Slow cooking

Judging a post by its title would deceive you into thinking that this is yet another post on sanitas per escam.  It is not.

Instead, it is about CO2 emissions.

CO2 emissions were on course to rise 0.6 percent this year—slower than previous years but still a world away from what is needed to keep global warming in check.
In three peer-reviewed studies, authors attributed the rise to "robust growth" in natural gas and oil, which offset significant falls in coal use in the United States and Europe.

📈 411.48 parts per million (ppm) #CO2 in the atmosphere December 6, 2019 📈 Up from 408.21 ppm 1 year ago 📈 Mauna Loa Observatory @NOAA data & graphic: https://t.co/MZIEphYygh 📈 https://t.co/DpFGQoYEwb tracking: https://t.co/PTTkLiPGm2 🙏 View & share often 🙏 pic.twitter.com/O3lRViorBh

— CO2 earth (@CO2_earth) December 7, 2019

Where does the slow cooking come in then?

The new data shows that natural gas, which is less polluting than coal but still a fossil fuel, has become the biggest driver of emissions growth globally in recent years. ...
“Natural gas may produce fewer carbon emissions than coal, but that just means you cook the planet a bit more slowly,” said Dr. Peters. “And that’s before even getting into the worries about methane leaks” from gas infrastructure.

The fact that we are being slowly cooked, as opposed to a quick broiling, is not comforting, however.

India is key when it comes to further slowing down the cooking:

India, which is trying to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, was perhaps the biggest surprise in the new data. India’s emissions are expected to rise a mere 1.8 percent this year after an 8 percent increase in 2018.
Some of that slowdown, the researchers noted, can be explained by weaker economic growth and an unexpectedly strong monsoon season that allowed the country to generate more electricity from its emissions-free hydroelectric dams and less from its coal plants. But India’s government is also pursuing big plans to promote solar power and electric vehicles, and it remains to be seen whether those policies can help the country constrain future emissions.

But, we need to always keep this in mind:

The carbon footprint of fully industrialized nations remains far higher, however—both in terms of historic emissions and on a per-person basis. America’s per capita oil consumption, for instance, is 16 times greater than India’s.While these wealthier nations are now making a tiny amount of progress on emission reductions, they also relied on fossil fuels to drive their economic growth for more than a century. So these countries have a clear responsibility, as well as a greater financial ability, to cut emissions deeper and faster than emerging economies. They should also help those countries meet as much of their growth as possible with clean energy technologies, by providing low-cost financing, technological know-how, and other forms of support.

Try convincing tRump and his 63 million toadies about this!

Less is an enabling agent of more?

I got a hefty increase in my salary.

What will I do with the additional income? Consume it in many new and expanded ways.

Consumption is practically what the modern economy is all about, once we got beyond basic survival.  And, oddly enough, even those concerned and worried about the natural environment--including me--love to get salary increases so that we can consume more, even though this additional consumption will have negative implications for the natural environment.  How twisted are we!

Such a worry about consumption and economic growth is not new.  In graduate school, I learnt about the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth.  This report came out when I had barely started elementary school!  Almost 50 years later, we continue to worry about the consequences of growth and consumption.

Could it be different this time?

Now the focus has turned from scarcity to excess—specifically, of carbon dioxide in the air. In the past 50 years the burning of fossil fuels has more than doubled its concentration, accelerating global warming with its potentially calamitous consequences.

Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere 50 years ago versus now should truly worry all of us.  The industry, increasingly because of consumer feedback, and despite the maniacal and wrong-headed tRump and his toadies, is actively reducing its environmental impacts.

Fearing a backlash from eco-conscious consumers, firms are striving to lower their carbon intensity. So long as this brings down costs, CEOs happily oblige and society reaps the benefits of higher efficiency and better resource allocation. But if that leads to higher sales, companies’ overall environmental impact may rise.

What can be done then?

They should not be shamed—or required to urge customers to buy less of their wares, as some activists who glued themselves to corporate headquarters in London seem to demand. Governments can make citizens want less by making consumption pricier, with carbon taxes or other regulations. Until they do, firms will try to sell more stuff—because most people want more of it.

Yep, even most of us environmentalists want more stuff--we are addicted to stuff.  Getting rid of this addiction is impossible.  Well, an individual could, but most of us cannot.  Reducing consumption is, therefore, not in the mix of actions that we would like.  Which means, are we looking at an impossible task of squaring the proverbial circle?

There is no free lunch

Remember that old joke about laptop computers being heavy, and that deleting unnecessary files will make it light as a feather? Haha!

Go ahead and Google that joke, if you want.

Wait, maybe you should think twice before you do it.  Not because of the need to think, which is important.  But, for a completely different reason:

Every Google search comes at a cost to the planet. In processing 3.5 billion searches a day, the world’s most popular website accounts for about 40% of the internet’s carbon footprint.

In the internet-of-things world of today, we forget that the internet is based on real world infrastructure and needs energy--a whole lot of it--to work.

“Almost nobody recalls that the internet is made up of interconnected physical infrastructures which consume natural resources,” [Joana] Moll writes as an introduction to the project. “How can such an evident fact become so blurred in the social imagination?”

In our daily lives, we rarely pause to consider how the good and services that we use are created.  Who makes tshirts? Where is the electricity coming from? It is always a combination of ignorance and apathy.

Despite the notion that the internet is a “cloud,” it actually relies on millions of physical servers in data centers around the world, which are connected with miles of undersea cables, switches, and routers, all requiring a lot of energy to run. Much of that energy comes from power sources that emit carbon dioxide into the air as they burn fossil fuels; one study from 2015 suggests internet activity results in as much CO2 emissions as the global aviation industry.

For Google, this infrastructure means about 0.01 kg per search request.

Of course, it is not just Google. The Frightful Five and others have to maintain servers and routers and whatever else all around the world.  Which is one of the reasons they also like places like Oregon where they set up their energy-hogging server farms.

Server farms all across the planet.

Ireland, which with Denmark is becoming a data base for the world’s biggest tech companies, has 350MW connected to data centres but this is expected to triple to over 1,000MW, or the equivalent of a nuclear power station size plant, in the next five years.
...
The data will be stored in vast new one million square feet or larger “hyper-scale” server farms, which companies are now building. The scale of these farms is huge; a single $1bn Apple data centre planned for Athenry in Co Galway, expects to eventually use 300MW of electricity, or over 8% of the national capacity and more than the daily entire usage of Dublin. It will require 144 large diesel generators as back up for when the wind does not blow.

The more connected we become, the more our energy needs, unless something is done dramatically different:

Global computing power demand from internet-connected devices, high resolution video streaming, emails, surveillance cameras and a new generation of smart TVs is increasing 20% a year, consuming roughly 3-5% of the world’s electricity in 2015, says Swedish researcher Anders Andrae.
In an update to a 2016 peer-reviewed study, Andrae found that without dramatic increases in efficiency, the ICT industry could use 20% of all electricity and emit up to 5.5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025. This would be more than any country except the US, China and India.

Don't trust all these?  Go ahead, do a Google search ;)

Taking a dump in the commons

(I have sent the following to the editor)

Like many, I am disappointed that Oregon’s legislature did not pass a cap and trade bill in its short session that ended on March 3rd. It will be a while, therefore, before we Oregonians figure out how to stop pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere.

In discussing emissions, politicians often try to sell the laws they propose as jobs, jobs, jobs. Here in Oregon, the cap and trade bill was floated as the “Clean Energy Jobs Bill.” Politicians take this approach for a good reason—public discussion on emissions is incorrectly framed by climate change deniers as job killers. Hence, the constant repackaging of legislation in this arena as an employment generator.

If a significant percentage of the public and their preferred leaders are not receptive to straight talk about the urgency to limit the emission of CO2 because of the role it plays in climate change, then there is another way to repackage it in a form that will appeal to many—as public health infrastructure.

In order to understand limiting CO2 emissions as an “infrastructure bill” we can learn from recent history. When England, and later the US, started industrializing, cities grew rapidly. People rushed to London, New York, and Philadelphia, in search of jobs and fortunes, and the growth of such population centers was unprecedented. The crowding of people and their close contact with each other made it easy for pathogens to wreak havoc, and life in the city became nasty, brutish, and short.

Two hundred years ago, Londoners were not only in close proximity with each other, they also lacked the piped water supply and sewer systems that we now take for granted. In the absence of protected systems, human feces found their way into fresh water supplies, like wells, and illnesses and death followed. A widely discussed example is the cholera epidemic in London in 1854 that was traced back to a single well where a mother had washed her child’s dirty diapers.

When American cities started growing as important economic centers, the population here, too, experienced health issues. Cities recognized the importance of public health and started investing in protected water supply services. As the Harvard economist Ed Glaeser points out, by the end of the 19th century, municipalities in the US were spending as much on water supply systems as the federal government was spending on everything except the military and postal services. It was a massive public infrastructure investment that wins applause from even contemporary anti-government crusaders.

These public investments in clean water supply and sewer systems separated the bad—the feces—from the good—potable water—and did wonders to decrease the incidence of water-borne diseases like cholera, and contributed to sharp increases in life expectancy. Thanks to our public sewer system, we now use the bathrooms at home and at the office, and don’t worry for a nanosecond about what happens after we flush.

This infrastructure is not for free. We pay monthly bills to our wonderful local utilities that collect all our refuse, process them at large sewage treatment plants, and make our cities livable and beautiful.

We do not want people to treat the banks of the Willamette River as their bathrooms—unlike, for instance, how the poor do in India by the side of lakes and rivers. Yet, we are the same people who have been merrily discharging filthy CO2 waste into the air that all of us breathe! We need an infrastructure plan to address this public dumping.

CO2 is a harmful byproduct of our activities that should not be dumped in the commons. Whether it is the smokestacks in factories, or the tailpipe in the car that I drive, the CO2 that comes out is casually and irresponsibly released into the air. All of us—yes, I, too—should be held accountable for this public dumping, and be required to pay for the needed infrastructure.

However, unlike with human feces, it is not easy to capture CO2 from the air and process it, though scientists and technologists are working on that approach. An easier and simpler approach is to limit our use of carbon in the first place. The less carbon we use, the less CO2 we will produce and, therefore, we will dump less in the commons.

Which is why I suggest that attempts to limit the use of carbon, through taxation, should be an important aspect of public health infrastructure investment for the future, similar to how generations past invested for the betterment of our lives. I hope that our elected officials will decisively act on this in 2019.

Should I be positive about negative emissions?

When two of my favorite magazines have essays on the same worrisome issue, it can only mean one thing: Curl into a fetal position, suck your thumb, and pray to your favorite gods!

First it was The New Yorker and then The Economist on "negative emissions."  Here's how the Londoner puts it:

The Paris agreement assumes, in effect, that the world will find ways to suck CO2 out of the air. That is because, in any realistic scenario, emissions cannot be cut fast enough to keep the total stock of greenhouse gases sufficiently small to limit the rise in temperature successfully. But there is barely any public discussion of how to bring about the extra “negative emissions” needed to reduce the stock of CO2 (and even less about the more radical idea of lowering the temperature by blocking out sunlight). Unless that changes, the promise of limiting the harm of climate change is almost certain to be broken.

Yep, if the CO2 that is piling up cannot be sucked out of the sky, well, your grandkids are in for some deep trouble!

The New Yorker's treatment of the subject is an awesome essay by the Pulitzer winning Elizabeth Kolbert.  She writes quoting Klaus Lackner:

The way Lackner sees things, the key to avoiding “deep trouble” is thinking differently. “We need to change the paradigm,” he told me. Carbon dioxide should be regarded the same way we view other waste products, like sewage or garbage. We don’t expect people to stop producing waste. (“Rewarding people for going to the bathroom less would be nonsensical,” Lackner has observed.) At the same time, we don’t let them shit on the sidewalk or toss their empty yogurt containers into the street.

Of course CO2 is a waste product.  We have been allowing factories and cars to throw the waste into the air that surrounds us.  So, what does Lackner suggest?  What is the paradigm shift that he wants us to think about?

One of the reasons we’ve made so little progress on climate change, he contends, is that the issue has acquired an ethical charge, which has polarized people. To the extent that emissions are seen as bad, emitters become guilty. “Such a moral stance makes virtually everyone a sinner, and makes hypocrites out of many who are concerned about climate change but still partake in the benefits of modernity,” he has written. Changing the paradigm, Lackner believes, will change the conversation. If CO2 is treated as just another form of waste, which has to be disposed of, then people can stop arguing about whether it’s a problem and finally start doing something.

I am all for it.  The guilt talk does not work.  It is way more practical to talk about trash removal.  Except, removing this trash ain't easy!

If we keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere, what will the story be?  Like I said, adopt the fetal position, and suck on your thumb!

The I.P.C.C. considered more than a thousand possible scenarios. Of these, only a hundred and sixteen limit warming to below two degrees, and of these a hundred and eight involve negative emissions. In many below-two-degree scenarios, the quantity of negative emissions called for reaches the same order of magnitude as the “positive” emissions being produced today.
“The volumes are outright crazy,” Oliver Geden, the head of the E.U. research division of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told me. Lackner said, “I think what the I.P.C.C. really is saying is ‘We tried lots and lots of scenarios, and, of the scenarios which stayed safe, virtually every one needed some magic touch of a negative emissions. If we didn’t do that, we ran into a brick wall.’ ”

Are you all curled up yet?  No?  Ok, then read on:

Early last month, the Trump Administration announced its intention to repeal the Clean Power Plan, a set of rules aimed at cutting power plants’ emissions. The plan, which had been approved by the Obama Administration, was eminently achievable. Still, according to the current Administration, the cuts were too onerous. The repeal of the plan is likely to result in hundreds of millions of tons of additional emissions.

So, what is Elizabeth Kolbert's bottom-line?

As a technology of last resort, carbon removal is, almost by its nature, paradoxical. It has become vital without necessarily being viable. It may be impossible to manage and it may also be impossible to manage without. ♦

Boy will the grandkids curse us all!

Dead Man Walking

Back in March 2010--yes, more than seven years ago--I blogged about 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.  In only seven years, that goal has become even more a remote idea than it was even then.

The Scientific American reported ten days ago that we breached the 410 ppm threshold!

In what’s become a spring tradition like Passover and Easter, carbon dioxide has set a record high each year since measurements began. It stood at 280 ppm when record keeping began at Mauna Loa in 1958. In 2013, it passed 400 ppm. Just four years later, the 400 ppm mark is no longer a novelty. It’s the norm.

In 1958, it was only at 280 ppm  Think about that for a minute.

The article ends with this:

Right now we’re on track to create a climate unseen in 50 million years by mid-century.

Keep in mind that our species was not around 50 million years ago.  So, yes, what happened?  It was the Eocene:

a period when the world was completely different than the present due to extreme heat and oceans that covered a wide swath of currently dry land.
“The early Eocene was much warmer than today: global mean surface temperature was at least 10°C (18°F) warmer than today,” Dana Royer, a paleoclimate researcher at Wesleyan University who co-authored the new research, said. “There was little-to-no permanent ice. Palms and crocodiles inhabited the Canadian Arctic.”

For all we know, we seem to be headed towards "little-to-no permanent ice."

The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, suggests a huge assessment of the region. The warming is hastening the melting of Arctic ice and boosting sea-level rise.

Imagine that!  The more worrisome aspect is that what happens at the Arctic does not merely stay at the Arctic.  The Economist writes that we should be afraid. Very afraid.

The right response is fear. The Arctic is not merely a bellwether of matters climatic, but an actor in them (see Briefing).

So?

The hard truth, however, is that the Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone. Efforts to mitigate global warming by cutting emissions remain essential. But the state of the Arctic shows that humans cannot simply undo climate change. They will have to adapt to it.

While all this is happening, the New York Times hires a columnist who writes as if his employer is not the newspaper but Exxon.  My old classmate in India wants me to cancel my subscription to the Times.

My subversive activism has failed, and failed miserably, to convey the urgency of this problem to the denialists like some of the readers in the past.  My newspaper columns on climate change did not do shit.  My fellow citizens proudly elected a guy who claims that global warming and climate change are a hoax created by the Chinese, and his party elders bring snowballs to the Senate chambers as evidence that there is no climate change.

I know fully well that I cannot do a damn thing here.  Which is why, more to commiserate than with any hope of achieving anything, did I participate in a march last Saturday.  Ironically enough, while the march was about the future, a good chunk of  the young men and women in college--the intended beneficiaries--were partying in the streets, on the porches, in the apartments, and in bars, because it was the spring scrimmage, and they could not be bothered with joining the march.  Football beats climate change!

Ignorance and the law

A few years ago, when a local organization filed a lawsuit against the federal government and the fossil fuel industry under the public trust doctrine, I didn't think that anything will be accomplished.  But, much to my surprise, the courts are siding with them.  Their claim, on behalf of a few named children plaintiffs, and on behalf of all children, is that the public trust doctrine "requires our government to protect and maintain survival resources for future generations."

The Oregon approach is now not the only one.  I didn't know, until I read this, that February 7th, the court heard "Juliana, et al v. United States of America, et al — a case a group of kids, young adults and environmentalists brought in 2015 against the U.S. government."  It is not the merits of the case that this post is about; there is no way I am going to pretend that I know the law.  I firmly believe in Charles Dickens's description that the law is an ass!

What caught my attention is this:

The lead attorney for U.S. manufacturers and oil and gas companies on a climate change lawsuit didn't know the answer to a measurement fact when asked in court two weeks ago, court papers show.

And what was that measurement fact?

Frank Volpe said he didn't know whether carbon dioxide levels had reached 400 parts per million, a measurement of atmospheric concentration.

A simple measurement fact.  About CO2 in the atmosphere.  The lead attorney defending the industry said he didn't know.

Of course Volpe knows.  Volpe is "representing the American Petroleum Institute, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers and National Association of Manufacturers in the case."  Of course the industry knows.  They just do not want to admit that they know.

The judge didn't let him off the hook:

Asked by Judge Thomas Coffin whether the groups he represents “acknowledge that the CO2 levels in the atmosphere are currently at 400 ppm,” Volpe did not answer.
“Do you deny that, or do you not know?” Coffin asked, according to a transcript.
“I would say that as we said in our answer, we don't know,” Volpe said.
“You don't know,” Coffin replied. Volpe said that determination would be up to an expert witness.

If we watched such an exchange on Saturday Night Live, we might laugh our asses off.  But, this is for real, in a real courtroom.

The judge tried again.

“So as we sit here today, do you have an expert witness that the intervenors intend to call that you can identify that will opine that the CO2 levels are not 400 ppm, but are something other than that and, if so, what?” he asked.
“I don't know, your honor,” Volpe responded.

How screwed up are the fossil fuel industry and their attorneys!

Neither Volpe nor C. Marie Eckert, another attorney for the trade groups, responded to requests for comment about their clients' views on carbon dioxide concentrations.

Why would they!

You ask scientists the same question, and they will give you the answer even when they are piss-drunk at the unholy 3:00 am when this president starts tweeting.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tracks CO2 levels measured at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. The monthly averages for January this year and last were both greater than 400 ppm, according to the agency.
Reached by phone and asked of the possibility that CO2 levels aren't at 400, a spokesman for the agency laughed.

63 million Americans have voted for a man who denies climate change, and who has appointed to the EPA a man who would rather dismantle the EPA.  How messed up are these 63 million voters?  What a disaster!

The 400-plus club!

There are those who believe that global warming is a hoax created by the Chinese government, and their fearless leader wants to be the leader of the free world.

We live in strange times where facts are for losers!  We started going down that road when a previous leader of the free world trusted nothing but his instincts, not realizing that he was like "a blind man in a room full of deaf people,"

Those folks will gloss over this fact:

2016 will be the year that carbon dioxide officially passed the symbolic 400 ppm mark, never to return below it in our lifetimes, according to scientists.

Perhaps never to return below 400 in our lifetimes.  I am sure it is a hoax being propagated by the Chinese government that works hand in glove with climate scientists all around the world.

So, how do we know about this 400 ppm?

September is usually the month when carbon dioxide is at its lowest after a summer of plants growing and sucking it up in the northern hemisphere. As fall wears on, those plants lose their leaves, which in turn decompose, releasing the stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. At Mauna Loa Observatory, the world’s marquee site for monitoring carbon dioxide, there are signs that the process has begun but levels have remained above 400 ppm.

Visit your favorite glaciers that you have listed in your bucket-list, thanks to the gorgeous photos that you have seen, before the Chinese government starts melting them away!

In the deep blue state that is north of us, the November election will include a ballot measure to address global warming:

Washington voters will decide in November whether to introduce a carbon tax on fossil fuels and electricity from coal and natural gas, with the goal of slowing global warming while reducing taxes on sales and manufacturing and keeping total tax revenue flat overall.

A deep blue state. Environmentally conscientious--even fanatical--electorate. So, the measure has big time support and will win easily, right?

Wrong!

Here, for instance, is the Sierra Club:

Sierra Club has adopted a Do Not Support position concerning Initiative 732, rather than Support, Neutral, or Oppose. 

How about that?  It is not a stand of "Support, Neutral, or Oppose" but "Do Not Support."  Talk about linguistic jiu-jitsu.  And you thought Bill Clinton's dancing around the word "is" was unique?

So, what's going on?  Why aren't the environmentalists embracing this initiative?

The ​resistance comes not just from the usual opponents on the right, but even more strikingly from the left. The reason: Many environmentalists see climate change as an opportunity to remake the economic order. They want to use carbon taxes to fund renewable energy and green technology and bolster the incomes of workers and communities they say are most hurt by climate change. Whatever the merits of these goals, the effect is to equate climate policy with bigger government, which makes it harder to achieve broad-based support.

Seriously?  Environmentalists oppose it because of their larger social engineering agenda?

But the main reason is that I-732 sends its revenue back to taxpayers, whereas environmentalists would like the revenue for other priorities. The Washington Environmental Council, which doesn’t support I-732, says revenue from any climate initiative should be plowed into the “clean energy economy…infrastructure for clean, abundant water and healthy forests” and assistance for “the most vulnerable workers and communities.”

So, party on, folks!  Make sure your party is on high ground so that you don't have to deal with the rising water levels.

Build that freaking wall!

I don't care whether or not Einstein really said or wrote somewhere that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  It makes a lot of sense.  Yet, humans often tend to do the same bloody things over again, believing things will work out differently.

I wonder if Einstein ever considered in his thought experiments the possibility that humans do the same thing again not because they expect different results, but because they completely deny the results.  Such denial would never occurred to his logical mind, perhaps.  Einstein versus the climate change deniers would have been one interesting discussion.

Yet, that is what is unfolding in plain sight.  People are gladly doing the same things.  Like this, in in South Florida:

Its very existence depends on the continued allure of the beaches, waterways and natural environment. Yet, by 2050, an estimated $15 billion to $36 billion of Florida’s coastal property will be threatened by sea-level rise, according to a report last year from the Risky Business Project, a Bloomberg Philanthropies effort that quantifies economic risks from climate change.
In South Florida, sea-level rise and climate change are already having an effect on available drinking water, roads and sewer lines in low-lying areas, and storm and flood insurance rates.

If problems are showing up in every day life even now, then Einstein's logic will tell us that people won't develop the land and sell multi-million dollar homes, right?  Welcome to the insanity:

there’s an emerging industry eager to find a way to help people stay in that paradise, a place born of real estate speculation and rebirthed cyclically out of natural disasters like hurricanes and man-made disasters like real estate bubbles.
Developers have started marketing storm-resistant homes and resilient buildings, like a high-rise in downtown Miami designed to withstand 300-mph winds. In Miami Beach, the city is beginning to implement building codes that require new construction and city infrastructure to be elevated. Fort Lauderdale is considering raising the height limits on sea walls.

Rising sea-levels will be matched by rising sea walls!  Ah, the insanity that is more than my criticism of American solutions to American problems!

“Sea level is rising, and we have to plan for the next 50 to 100 years. You have to, for the purposes of marketing, build for the future. You have to build for the future, even if the code may not allow it.”

Seriously?

Meanwhile, whatever the deniers might want to believe, the data trend is worsening.

The last station on Earth without a 400 parts per million (ppm) reading has reached it.

Where was that, you ask?  In Antarctica.  Far, far, away from South Florida and China and India and humanity.

In the remote reaches of Antarctica, the South Pole Observatory carbon dioxide observing station cleared 400 ppm on May 23, according to an announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Wednesday. That’s the first time it’s passed that level in 4 million years (no, that’s not a typo).

So, those of us who are not into insanity, nor into denial, will worry about trends like this:

“The increase of carbon dioxide is everywhere, even as far away as you can get from civilization,” Pieter Tans, a carbon-monitoring scientist at the Environmental Science Research Laboratory, said. “If you emit carbon dioxide in New York, some fraction of it will be in the South Pole next year.”
It’s possible the South Pole Observatory could see readings dip below 400 ppm, but new research published earlier this week shows that the planet as a whole has likely crossed the 400 ppm threshold permanently (at least in our lifetimes).
Passing the 400 ppm milestone in is a symbolic but nonetheless important reminder that human activities continue to reshape our planet in profound ways

And, one of the results will be, yes, rising sea levels in South Florida too.

Guess who is in favor of building higher sea walls even when denying the very climate change?  Yes, it is the fascist, who is worried about his wealth!

Insanity!

So, humans are the main agents of climate change. Now what?

The Economist explains:

ON NOVEMBER 2ND the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which represents mainstream scientific opinion, said that it was extremely likely that climate change is the product of human activity. Extremely likely in IPCC speak means having a probability of over 95%.

In the probabilistic world that we live, that 95 percent confidence or more is pretty darn good.  All the more reason to ignore that shrill minority in the Geriatrics Only Party who continue to deny climate change and the human causation.

The Scientific American chips in with this briefing:

What has changed is the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have now touched 400 parts-per-million. Pollution in the first decade of the 21st century grew twice as fast as it did in the last few decades of the 20th century. The resulting global warming poses risks ranging from rising sea levels that drown inhabited coasts to crop failures from stronger heat waves and drought.

The IPCC has now offered a budget for how much pollution people can add to the atmosphere without too much climate change. Unfortunately, humanity has already used more than half of that budget.

So, what might be the effects if we continue along the same path?

In terms of impacts, such as heatwaves and extreme rain storms causing floods, the report concludes that the effects are already being felt: “In recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans.”
Droughts, coastal storm surges from the rising oceans and wildlife extinctions on land and in the seas will all worsen unless emissions are cut, the report states. This will have knock-on effects, according to the IPCC: “Climate change is projected to undermine food security.” The report also found the risk of wars could increase: “Climate change can indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts by amplifying well-documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks.”

Emissions are a big problem, which is why:

The report also states that behavioural changes, such as dietary changes that could involve eating less meat, can have a role in cutting emissions.

A whole lot of behavioral changes will be needed.  Not easy to get that across.  For instance, imagine telling people that eating beef is way more harmful to the environment than it is to drive around in cars:

Beef’s environmental impact dwarfs that of other meat including chicken and pork, new research reveals, with one expert saying that eating less red meat would be a better way for people to cut carbon emissions than giving up their cars. ...
the message for the consumer is even stronger. Avoiding excessive meat consumption, especially beef, is good for the environment.

Think about what is coming up here in the US of A, which emits a seventh of the greenhouse gases.  This month end is the granddaddy of all eating occasions: Thanksgiving.  And, we would barely have time to loosen our belts before we dash out to buy a whole lot of stuff that we don't really need.  Almost four weeks of a buying binge.

You think such behavior, and more, will change?  And change soon?  Dream on!

On the other hand, one could use the season of Christmas to adopt behavioral changes of a less-is-better life, which will be consistent with that radical thinker from the Levant, right?

Ok, got to go--cheeseburger is ready!

Possible to be pro-nuclear and for the environment? Yes, we can!

A couple of days ago, I was intrigued by a news item, which popped up in my Twitter feed, that a study by James Hansen concluded that nuclear power prevented more deaths than it causes.

if coal or natural gas power had replaced nuclear energy from 1971 to 2009, the equivalent of an additional 64 gigatons of carbon would have reached the atmosphere. Looking forward, switching out nuclear for coal or natural gas power would lead to the release of 80 to 240 gigatons of additional carbon by 2050.
By comparison, previous climate studies suggest that the total allowable emissions between now and 2050 are about 500 gigatons of carbon. This level of emissions would keep atmospheric CO₂ concentrations around 350 ppm, which would avoid detrimental warming.
Because large-scale implementation of renewable energy options, such as wind or solar, faces significant challenges, the researchers say their results strongly support the case for nuclear as a critical energy source to help stabilize or reduce greenhouse gas concentrations.

Interesting.  And, therefore:

Using nuclear power in place of fossil-fuel energy sources, such as coal, has prevented some 1.8 million air pollution-related deaths globally and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes a study. The researchers also find that nuclear energy prevents emissions of huge quantities of greenhouse gases.

Turns out that James Hansen is the co-author and not the principal author.  But, hey, it is James Hansen.  The guy who brought global warming and climate change to the forefront.  He is now retiring to become a full-time activist:

James Hansen, perhaps the world's most prominent and outspoken climate scientist, had told reporters in recent years that his retirement was coming. Yesterday, The New York Times reported that the 72-year-old researcher has made it official and will leave his job at a NASA research institute after 46 years to pursue climate activism and litigation full-time. 

Hansen is, of course, not alone among environmental activists who are in favor of nuclear energy.  But, the public, leave alone the ideologically determined environmentalists, equates nuclear energy with nuclear weapons and crazies like North Korea's Kim Jong Un.  Of course, it was environmental activism by groups like Greenpeace that systematically created this false equivalence in the first place.

As the use of fossil fuels rapidly increase, resulting in unprecedented levels of CO2 emissions, and with renewables like solar and wind not economically feasible enough to become large-scale, nuclear power begins to look less and less of an enemy:

The emergence of the pronuclear Greens represents an important schism in modern environmentalism. For decades, groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace have pushed an antinuclear agenda and contended that the only energy path for the future is the widespread deployment of wind turbines and solar panels. But fear of carbon emissions and climate change has catalyzed a major rethinking. As Brand puts it in a new documentary, Pandora’s Promise, which explores the conversion of antinuclear activists to the pronuclear side: “The question is often asked, ‘Can you be an environmentalist and be pronuclear?’ I would turn that around and say, ‘In light of climate change, can you be an environmentalist and not be pronuclear?’ ”

But, of course, when activist groups have created their identities based on a particular point of view, then they will not be keen on changing their positions anytime soon, and will continue to ignore the cognitive dissonance.

it’s not clear whether groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace can be persuaded to abandon their antinuclear zealotry. Nevertheless, it’s encouraging to see that some influential environmentalists are realizing that we have no choice but to embrace the astonishing power of the atom. 

Won't it be wonderful if substantive discussions on these happened on Earth Day?

In reviewing the environmental movement, Nicholas Lehmann writes in the New Yorker:

In the decades since Earth Day, Americans have become attuned to forms of social justice of which we used to be oblivious—the latest example is gay marriage, and the enlargement of the circle of concern that it stands for. Yet the cultural and economic distance between the top of American society and the broad middle has grown enormously. Political distances have grown, too. ...
Meanwhile, liberals have come to take as a core creed the urgent need to reckon with global warming, and limit carbon emissions. To turn concern into action requires politics. The science of carbon emissions is there. The politics is not. On its anniversary, Earth Day is worth not just celebrating but also studying—as a story with political lessons.

Easier said than done!

Climate change, and the hypocritical and impotent US

After a long time, I swung by to have coffee with a retired colleague.  "Oh, lemme get a coat" she said as I started walking towards the car.

"It is rather pleasant outside, and you might not need one" I replied.  It was about 55 degrees outside. And dry.

So, no coat.  As we started driving to the coffee shop, I asked her if the temperature was ok.

"No, it is not.  This time of the year, it typically is much cooler than this.  The climate change is messing up our weather patterns" the scientist in her replied.

For all we know, this unusually warmer temperature has got nothing to do with climate change. Just as Hurricane Sandy had nothing to do with climate change. Just as the drought had nothing to do with ...

Even if all these weather issues are not related to climate change, there is that pesky issue.  Global warming and climate change and the role of carbon.

So, where stands the US on the global attempts to bring carbon dioxide levels down?

The supposed goal of the climate negotiations is to keep the globe's average temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees celsius over the pre-industrial average by capping the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (ppm). Pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide were at 280 ppm; it is now at 391 ppm. The poor countries are arguing that "climate justice" means that the 170 ppm (the difference between 280 and 450 ppm) must be divvied up based on population. As they see it, the rich countries have more or less already used up 110 ppm, meaning that the remaining 60 ppm should be allocated to the poor countries. This climate justice formula actually implies that rich countries would have to emit "negative" amounts of greenhouse gases.
However, in a supposedly off-the-record meeting U.S. chief climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing pushed back against these demands. The Times of India reported:

Pershing said, "It's a vision you can say that the atmosphere can take an X quantity of coal emissions and therefore what you do is you divide that number into percentages. The obligation it states is that you (the US) would have to reduce its emissions down to negative 37% (below 1990 levels). And the obligation of China will be a tiny bit, but India can still grow quite a lot. The politics of that quite frankly really don't work. I can't really sell that to the US Congress."
Suggesting that the US preferred to take the domestic constituency into confidence while making the commitment and not go by scientific requirements, he reasoned, "One way to think about it is what you could deliver. You say what you are going to do and you will be held to that. So how do you marry the reality of what you are doing with the reality of what is needed. To me, it's going to be a hybrid. It's going to be something between those two."
Unlike the Kyoto Protocol approach where the UN convention first decides how much reduction is required and then apportions the burden, Pershing suggested in what's dubbed not a new US position "that each country decides independently what it wants to do and put it on the global table."
Reiterating that US domestic political compulsions were paramount, he added, "Because if we can't take it home and sell it at home, in whatever political economy we are living in, we won't do it."

Way back in 1997, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution 95 to 0 that rejected the Kyoto Protocol which would have limited U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent below their 1990 levels. The resolution declared the sense of the Senate to be that the U.S. should not consider any climate change treaty that did not include limits on developing country emissions and that would "result in serious harm to the economy of the United States."
The Obama administration evidently recognizes that such a treaty would is still not saleable to Congress and the American public.

Yep, it was ok for us to burn carbon and get materially rich.  But, to heck with those poorer countries and their peoples!

Now, one could argue that this maybe it is because the US politicians of all stripes don't care much for government intervention, and that they would favor using market mechanisms.  So, perhaps a carbon tax then?

Perhaps because a carbon tax makes so much sense—researchers at M.I.T. recently described it as a possible “win-win-win” response to several of the country’s most pressing problems—economists on both ends of the political spectrum have championed it. Liberals like Robert Frank, of Cornell, and Paul Krugman, of Princeton, support the idea, as do conservatives like Gary Becker, at the University of Chicago, and Greg Mankiw, of Harvard. (Mankiw, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush and as an adviser to Mitt Romney, is the founding member of what he calls the Pigou Club.) A few weeks ago, more than a hundred major corporations, including Royal Dutch Shell and Unilever, issued a joint statement calling on lawmakers around the globe to impose a “clear, transparent and unambiguous price on carbon emissions,” which, while not an explicit endorsement of a carbon tax, certainly comes close. Even ExxonMobil, once a leading sponsor of climate-change denial, has expressed support for a carbon tax. “A well-designed carbon tax could play a significant role in addressing the challenge of rising emissions,” a spokeswoman for the company said recently in an e-mail to Bloomberg News.

See, a wonderful level of agreement.  Yay!  So, time to start discussing the carbon tax with voters and implement it?  Right?

Wrong!

Because:

One key player who has not embraced the idea is Barack Obama. The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, was asked about the tax last month, en route, as it happens, to visit storm-ravaged areas of New York with the President. “We would never propose a carbon tax, and have no intention of proposing one,” Carney told reporters.

WTF!

The New Yorker piece concludes thus:

In either case, the White House is making a big mistake. Pigovian taxes are rarely politically popular—something they have in common with virtually all taxes. But, as Obama embarks on his second term, it’s time for him to take some risks. Several countries, including Australia and Sweden, already have a carbon tax. Were the United States to impose one, it would have global significance. It would show that Americans are ready to acknowledge, finally, that we are part of the problem. There is a price to be paid for living as we do, and everyone is going to get stuck with the bill.

It appears that the US President and politicians are happy to stick the bill on the poorer countries!

Worried about CO2 emissions? Story got more interesting today

One of the more surprising headlines of the day:

U.S. CO2 Emissions Fall to Lowest First-Quarter Level in 20 Years

Huh?

Really?

Apparently so:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy use in the first quarter of this year fell to their lowest level in the U.S. in 20 years, as demand shifted to natural gas-fired generation from coal-fired electricity due to record low gas prices, the energy department said.
Energy-related carbon emissions fell 8 percent from the same period a year ago to 1.134 billion metric tons (1.25 billion tons), according to the latest monthly energy review by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) - the energy department's statistics arm.

If only the "doubting Thomas" commenter, jayjames,  who didn't believe my arguments about coal plants closing and natural gas price decreasing actually knew what he/she was talking about!

If the news about CO2 emissions here in the US was a surprise, perhaps only a tad lower was this:

Earth sucking up increasing amounts of carbon dioxide

Huh?

Really?

Apparently so:

The Earth's ability to soak up man-made carbon dioxide emissions is a crucial yet poorly understood process with profound implications for climate change.
Among the questions that have vexed climate scientists is whether the planet can keep pace with humanity's production of greenhouse gases. The loss of this natural damper would carry dire consequences for global warming.
A study published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature concludes that these reservoirs are continuing to increase their uptake of carbon — and show no sign of diminishing.
In an accounting of the global "carbon budget," researchers calculated that Earth's oceans, plants and soils had almost doubled their uptake of carbon each year for the last half-century. In 1960, these carbon sinks absorbed around 2.4 billion metric tons of carbon; in 2010, that figure had grown to around 5 billion metric tons.

Head spinning, you say?  Wait, there is more.

A second paper, published earlier in the week by the journal Nature Geoscience, provides insight into how the disposal service in the ocean is actually working. The surprising finding is that a handful of relatively concentrated spots in the Southern Ocean account for a high proportion, roughly 20 percent, of the entire oceanic carbon uptake.

So, can they keep absorbing at the same rates?

The obvious concern the paper raises is that climate change could disturb the existing pattern of winds and currents and shut down the hot spots, making the entire ocean less efficient as an absorber of carbon dioxide.
In principle, of course, things could go the other way too, with climate change perhaps creating more such hot spots and increasing the efficiency of the disposal service. But we know from the geological record that past jumps in the earth’s temperature have tended to raise the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, which then reinforced the warming trend. So that’s a pretty good reason to think that things will unfold the same way as a result of human-caused warming.

These reports about CO2, against the backdrop of the blackouts in India where the monsoon has failed as well, reminded me about this op-ed by the editor of Scientific American, in which he noted:

The most frightening prospect that Mr. Lenton has found is the vulnerability of the Indian monsoon. More than a billion people depend on this weather pattern each year for the rain it brings to crops. The monsoon, though, is being affected by two conflicting forces: the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is adding energy to the monsoons, making them more powerful. On the other hand, soot from fires and coal plants acts to blocks the sun’s energy, weakening the monsoons.

This opposition creates potential instability and the possibility that the atmospheric dynamics that bring the monsoons could change suddenly. Mr. Lenton’s analysis shows this could occur in a remarkably short time. The monsoons could be here one year, then gone the next year. 

Here today and gone tomorrow is not a bottom-line that is conducive to any long-term planning, is it?  The level of uncertainty that CO2 introduces ought to worry most of us outside the maniacal GOP!

Kyoto Protocol? Oh, I thought it was the Quito port of call!

The Economist, the source of the graph, adds:

America, which did not ratify the [Kyoto Protocol], and China, which as a developing country is exempt, are responsible for 41% of the world’s CO2 emissions.

350.org .... check it out