Can we think, please?

In a column in the on-line London Times, Magnus Linklater bemoans our collective unwillingness to face up to climate change.

His case in point: the Swiss willingness for their ski resorts to continue to mobilize fleets of snow-making machines to extend their ski-tourism season for a few weeks. One resort worth of machines uses as much power “as a small village,” and enough water in a year to supply a city of 1.5 million people. Water that has to be helicoptered in. He concludes “It would be hard to conjure up a more potent symbol of environmental perversity than the use of carbon-spewing fossil fuels to help to dispose of millions of gallons of carefully extracted water in order that a few thousand tourists can slide down a slope for an extra week.”

Other examples he cites are the unwillingness of people to accept wind farms because they might “spoil the view” or kill an “occasional absent-minded hawk” and a well-thought-out hydroelectric proposal in England that was declined because “the river is used by a few dozen canoeists every year.”

His point is well taken. We can’t adopt the Bush-at-war philosophy that hard gains can be had without sacrifice. But this is only one-half of the coin.

Equally scary is our willingness to jump on various save-the-planet schemes without thinking them through, leaving ourselves open to the law of unintended consequences. Case in point here is our headlong rush to ethanol – we’ve committed billions of dollars, farmers are betting their livelihoods, and the unintended consequences are coming home.

What’s needed is between “hurry” and “indecision”. What’s needed is to think things through. There are reasonable solutions to the climate change problem out there. Trouble is, they are nuanced and multi-faceted, they require thought and planning, they require sacrifice, and they are therefore seemingly beyond the reach of our politicians.

IPCC: Global Warming "very likely" caused by humans

The recently released IPCC report on climate change, which reiterated the 2001 report conclusion that global warming was a real threat but upped the ante on human causation (from “likely (60% sure) to “very likely” (90% sure) was remarkable in many ways. Most usefully, it was unanimously accepted by the member countries, including the U.S., which for all practical purposes moves the debate forward from agreeing that there’s a problem to what’s the solution. And the report dragged the naysayers along with it, shifting their tactics from “it’s not happening” to “we can’t fix it.”

The downside is the price the IPCC paid to get that unanimity. Don’t get me wrong, I think the unanimity was hugely important to shift the debate focus. But now we have to deal with the scale and urgency of the issue, both of which were downplayed in the report. How? To get unanimity, they excluded any recent evidence that hadn’t formerly been incorporated into the climate models (i.e. had any degree of uncertainty about it). Two worrisome exclusions: feedback loops and extremes.

Feedback loops: we’ve known for years now that the farther you move from the equator, the more severe the warming. Evidence shows that the poles are warming up to five times faster than the global average. One reason is certainly this feedback loop: warming temps cause more ice to melt. Since ice reflects 90% of the sunlight (and heat) and whatever’s under the ice reflects a lot less, a net loss of ice means the earth’s surface warms more that it otherwise would. Warmer surface means the ice melts even faster, which uncovers even more of the heat-absorbing land/water, and so on. With a feedback loop, the changes aren’t linear, they accelerate. Unfortunately, our climate models are mostly still linear, so they are no doubt underestimating the scale of the problem. What’s true is that scientists still can’t precisely say how much they’re underestimating the problem, so they can’t come up with an equation for the climate model that could get general agreement.

Another loop: the rapidly warming northern tundra is causing the permafrost to melt. Trapped in the permafrost are huge amounts of methane, a gas that is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. As this gas is released, and its being released at an alarming rate, it causes accelerated warming, which in turn melts the permafrost faster, etc. etc.

Extremes: The other great omission is the extremes. The IPCC report mainly limited itself to global averages. It’s not the averages that will kill us first, it’s the extremes. An ‘average’ rise in sea level means a lot more to an inhabitant of Bangladesh than to a Midwest farmer. A small “average” global rise in temperatures masks the fact that in the Arctic and Antarctic, temperatures are rising much more dramatically, balanced by much smaller increases at the equator. The effects of climate change aren’t going to be uniformly felt: the higher latitudes will experience much higher rainfalls (warmer atmosphere holds more water), but in the subtropics they will be experiencing much lower amounts, exacerbating endemic drought conditions.

Global warming winners and losers

In a well-written piece for the April, 2007 issue of The Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook looks at possible changes in the global distribution of money and power that Global Warming might bring.
For example, general warming will tend to make currently the currently frigid high latitudes (think Siberia and northern Canada) more temperate. Unfreezing the Siberian tundra might make available the largest chunk of pristine soil since the “discovery” of North America (an analogy that might make Canada’s northern native peoples think…). Russia wins big on this one.
A major impact would be that the rich (the industrial west owns most of the high-latitude land on the globe) get richer, reversing a trend toward more global economic equity. A second impact would be the mass migration of economic refugees northward.
Water impacts are harder to predict, but significant changes to the Gulf Stream in the north Atlantic might plunge Europe into a prolonged depression that could have disastrous effects on the global economy at large. Melting of the Arctic Ice Cap could finally make the fabled “Northwest Passage” a reality, shifting the locus of shipping centers from south to north.
Easterbrook’s conclusions are that we need to enact laws/regulations that incent the private markets to find and implement solutions, that the cost of preventing some of these potential problems is much, much less that the cost of fixing them later, and finally, for us Americans, the current world order has us at the top of the heap; therefore, any significant changes to that order are bound to be bad for us.

Gore making a difference

The success of Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” gets a lot of credit in the US press for helping to elevate public awareness of, and concern for, the problem of global warming. I haven’t seen any actual data on this, but the fact that the movie is the third-highest grossing documentary of all time is pretty good supportive evidence.

More evidence comes from Australia: I subscribe to Google Alerts for “Global Warming” and “Climate Change.” That means that I get a daily email with a list of every news article on either subject that Google can find. In early September, Al Gore was in Australia for the opening of his movie, and engaged the government there (which is very Bush-like in its approach) in a public debate about global warming. Australia gets a couple of mentions in his movie, one because Australia is the only industrialized nation besides us that refused to sign the Kyoto agreement, and another because Australia figures to be a major loser (increasing drought and wildfires, the death of the Great Barrier Reef) if the planet keeps heating up.

Not surprisingly, during the time of Gore’s visit the number of news citations on global warming and climate change with an Australian dateline shot up dramatically. What's amazing is that Australian news coverage of global warming has stayed high. Yesterday, a third of the global coverage on the issue emanated from Down Under.

I’d say Al Gore is making not just a splash, but a difference.

Global Warming is not coming soon...

It’s here. That’s the message that needs to get out. It’s here right now.

Here are a couple of reminders from the news today:

1. Current temperature readings in the Alps show that they are the warmest they’ve been in at least 1200 years. The warming trend began in the 1980s, about the same time that the hockey stick graph of global temperatures shot upwards.


2. We know the oceans are warming, and now we have hard evidence of what one of the consequences will be. A study published in Nature provides a direct link between warmer water temperatures and the shrinking of phytoplankton production – a double whammy since they are both the base of the ocean’s food web and a major carbon sink.

Add this data to the abundance of evidence that species are migrating because their habitat is getting too hot, the current loss of both sea and glacier ice, the measured rise in sea level, the increasing fury of ocean storms…how big does stack have to get? This isn’t tomorrow’s problem, it’s today’s problem.

Most worrisome, of course, is that we’re seeing the evidence today – and we’re already locked into several decades of further warming even if we immediately stop pumping CO2 and methane into the atmosphere.

Where is Chicken Little when you need him?

We have met the enemy...

“When the subject is global warming, the villain is usually the United States.”

This was the lead sentence in an article in the Economist this week. The Economist, for those who don’t know, is a highly regarded weekly news magazine published in England. Sort of like Time or Newsweek, but with brains. And the courage to call it like it is.

Notice that is was the lead sentence in an article. Not an opinion piece. As far as the world is concerned, our shameless refusal to own up to our massive contributions to global warming (25% of the world’s CO2 output, for example) is a fact, not an opinion. The greatest crisis facing the planet, and our government has its collective head in the sand.

It's never simple

Just when you thought it was safe to bet on hydropower for clean energy, there’s new evidence that the reservoirs created behind dams in tropical countries may emit as much – or more – greenhouse gasses than their fossil-fuel counterparts.

In a report in the September 30th issue of Nature, Jim Giles reports on a growing body of research that shows that both carbon dioxide and methane are emitted in large quantities from the water trapped behind, and flowing from, dams in tropical countries. Studies at one site in particular, the Balbina Dam in Brazil, have concluded that the environment would in fact have been better off if they’d built a conventional fossil fuel plant instead.

The problem is organic matter in the reservoir behind the dam: plants submerged as the reservoir is formed and plant matter that gets washed in and trapped later. As the organic matter decays – rapidly in those warm tropical waters – carbon dioxide and methane are produced. There is still disagreement on a formula for calculating how much of these gases are released, and by what mechanism: more research is definitely needed, and urgently.

But the evidence we do have is enough that future construction of hydroelectric facilities in tropical countries needs to be approached with caution. Giles notes that the Clean Development Mechanism, which allows developed nations to fund clean-energy projects in developing countries as a way to earn carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol, may need to be revised as well.

Even more scary, though, is that greenhouse emissions from tropical dams are not included in current climate models, and projections using existing evidence mean we are pumping around 20% more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than we thought, bringing the day of reckoning that much closer.