local man to guide us to the plane so we could take a look. Here's a short video, I'll guess the only video in existence (?), of the plane:



I can upload more footage if there is interest.

Read More...

Summary only...

Last chance to support science through Scifund!

The Scifund Challenge ends in about 12 hours. This is the last chance to support this alternative way of funding science and to fuel the great projects proposed by students, post-docs and university faculty.

So far, SciFund had raised over $90,000 for research. But a number of really facsinating projects - a webcam to track penguins in Antarctica, looking for fracking contaminants in birds, studying the DNA of a long-lost race of people - are still short of their fundraising goals. Take a look at their videos.

Thanks to all the contributors to Scifund so far, including the fuellers of my Kiribati research project. The funds for our project will go directly to pay all the i-Kiribati co-workers and to pay ships costs. I'm actually just going through bills this week. We're still well short of the goal and appreciate any final day contributions.

Read More...

Summary only...

A really good excuse for not posting more about Kiribati

As a PhD student, I learned a lot about this tropical virus called dengue fever. A fellow student had developed a pretty impressive model that simulated the effect of climate, basically heat and rainfall, on the spread of Aedes Aegypti, the mosquito that transmits dengue. I consumed so many practice presentations and read so many draft papers that the symptoms of dengue became pretty much permanently stored in my brain, along with some atmospheric physics, coral ecology, useless sports trivia, the names of Canadians in Hollywood, etc.

So when the dangerously high fever, nausea, roller-coaster level dizziness, and random back and knee pain suddenly struck on Abaiang Atoll two weeks ago, I may have barely known who I was or where I was, but I certainly know what I had. The worst is now over, thanks to the numerous people, especially my caring i-Kiribati colleagues and the doctors in Tarawa. Safe to say, I have first-hand evidence why people at home might want to fear the northward spread of dengue as the planet warms.

Once the headaches and residual fatigue pass, I'll write a bit more about the research we did in Kiribati. In the mean time, I appreciate any more donations to the field research via Scifund. Only three days left!!

Read More...

Summary only...

Dispatch from Kiribati II: The slow boat to Butaritari

Tarawa, Kiribati - For new readers, this is an update on our field research in Kiribati. This month, you can contribute through Scifund to help us do another round of monitoring next year. All the funds will be spent here in Kiribati. Spread the word if you can.

We returned a couple days ago from boat trip to Butaritari, at the northern end of the Gilbert Islands chain here in Kiribati. That's it on the left. Try squinting. Atolls are hard to see from a distance, but more on that later.

Butaritari is an atoll apart. Though only 200 km N of the Kiribati capital of Tarawa, it has a very different climate. The plentiful rainfall - two to three times what you get close to the equator - allows more crops to grow (bananas, squash, pawpaw), or at least grow well. It also does not experience the same amount of El Nino driven variability.

That's why this awkward to access atoll is so critical to our scientific work. Butaritari allows us to compare the effect of different levels of past temperature variability on individual corals and coral communities. We already have strong evidence that higher temperature variability can make corals more resistant to bleaching - that's the subject of our recent paper, and the discussion on Quirks and Quarks. I'm now looking at how the temperature experience influence what corals survive on the reef, and how that changes over time.

This year, getting there with the dive gear required bunking on the government "research" vessel, actually an old fishing ship that even the captain says has seen some better days (er, decades). The Kiribati tourism slogan is "for travellers, not tourists". Travel here can be fun, provided you dispense with all, I mean ALL, "western" expectations. We left Tarawa with several large drums of fuel, stacks and stacks of cargo (unloading a ship was like unloading a clown car), two fish aggregating devices, a whole load of extra passengers such that there was little floor space, a few motorbikes, dive gear, a dive compressor (it's BYO everything if you are diving in Kiribati) and a one massive tub of seaweed.

En route, in a triangular sense, we stopped in Marakei, a neighbouring atoll, to drop off some cargo, a fish aggregating device, and a number of passengers. As a first time visitor, I did the traditional tour of the key sites around the island, which is this case, was literally around the island. Marakei is a complete oval, the world as a Mobius strip. As is tradition, I left offerings to the four ancestral spirits (that's one of the statues). I guess the ancestors protected us from the wildly rolling seas on the overnights to and from Butaritari (it's a bad sign when the locals laugh and say, "phew, that was rough"). Shame I didn't get my GPS, which conked out for reasons unknown, blessed as well.

In Butaritari, after a day of negotiations for fuel, a boat and a drive, we headed out to conduct coral and fish surveys, using underwater transects and a lot of photography, at a variety of sites along the western rim. I owe a great thanks to my fish expert Toaea for coming on every exhuasting long day in the boat, and to Timon and Tonana for chipping most days.

I also learned the key lesson to never draft a group of guys to help carry a large, heavy fiberglass boat into the water, at low tide no less, without first checking whether the proprietor is willing to also rent the engine. Never assume anything when doing a field project. We got our workout, and a good laugh, that day.

Being a scientist, I'm naturally reluctant to comment much on what we found until the numbers have been crunched. I'll say that, in general, we saw what looked to be rapid recovery from the 2009-10 El Nino, which caused severe heat stress in the region.  There were still many large dead coral colonies, like this table, topped with a few young colonies. Elsewhere, there appeared to have been some impressive coral growth, like in the photo taken by Toaea, albeit often restricted to certain species.

On the final day, with a bit of air left in our tanks, Tonana and I had the chance to dive around a Japanese plane from WWII sunk in the lagoon. This relic of the war is probably only known to the people of Butaritari. I'll upload the video to my Youtube channel when I get home.

We returned nine days later with a whole different set of passengers, an large empty tub, lots of reef data including many GB of coral photos and video, a broken GPS, a wonky CTD (oh, pH data, we'll miss you), enough bananas to challenge the global cartel, bags and bags of root crops, four pigs, the unloading of which is an image that will unfortunately be emblazoned on my brain for many years, and one seriously exhausted i-Matang from Canada.

After a rough night on the open passage from Butaritari, where the winds have 1000s of kms to stir up a good swell, there was much excitement when Tarawa first appeared on the horizon.

That's it in the photo. Don't see anything? The old i-Kiribati mariners, and many fishermen today, navigate between the thin, flat atolls by looking at the clouds. The shallow lagoons of the Central Gilberts shimmer an amazing greenish-blue. That green can often be seen reflected in the low clouds. It's fairly easy after a bit of practice, especially if you have a pair of polarized sunglasses.

The reflection is only one of the many tricks for navigating in this flat part of the planet. The cloud formations themselves are a good key, as are the currents, the birds and possibly also the fish, if you're got a line in the water.

For a real pro, it it easiest to navigate at night, when the sky is full of stars. I managed to work out was north and south, thanks to the Southern Cross, still visible this close to the equator, and the Big Dipper which points to where the North Star would be if we were further north. But that's amateur hour. As Tonana and others relayed with great pride, the old i-Kiribati mariners were experts at navigating by the night sky. That knowledge was all passed down orally, and much is being lost with today's generation. It takes time and patience to learn such skills, something that's in much shorter supply today, even in Kiribati.

I'm off again shortly to survey Abaiang, another key site for the coral research.

Read More...

Summary only...

Dispatch from Kiribati: Can you "see" sea level rise?

Tarawa, Kiribati - This is my fifth time visiting Kiribati for research. I'm here working on a coral monitoring project together with my colleagues at the local government. For more, check out my Scifund site, which is dedicated to raising funds for the in-country side of the coral research. People at home often ask whether I have seen changes in the islands. I don't think the questioner is interested stories about new maneabas, the emergence of kava as a social beverage, or the increased availability of vegetables. Back home, we do seem to have a morbid fascination with seeing the islands that are "sinking" due to sea level rise, never mind the fact that the islands aren't "floating" in the first place. I'll spare everyone a lecture on colonialism, race and definitions of vulnerability - there are, after all, towns in the Greater Vancouver Area with similar population to Tarawa and even less topographical relief - and get to the physical question.

The short answer, I suppose, is yes. I can point to many shorelines that don't look the same as they did seven years ago. The long answer, however, is that the change is quite often not what you might expect on a planet with a rising ocean. In many cases, there's more land.  The reason is that shorelines are constantly changing in response to natural variability and human disturbance, in addition to the global trend. That's the subject of my recent article in EOS and our video "Lessons of Bikeman".

Case in point: The above photo is of a house in Bikenibeu, a south Tarawa islet, during the 2005 storm I mention in the paper. My first trip to Kiribati happened to coincide with that El Nino-driven storm, the strongest Tarawa had experienced in ~30 years. Winds peaked right at high tide. The beach "should" be about the edge of the photograph. The combination of a high astronomical tide and 40 mph+ westerly winds blowing across the unprotected lagoon slammed waves into homes and buildings and over the causeways between islets.

I went by that house a couple days ago and snapped another picture, around but not exactly at high tide. It's not from the same angle, and some new foliage is obsuring the house, but you can still see the kitchen, and you can get a sense of the beach slope. That storm, and some subequent storms, scoured a lot of the sand off the beach, leaving the back part of the house perched more on coral rock (a bit hard to make out; the equatorial sun makes lighting photos difficult!). But, overall, seven years later, the house is not really much closer to the sea.

Is sea level rise a hoax? Of course not. There's overwhelming evidence that the global sea level is rising, and that humans are the cause. But that doesn't mean you can fly to Kiribati and find "proof". As I write in the conclusion of the EOS paper.

The coastal environment, like the weather, is evolving because of natural climate variability and direct human disturbance, as well as a global trend. A particular flood event, whether it occurs in a low- lying atoll like Tarawa or in New York City, cannot be blamed on global sea level rise any more than a particular heat wave can be blamed on climate warming.
Instead of incorrectly attributing individual flood events or shoreline changes to global sea level rise, scientists and climate communicators can use such occurrences to educate the public about the various natural and human processes that affect sea level, the shoreline, and the shape of islands. This would better prepare the public and policy makers for the changes that societies are likely to experience as global sea level rises in the coming decades.

I'll try to write more about our work here before hopping on a boat for the outer atolls.

Read More...

Summary only...

Is the sea ever actually level? The lesson of Bikeman, Kiribati

Ever wonder what's really happening to the low-lying islands in the tropics?

My former student Cory Kleinschmidt and I made this video about complicated geological and social dynamics at play in loss of Bikeman, an islet in the lagoon of Tarawa Atoll, the capital of Kiribati. The science behind this story and others in the ongoing "Battle of Tarawa" is described my feature in the latest issue of EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union.

I'm heading to Kiribati to do some climate and coral reef monitoring with colleagues in the local government. I'll try to post about our work periodically, provided the internet cooperates, and our boat doesn't sink.

Read More...

Summary only...

Climate experience makes some corals more resistant to heat stress

Preserving coral reefs, and everything they provide to communities across the tropics, on a warming planet will require identifying what might make a coral less susceptible to heat stress.

One of the big questions being studied by a number of scientists in the community is whether past temperature experience can make individual corals (by individual acclimation or adaptation) or coral communities (by selecting for tougher species) more resistant or more resilient to heat stress. I've been leading field projects in the Gilbert Islands of Kiribati, where this whimsical coral can be found, because the unique El Nino-driven climate provides a great natural laboratory for studying that big question.

In the lastest publication on this research, my colleagues Jessica Carilli (the lead author), Aaron Hartmann and I describe how massive corals on the atolls which naturally experience more frequent heat stress appear to have been more resistant to the recent El Nino-driven ocean heat waves. For an accessible summary of our findings, I recommend listening to this past weekend's episode of CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks. But you can also read the paper itself: the journal PLoS-One is online and open access to all.

The research involved drilling coral cores, Jess Carilli's area of expertise, from sites around three different atolls, followed by some exhaustive lab analysis by my colleagues. The logistics of collecting the samples from the outer islands was unbelievably complicated, even for someone who knows the challenges of working in a remote island country. Just getting all the gear to Butaritari (that's the seat beside my flip-seat on the plane), making it all work and bringing the samples back intact will probably go down as our greatest accomplishment in science. We owe a huge thanks to local colleagues Aranteiti Tekiau, Toaea Beiateuea, Iobi Arabua and the late Moiwa Erutarem, who sadly was lost at sea six months after our expedition.

In the month of May, I'll be fundraising for the in-country expenses of a planned, future expedition through the second Scifund crowd-sourcing science funding campaign. By sheer coincidence I will actually be in Kiribati during some coral monitoring during most of the Scifund campaign. I'll try to put trip updates on Maribo whenever I find internet access.

Read More...

Summary only...

Mountain pine beetle upends the Canadian emissions picture?

The lastest Canadian greenhouse gas emissions data looks very different if Canadian forests are taking into consideration.

There was some rejoicing over the fact that Canada's GHG emissions grew by only 2 Mt CO2e (that includes CO2 plus other GHGs converted to "units" of CO2) or 0.25% from 2009 to 2010, despite the fact that the economy was rebounding from the recession. But if you include land cover, land use change and forestry, GHG emissions grew by 86 Mt from 2009 to 2010.

Why such a large change? According to the Canadian government model, forests went from a net sink of 17 Mt in 2009 to a net source of 72 Mt in 2010 (see Table 7-1 in NIR). If you

break the GHG balance of forests up by region, the driver of this change was the "Montane Cordillera", or #14 on the map to the left. These forests of western BC were a net source of 100 Mt. The only other net sources regions in 2010 were the "Boreal Shield West" (#9 at 22 Mt), the "Pacific Maritime" (#15 at 5.7 Mt) and the "Taiga Shield East" (#4 at 1.7 Mt).

There are large, natural year-to-year variations in forest carbon balance, so it's important not to read too much into the jump from 2009 to 2010. What the 2010 number does reflect, however, is the very large amount of carbon, in the form of dead wood, in BC that is waiting to be respired to the atmosphere (if we don't use sequester it in buildings). For that, we can largely thank the Mountain Pine Beetle, the outbreaks of which have been linked to climate change. From the National Inventory Report:

The upward trend in dead organic matter (DOM) decay since the year 2000 reflects the long-term, growing effect of past disturbances, especially insect epidemics that have left substantial quantities of decaying DOM. Over the last decade, insect epidemics have affected a total of over 56 Mha3 of managed forests, with 72% being located in the Montane Cordillera reporting zone and corresponding to the epidemics of Mountain Pine Beetle. In contrast, much of the interannual variability of the GHG budget of managed forests hinges on the occurrence and severity of fires.

Before you start screaming "cover-up", it is standard UN reporting practice, to not include land use, land cover and forestry in the "total" at the top of the GHG inventory tables. This is done for a number of legitimate reasons, not the least of which being that net emissions from forests must be estimated by models and, as I've said, the results vary from year to year because of climate variability. Nonetheless, it is striking that climate change, via its effects on Canadian forest, might be undoing the reported progress in curbing, or starting to curb is a better term, greenhouse gas emissions from some sectors of the Canadian economy.

Read More...

Summary only...

Canadian GHG emissions in perspective

The Canadian government submitted the latest national Greenhouse Gas inventory report to the UN yesterday, which features data through the end of 2010. As was highlighted in the Environment Canada press release and the media, GHG emissions grew by only 2 Mt CO2e (that includes CO2 plus other GHGs converted to "units" of CO2) despite the fact that the economy was rebounding from the recession. This was viewed by some, including the Environment Minister, as good climate news, because it suggests that  the economy is decoupling from greenhouse gas emissions.

For some perspective, here's a plot of Canada's GHG emissions since 1990, together with various policy targets (Kyoto, Canada's own 2020 target, the EU reduction target for 2020) and emissions projections (Energy Information Administration's 2020 projection for Canada). It was quickly adapted from a recent presentation. The "decoupling", if real, which is questionable given that Canada's economy is shifting more towards resource-intensive industries, has to seriously accelerate even to hit Canada's much-criticized 2020 goal.

There's an important and very telling missing nugget in the emissions total. I'll get to that tomorrow.
NOTE: The lines look "steeper" because the y-axis on the chart begins at 400 Mt; the Canadian government report uses a y-axis from 0 - 800 Mt.

Read More...

Summary only...

Canada's unrealistic greenhouse gas target

Over the past couple years, plenty of policy experts have stated that there is little chance that Canada will meets its 2020 greenhouse gas target (17% below 2005 levels, which is ~3% below 1990 levels) without a serious, and unlikely change in federal policy. I've been rather blunt about this myself:

It is harder to find a seat at a Canucks game than to find an expert who thinks the mix of existing and proposed federal regulations and policies will come close to achieving even the government's own weak emissions target for the year 2020, let alone the much lower target set in the Kyoto Protocol.

For readers not familiar enough with Vancouver's love for the Canucks to appreciate the analogy, the local hockey team just sold out is 400th consecutive game.

The strident nature of comments like mine might take away from an important point. The conclusion comes from the government's own analysis.

Here's a figure from last year's report by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NTREE) as a part of Canada's reporting obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. Even in the "policy" scenario in the Environment Canada model (the green line), greenhouse gas emissions are ~30% over the government's own target.

If you're never heard of the NRTEE, it's job, since 1993, has been to "help Canada achieve sustainable development solutions that integrate environmental and economic considerations to ensure the lasting prosperity and well-being of our nation" through preparing reports, convening perspectives from all sides of issues, and offering advice to the government on "how best to reconcile the often divergent challenges of economic prosperity and environmental conservation". The NRTEE was cut in yesterday's budget.

Read More...

Summary only...

Storm the Riding: UBC students getting climate change on the agenda

As was reported in Wednesday's Vancouver Sun, a group of UBC students, staff and faculty from a new campus organization UBCC350 will be canavassing door-to-door in BC Premier Christie Clarke's riding on Saturday to draw attention to climate change and carbon exports from Canada. However you feel about political action, it is terrific to see a group of young people willing to spend their free time taking a stance on a public issue. 

I've recently expressed my own view on the issue of carbon exports and the proposed oil pipelines, a view shared by UBCC350 founder and UBC political scientist George Hoberg and many in the group.

For more information, check UBCC350's website.

Read More...

Summary only...

Climate science, then and now

Kudos to Peter Sinclair for this great video about a talk by Mike McCracken that was delivered in 1982:

Read More...

Summary only...