Showing posts with label crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crisis. Show all posts
Friday, July 11, 2014
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Stress and Anxiety: The Lesser-Known Effects of Climate Change
Alexis Petru, June 18th, 2014 triplepundit.com
We now know all too well the effects that climate change will have on the environment and society: from making weather events more severe to damaging infrastructure, displacing populations and threatening our food and water supply. But climate change will also have a significant impact on our psychology and well-being, according to a new report from the American Psychological Association, the country’s largest professional organization representing the field of psychology, and ecoAmerica, a nonprofit focused on climate solutions.
Rather than being simply another “doom-and-gloom” study intended to scare unconvinced Americans into acknowledging that climate change is real, the report’s authors hope their findings can help people better understand the phenomenon of climate change, as well as motivate them to take action.
Anxiety, depression, shock, grief and post-traumatic stress disorder – these are some of the mental health consequences for individuals experiencing climate change-related disasters like floods and hurricanes, according to Beyond Storms and Droughts: The Psychological Impacts of Climate Change. One study of flood survivors found that some individuals were having panic attacks, insomnia, low motivation and obsessive behavior long after the natural disaster hit their community.
People exposed to the gradual effects of climate change – increased air pollution, proliferation of disease and food insecurity, to name a few – are at risk for different psychological conditions, the report said. For example, mental health workers have noticed an uptick in substance abuse and the use of mental health programs in Canada’s Inuit community in response to climate change’s gradual impacts. “Ecoanxiety” – a term frequently lampooned by the media – is also a real reaction to changing climatic conditions, according to the report: Many people feel deeply helpless and fatalistic while watching the effects of climate change unfold and worrying about their families’ future.
Droughts – another calamity exacerbated by climate change – are a special type of long-lasting natural disaster that doesn’t quite fit into the categories of acute disaster or gradual impact, the report said. While individuals may withstand a drought well initially, their mental health is likely to deteriorate as the drought persists over time. Droughts affect rural communities more, the report went on to say: One study found an increase in suicide among male farmers during an Australian drought.
The study noted that certain populations are more susceptible to climate change’s psychological impacts: children and seniors, women, and communities with aging infrastructure, high levels of poverty or a lack of health care services.
The psychological well-being of communities can also be affected by the changing climate, the report said, as climate change influences the way community members interact with each other. “Environmental refugees,” who are forced to vacate their community after a natural disaster or as climate change makes the environment inhabitable, may lose their feelings of continuity and belonging, one study found.
Communities may see an increase in violence and crime, as food becomes scarce or governments devote more resources to responding to natural disasters, instead of their criminal justice and mental health systems. Some studies suggested that a mere rise in temperature corresponds with an increase in aggression: One researcher predicted that higher global temperatures will lead to an additional 30,000 murders and 3.2 million burglaries during this century.
How the power of positive thinking can combat ecoanxiety
However, the report’s authors concluded on a positive note, with a list of tips to assist sustainability advocates and policymakers in communicating about the impacts of climate change, including the psychological effects, that will help people better understand it and inspire them to take action. Focusing on climate change solutions rather than the problem itself, using hopeful, positive messaging, and avoiding graphic images of climate change’s impacts are some effective ways to educate the public on this environmental crisis, according to the report.
The report also included recommendations for how communities can prepare for the mental health impacts of climate change, aimed at city planners, public health agencies and disaster relief organizations. Suggestions ranged from encouraging community members to add items that promote well-being to their emergency kits – like family photos, games and religious items – to strengthening community infrastructure including transportation, housing and health care to better withstand natural disasters.
The authors of the “Beyond Storms and Droughts” report pointed out that despite the psychological trauma caused by climate change, individuals and communities have the opportunity to transform themselves in positive ways in the face of adversity. For example, a study of low-income mothers who survived Hurricane Katrina found that the simple power of positive thinking helped the women survive and thrive after the disaster.
For individuals, psychologists use the term “post-traumatic growth” to describe the experience of using optimism, flexibility and problem-solving to overcome a difficult situation and feel they have gained something worthwhile, like stronger social relationships or special skills. On a community-scale, I would suggest that the sustainability community already calls this “climate resilience.”
Rather than being simply another “doom-and-gloom” study intended to scare unconvinced Americans into acknowledging that climate change is real, the report’s authors hope their findings can help people better understand the phenomenon of climate change, as well as motivate them to take action.
Anxiety, depression, shock, grief and post-traumatic stress disorder – these are some of the mental health consequences for individuals experiencing climate change-related disasters like floods and hurricanes, according to Beyond Storms and Droughts: The Psychological Impacts of Climate Change. One study of flood survivors found that some individuals were having panic attacks, insomnia, low motivation and obsessive behavior long after the natural disaster hit their community.
People exposed to the gradual effects of climate change – increased air pollution, proliferation of disease and food insecurity, to name a few – are at risk for different psychological conditions, the report said. For example, mental health workers have noticed an uptick in substance abuse and the use of mental health programs in Canada’s Inuit community in response to climate change’s gradual impacts. “Ecoanxiety” – a term frequently lampooned by the media – is also a real reaction to changing climatic conditions, according to the report: Many people feel deeply helpless and fatalistic while watching the effects of climate change unfold and worrying about their families’ future.
Droughts – another calamity exacerbated by climate change – are a special type of long-lasting natural disaster that doesn’t quite fit into the categories of acute disaster or gradual impact, the report said. While individuals may withstand a drought well initially, their mental health is likely to deteriorate as the drought persists over time. Droughts affect rural communities more, the report went on to say: One study found an increase in suicide among male farmers during an Australian drought.
The study noted that certain populations are more susceptible to climate change’s psychological impacts: children and seniors, women, and communities with aging infrastructure, high levels of poverty or a lack of health care services.
The psychological well-being of communities can also be affected by the changing climate, the report said, as climate change influences the way community members interact with each other. “Environmental refugees,” who are forced to vacate their community after a natural disaster or as climate change makes the environment inhabitable, may lose their feelings of continuity and belonging, one study found.
Communities may see an increase in violence and crime, as food becomes scarce or governments devote more resources to responding to natural disasters, instead of their criminal justice and mental health systems. Some studies suggested that a mere rise in temperature corresponds with an increase in aggression: One researcher predicted that higher global temperatures will lead to an additional 30,000 murders and 3.2 million burglaries during this century.
How the power of positive thinking can combat ecoanxiety
However, the report’s authors concluded on a positive note, with a list of tips to assist sustainability advocates and policymakers in communicating about the impacts of climate change, including the psychological effects, that will help people better understand it and inspire them to take action. Focusing on climate change solutions rather than the problem itself, using hopeful, positive messaging, and avoiding graphic images of climate change’s impacts are some effective ways to educate the public on this environmental crisis, according to the report.
The report also included recommendations for how communities can prepare for the mental health impacts of climate change, aimed at city planners, public health agencies and disaster relief organizations. Suggestions ranged from encouraging community members to add items that promote well-being to their emergency kits – like family photos, games and religious items – to strengthening community infrastructure including transportation, housing and health care to better withstand natural disasters.
The authors of the “Beyond Storms and Droughts” report pointed out that despite the psychological trauma caused by climate change, individuals and communities have the opportunity to transform themselves in positive ways in the face of adversity. For example, a study of low-income mothers who survived Hurricane Katrina found that the simple power of positive thinking helped the women survive and thrive after the disaster.
For individuals, psychologists use the term “post-traumatic growth” to describe the experience of using optimism, flexibility and problem-solving to overcome a difficult situation and feel they have gained something worthwhile, like stronger social relationships or special skills. On a community-scale, I would suggest that the sustainability community already calls this “climate resilience.”
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Big trouble in the Antarctic has been brewing for a long time
Big trouble in the Antarctic has been brewing for a long time
David Spratt, 15 June 2014
"A game changer" is how climate scientist Dr Malte Meinshausen describes newly published research that West Antarctic glaciers have passed a tipping point much earlier than expected and their disintegration is now "unstoppable" at just the current level of global warming. The research findings have shocked the scientific community. "This Is What a Holy Shit Moment for Global Warming Looks Like," ran a headline in Mother Jones magazine.
In the Guardian, lead researcher Dr Eric Rignot explained:
We announced that we had collected enough observations to conclude that the retreat of ice in the Amundsen sea sector of West Antarctica was unstoppable, with major consequences – it will mean that sea levels will rise one metre worldwide. What's more, its disappearance will likely trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which comes with a sea level rise of between three and five metres. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide.But this news should not have come as a shock. In 2007 when we wrote "Climate Code Red", Philip Sutton and I devoted a chapter to Antarctica, and surveyed scientists who were warning of this scenario. We quoted NASA climate chief James Hansen:
We find it implausible that BAU [‘business-as-usual’] scenarios, with climate forcing and global warming exceeding those of the Pliocene, would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for a century.As far back as 1968, John Mercer had predicted that the collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula could herald the loss of the ice sheet in West Antarctica, and 10 years later contended that: "a major disaster — a rapid deglaciation of West Antarctica — may be in progress … within about 50 years."
Such science was excluded from "mainstream" reports such as those of the IPCC, which systematically and embarrassing underestimated likely sea-level rises, with the most recent, 2013 report being no exception.
It's par for the course for climate policy-makers to hope for the best, rather than plan for the worst. More than once this blog has warned that sea-level rises are being underestimated by Australian policy-makers, and that the tens of millions of dollars being put into adaptation planning for sea-level rises of no more than 1.1 metres by 2100 will be a waste of money, and all that work will have to be done again. And now that has come to pass.
It's so dumb, but putting politics ahead of science has got us into this mess, and there is little sign that even peer-reviewed evidence that West Antarctic has passed a tipping point for partial or total collapse of its ice sheets will get those in power to acknowledge scientific reality.
So here, for the record, is what we said back in late 2007.
Climate Code Red (extract): Antarctica
Big changes are also underway at the other end of the world, in the Antarctic, where most of the world’s ice sits on the fifth largest continent. The majority of Antarctic ice is contained in the East Antarctic ice sheet — the biggest slab of ice on Earth, which has been in place for some 20 million years and which, if fully melted, would raise sea levels by more than 60 metres.
Considered more vulnerable is the smaller West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains one-tenth of the total Antarctic ice volume. If it disintegrated, it would raise sea levels by around 5 metres, a similar amount to what we would see with a total loss of the Greenland ice sheet.
While it was generally anticipated that the West Antarctic sheet would be more stable than Greenland at a 1–2 degree rise, recent research demonstrates that the southern ice shelf reacts far more sensitively to warming temperatures than scientists had previously believed. Ice-core data from the Antarctic Geological Drilling joint project (being conducted by Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United States) shows that ‘massive melting’ must have occurred in the Antarctic three million years ago, during the Miocene–Pliocene period, when the average global temperature in the oceans increased by only 2–3 degrees above the present temperature. Geologist Lothar Viereck-Götte called the results ‘horrifying’, and suggested that ‘the ice caps are substantially more mobile and sensitive than we had assumed’.
The heating effect caused by climate change is greatest at the poles, and the air over the West Antarctic peninsula has warmed nearly 6 degrees since 1950. At the same time, according to a report in the Washington Post on 22 October 2007, a warming sea is melting the ice-cap edges, and beech trees and grass are taking root on the ice fringes.
Another warning sign was the rapid collapse in March 2002 of the 200-metre-thick Larsen B ice shelf, which had been stable for at least twelve thousand years, and which was the main outlet for glaciers draining from West Antarctica. An ice shelf is a floating sheet, or platform, of ice. Largely submerged, and up to a kilometre thick, the shelf abuts the land and is formed when glaciers or land-based ice flows into the sea. Generally, an ice shelf will lose volume by calving icebergs, but these are also subject to rapid disintegration events. Larsen B, weakened by water-filled cracks where its shelf attached to the Antarctic Peninsula, gave way in a matter of days, releasing five hundred billion tonnes of ice into the ocean.
Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University and Ted Scambos from the NSIDC found that as glacier fl ow had begun to increase during the 1990s, the ice shelf had become stressed. The warming of deep Southern Ocean currents (which increasingly reach the Antarctic coastline) had also led to some thinning of the shelf, making it more prone to breaking apart. Scambos concludes that ‘the unusually warm summer of 2002, part of a multi-decade trend of warming [that is] clearly tied to climate change, was the final straw’.
Looking at the overall pace of events, Scambos says: ‘We thought the southern hemisphere climate is inherently more stable, [but] all of the time scales seem to be shortened now. These things can happen fairly quickly. A decade or two of warming is all you need to really change the mass balance … Things are on more of a hair trigger than we thought.’
Much of the West Antarctic ice sheet sits on bedrock that is below sea level, buttressed on two sides by mountains, but held in place on the other two sides by the Ronne and Ross ice shelves; so, if the ice shelves that buttress the ice sheet disintegrate, sea water breeching the base of the ice sheet will hasten the rate of disintegration.
In 1968, the Ohio State University glaciologist John Mercer warned, in the journal of the International Association of Scientific Hydrology, that the collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula could herald the loss of the ice sheet in West Antarctica. A decade later, in 1978, his views received a wider audience in Nature, where he wrote: ‘I contend that a major disaster — a rapid deglaciation of West Antarctica — may be in progress … within about 50 years.’ Mercer said that warming ‘above a critical level would remove all ice shelves, and consequently all ice grounded below sea level, resulting in the deglaciation of most of West Antarctica’. Such disintegration, once under way, would ‘probably be rapid, perhaps catastrophically so’, with most of the ice sheet lost in a century. Credited with coining the phrase ‘the greenhouse effect’ in the early 1960s, Mercer’s Antarctic prognosis was widely ignored and disparaged at the time, but this has changed.
(James Hansen says it was not clear at the time whether Mercer or his many critics were correct, but those who labelled Mercer an alarmist were considered more authoritative and better able to get funding. Hansen believes funding constraints can inhibit scientific criticisms of the status quo. As he wrote in New Scientist on 28 July 2007: ‘I believe there is pressure on scientists to be conservative.’ Hansen is responsible for coining the term ‘The John Mercer Effect’, meaning to play down your findings for fear of losing access to funding or of being considered alarmist.)
Another vulnerable place on the West Antarctic ice sheet is Pine Island Bay, where two large glaciers, Pine Island and Thwaites, drain about 40 per cent of the ice sheet into the sea. The glaciers are responding to rapid melting of their ice shelves and their rate of fl ow has doubled, whilst the rate of mass loss of ice from their catchment has now tripled. NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot has studied the Pine Island glacier, and his work has led climate writer Fred Pearce to conclude that ‘the glacier is primed for runaway destruction’. Pearce also notes the work of Terry Hughes of the University of Maine, who says that the collapse of the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers — already the biggest causes of global sea-level rises — could destabilise the whole of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Pearce is also swayed by geologist Richard Alley, who says there is ‘a possibility that the West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse and raise sea levels by 6 yards [5.5 metres]’, this century.
Hansen and fellow NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies researcher Makiko Sato agree:
The gravest threat we foresee starts with surface melt on West Antarctica, and interaction among positive feedbacks leading to catastrophic ice loss. Warming in West Antarctica in recent decades has been limited by effects of stratospheric ozone depletion. However, climate projections find surface warming in West Antarctica and warming of nearby ocean at depths that may attack buttressing ice shelves. Loss of ice shelves allows more rapid discharge from ice streams, in turn a lowering and warming of the ice sheet surface, and increased surface melt. Rising sea level helps unhinge the ice from pinning points … Attention has focused on Greenland, but the most recent gravity data indicate comparable mass loss from West Antarctica. We find it implausible that BAU [‘business-as-usual’] scenarios, with climate forcing and global warming exceeding those of the Pliocene, would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for a century.Even in East Antarctica, where total ice loss would produce a sea-level rise of 60 metres, mass loss near the coast is greater than the mass increase inland (mass increase inland is caused by the extra snowfall generated from warming-induced increases in air humidity).
While the inland of East Antarctica has cooled during the last 20 years, the coast has become warmer, with melting occurring 900 kilometres from the coast and in the Transantarctic Mountains, which rise up to an altitude of 2 kilometres.
Research published in January 2008 by Rignot and six of his colleagues shows that ice loss in Antarctica has increased by 75 per cent in the last ten years due to a speed-up in the flow of its glaciers, so that the ice loss there is now nearly a great as that observed in Greenland.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Dr Mayer Hillman on climate change
CFI UK presents Dr Mayer Hillman on climate change
Published on Jun 2, 2014
CFI UK presents Global Warming -- Where Do We Go From Here?Dr Mayer Hillman, Senior Fellow Emeritus, Policy Studies Institute, London. What do we do now that society is demonstrating all too clearly its strong preference for downplaying the significance and implications of climate change?
Last Hours
Last Hours
Published on Sep 28, 2013
"Last Hours" is the first in a series of short films that explore the perils of climate change and the solutions to avert climate disaster. Each subsequent film will highlight fact-based challenges facing the human race, and offer solutions to ameliorate these crises. The initial short film series will culminate in a feature film to be presented prior to COP21, the 2015 UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris.
An asset for the climate change movement, "Last Hours" will be disseminated globally to awaken modern culture worldwide about the various dangers associated with climate change.
"Last Hours" describes a science-based climate scenario where a tipping point to runaway climate change is triggered by massive releases of frozen methane. Methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, has already started to percolate into the open seas and atmosphere from methane hydrate deposits beneath melting arctic ice, from the warming northern-hemisphere tundra, and from worldwide continental-shelf undersea methane clathrate pools.
Burning fossil fuels release carbon that, principally through greenhouse effect, heat the atmosphere and the seas. This is happening most rapidly at the polar extremes, and this heating has already begun the process of releasing methane. If we do not begin to significantly curtail the use of carbon-based fossil fuels, this freed methane threatens to radically accelerate the speed of global warming, potentially producing a disaster beyond the ability of the human species to adapt.
This first video is designed to awaken people to the fact that the earth has experienced five major extinctions in the deep geologic past -- times when more than half of all life on earth vanished -- and that we are now entering a sixth extinction. Industrial civilization with its production of greenhouse gases has the ability to trigger a mass extinction; in the extreme, it could threaten not just human civilization, but the very existence of human life on this planet.
The world community and global citizens urgently need to chart a path forward that greatly reduces green house gas emissions. To take action and follow the pathway to solutions to the climate crisis, you can explore this website and you can also sign-up for future updates. Thank you.
"Last Hours" is presented and narrated by Thom Hartmann and directed by Leila Conners. Executive Producers are George DiCaprio and Earl Katz. Last Hours is produced by Mathew Schmid of Tree Media Foundation, and was written by Thom Hartmann, Sam Sacks, and Leila Conners. Music is composed and performed by Francesco Lupica.
Friday, June 6, 2014
How Acidification, Overfishing and Plastics Threaten the World’s Oceans
How Acidification, Overfishing and Plastics Threaten the World’s Oceans
David Suzuki, June 3, 2014 ecowatch.com
As a top predator, humans from the tropics to the poles have harvested all forms of marine life, from the smallest shrimp to the largest whales, from the ocean’s surface to its floor. The staggering volume of fish removed from our waters has had a ripple effect through all ocean ecosystems. Yet the ocean continues to provide food for billions of people, and improved fishing practices in many places, including Canada, are leading to healthier marine-life populations. We’re slowly getting better at managing what we catch to keep it within the ocean’s capacity to replenish. But while we may be advancing in this battle, we’re losing the war with climate change and pollution.
In the coming years, our ties to the oceans will be defined by what we put into them: carbon dioxide, nutrients washed from the land, diseases from aquaculture and land-based animals, invasive species, plastics, contaminants, noise and ever-increasing marine traffic. We once incorrectly viewed oceans as limitless storehouses of marine bounty and places to dump our garbage; now it’s clear they can only handle so much.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report described how ingredients in the ocean’s broth are changing dramatically. Life in the seas is closely linked to factors in the immediate surroundings, such as temperature, acidity or pH, salinity, oxygen and nutrient availability. These combine at microscopic levels to create conditions that favor one form of life over another and emerge into complex ecosystems.
The oceans now absorb one-quarter of the atmosphere’s CO2. That’s bad news for organisms with calcium carbonate shells that dissolve in acidic conditions. We’re witnessing the effects ofocean acidification on shellfish along the West Coast of North America. Earlier this year, a Vancouver Island scallop farm closed after losing 10 million scallops, likely because of climate change and increasing acidity. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has also linked oyster die-offs along the Pacific coast to climate change.
While we may be getting better at figuring out how to sustainably harvest crabs, lobsters and sea urchins, we’re just starting to investigate whether they can even survive in oceans altered by climate change.
Whales also offer a glimpse into our changing relationship with oceans. From the 17th century until well into the 20th, commercial whaling in Canada left populations severely depleted. Now, our most endangered whales are threatened by industrial activity. The St. Lawrence belugapopulation, for example, was decimated by hunting until 1979. Today’s biggest threats include contaminants, vessel traffic and industrialization, including a proposal to develop an oil port in the heart of their critical habitat.
Although the conservation challenge is daunting, nurturing functioning ecosystems offers hope. Healthy oceans ensure we can continue to enjoy seafood—and they’re more resilient to increasing human impacts. If the global fishing industry wants to ensure its survival, it should advocate for marine ecosystem conservation.
By continuing to improve fisheries, protect habitat, carefully control industrial activities and create marine protected areas, we can maintain marine ecosystems that are better able to adapt to the pressures of climate change and other human activities. That’s happening on the Pacific North Coast, thanks to a partnership between the B.C. government and First Nations to develop marine plans to guide future ocean uses.
Although there’s much to lament about the state of the oceans, I remain inspired by the David Suzuki Foundation’s Ocean Keepers and others working to defend our precious coastal waters. With less than five per cent of the oceans explored, we have much left to discover and learn.
As the late American marine biologist, author and conservationist Rachel Carson wrote, “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.”
David Suzuki, June 3, 2014 ecowatch.com
June 8 is World Oceans Day. It’s a fitting time to contemplate humanity’s evolving relationship with the source of all life. For much of human history, we’ve affected marine ecosystems primarily by what we’ve taken out of the seas. The challenge as we encounter warming temperatures and increasing industrial activity will be to manage what we put into them.
As a top predator, humans from the tropics to the poles have harvested all forms of marine life, from the smallest shrimp to the largest whales, from the ocean’s surface to its floor. The staggering volume of fish removed from our waters has had a ripple effect through all ocean ecosystems. Yet the ocean continues to provide food for billions of people, and improved fishing practices in many places, including Canada, are leading to healthier marine-life populations. We’re slowly getting better at managing what we catch to keep it within the ocean’s capacity to replenish. But while we may be advancing in this battle, we’re losing the war with climate change and pollution.
In the coming years, our ties to the oceans will be defined by what we put into them: carbon dioxide, nutrients washed from the land, diseases from aquaculture and land-based animals, invasive species, plastics, contaminants, noise and ever-increasing marine traffic. We once incorrectly viewed oceans as limitless storehouses of marine bounty and places to dump our garbage; now it’s clear they can only handle so much.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report described how ingredients in the ocean’s broth are changing dramatically. Life in the seas is closely linked to factors in the immediate surroundings, such as temperature, acidity or pH, salinity, oxygen and nutrient availability. These combine at microscopic levels to create conditions that favor one form of life over another and emerge into complex ecosystems.
The oceans now absorb one-quarter of the atmosphere’s CO2. That’s bad news for organisms with calcium carbonate shells that dissolve in acidic conditions. We’re witnessing the effects ofocean acidification on shellfish along the West Coast of North America. Earlier this year, a Vancouver Island scallop farm closed after losing 10 million scallops, likely because of climate change and increasing acidity. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has also linked oyster die-offs along the Pacific coast to climate change.
While we may be getting better at figuring out how to sustainably harvest crabs, lobsters and sea urchins, we’re just starting to investigate whether they can even survive in oceans altered by climate change.
Whales also offer a glimpse into our changing relationship with oceans. From the 17th century until well into the 20th, commercial whaling in Canada left populations severely depleted. Now, our most endangered whales are threatened by industrial activity. The St. Lawrence belugapopulation, for example, was decimated by hunting until 1979. Today’s biggest threats include contaminants, vessel traffic and industrialization, including a proposal to develop an oil port in the heart of their critical habitat.
Although the conservation challenge is daunting, nurturing functioning ecosystems offers hope. Healthy oceans ensure we can continue to enjoy seafood—and they’re more resilient to increasing human impacts. If the global fishing industry wants to ensure its survival, it should advocate for marine ecosystem conservation.
By continuing to improve fisheries, protect habitat, carefully control industrial activities and create marine protected areas, we can maintain marine ecosystems that are better able to adapt to the pressures of climate change and other human activities. That’s happening on the Pacific North Coast, thanks to a partnership between the B.C. government and First Nations to develop marine plans to guide future ocean uses.
Although there’s much to lament about the state of the oceans, I remain inspired by the David Suzuki Foundation’s Ocean Keepers and others working to defend our precious coastal waters. With less than five per cent of the oceans explored, we have much left to discover and learn.
As the late American marine biologist, author and conservationist Rachel Carson wrote, “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.”
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Dr. James Hansen
Published on Jan 2, 2013
"I'm very disappointed [California] chose a half-baked system like cap-and-trade, with offsets," said NASA climatologist James Hansen in a conversation with Climate One host Greg Dalton. He prefers a carbon fee and dividend and, in the absence of a strong carbon price, says the risks of reaching climatic tipping points that could bring catastrophic consequences rise. He also said people spreading disinformation about climate change "are smart enough to know what they are doing" and perhaps should be sued "for crimes against humanity." Dr. Hansen is the recipient of the 2012 Stephen Schneider Award for Climate Science Communication, a $10,000 award in memory of the late great Stanford climate scientist and former member of the Climate One Advisory Council. James Hansen joins Climate One founder Greg Dalton to discuss recent wild weather, communicating climate change to the younger generation, climate change in politics, human fingerprints on Superstorm Sandy, and inspiring action. James Hansen, Head, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Adjunct Professor, Columbia University's Earth Institute; Author, Storms of My Grandchildren
This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on December 4, 2012
Friday, May 30, 2014
We are killing species at 1000 times the natural rate
We are killing species at 1000 times the natural rate
Peter Aldhous, 29 May 2014 newscientist.com
First the bad news. Humans are driving species to extinction at around 1000 times the natural rate, at the top of the range of an earlier estimate. We also don't know how many species we can afford to lose.
Now the good news. Armed with your smartphone, you can help conservationists save them.
The new estimate of the global rate of extinction comes from Stuart Pimm of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues. It updates a calculation Pimm's team released in 1995, that human activities were driving species out of existence at 100 to 1000 times the background rate (Science, doi.org/fq2sfs).
It turns out that Pimm's earlier calculations both underestimated the rate at which species are now disappearing, and overestimated the background rate over the past 10 to 20 million years.
Gone gone gone
The Red List assessments of endangered species, conducted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), are key to Pimm's analysis. They have evolved from patchy lists of threatened species into comprehensive surveys of animal groups and regions.
"Twenty years ago we simply didn't have the breadth of underlying data with 70,000 species assessments in hand," says team member Thomas Brooks of the IUCN in Gland, Switzerland.
By studying animals' DNA, biologists have also created family trees for many groups of animals, allowing them to calculate when new species emerged. On average, it seems each vertebrate species gives rise to a new species once every 10 million years.
It's hard to measure the natural rate of extinction, but there is a workaround. Before we started destroying habitats, new species seem to have been appearing faster than old ones disappeared. That means the natural extinction rate cannot be higher than the rate at which they were forming, says Pimm.
For the most part, the higher estimate of the modern extinction rate is not caused by any acceleration in extinctions since 1995. One exception is an increase in threats to amphibians, partly due to the global spread of the killer chytrid fungus.
Save everything
The big unknown is what the high current extinction rate means for the health of entire ecosystems. Some researchers have suggested "sustainable" targets for species' loss, but there's still no scientific way to predict at what point cumulative extinctions cause an ecosystem to collapse. "People who say that are pulling numbers out of the air," says Pimm.
Still, it seems unlikely that extinctions running at 1000 times the background rate can be sustained for long. "You can be sure that there will be a price to be paid," says Brooks.
Pimm's team has also compiled detailed global maps of biodiversity, showing the numbers of threatened species and total species richness in a global grid consisting of squares 10 kilometres across.
Such maps can help conservationists decide what to do.
For instance, Pimm and his colleague Clinton Jenkins of the Institute for Ecological Research in Nazaré Paulista, Brazil, noticed high numbers of threatened species on Brazil's Atlantic coast. Local forests were being cleared for cattle ranching. So they are working with a Brazilian group, the Golden Lion Tamarin Association, to buy land and reconnect isolated forest fragments.
But conservationists need more data, and you can help, through projects like iNaturalist. Users share photos of the creatures they see via iPhone and Android apps, and experts identify them. "Right now, someone is posting an observation about every 30 seconds," says co-director Scott Loarie of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Something Is Seriously Wrong on the East Coast - and It's Killing All the Baby Puffins
Ustream
Something Is Seriously Wrong on the East Coast—and It's Killing All the Baby Puffins
Disappearing puffins, stray whales, invading sailfish: The North Atlantic is in a bad way. Here's why.
Rowan Jacobsen motherjones.com
THE NEW POSTER CHILD for climate change had his coming-out party in June 2012, when Petey the puffin chick first went live into thousands of homes and schools all over the world. The "Puffin Cam" capturing baby Petey's every chirp had been set up on Maine's Seal Island by Stephen Kress, "The Puffin Man," who founded the Audubon Society's Project Puffin in 1973. Puffins, whose orange bills and furrowed eyes make them look like penguins dressed as sad clowns, used to nest on many islands off the Maine coast, but 300 years of hunting for their meat, eggs, and feathers nearly wiped them out. Project Puffin transplanted young puffins from Newfoundland to several islands in Maine, and after years of effort the colonies were reestablished and the project became one of Audubon's great success stories. By 2013, about 1,000 puffin pairs were nesting in Maine.
Now, thanks to a grant from the Annenberg Foundation, the Puffin Cam offered new opportunities for research and outreach. Puffin parents dote on their single chick, sheltering it in a two-foot burrow beneath rocky ledges and bringing it piles of small fish each day. Researchers would get to watch live puffin feeding behavior for the first time, and schoolkids around the world would be falling for Petey.
But Kress soon noticed that something was wrong. Puffins dine primarily on hake and herring, two teardrop-shaped fish that have always been abundant in the Gulf of Maine. But Petey's parents brought him mostly butterfish, which are shaped more like saucers. Kress watched Petey repeatedly pick up butterfish and try to swallow them. The video is absurd and tragic, because the butterfish is wider than the little gray fluff ball, who keeps tossing his head back, trying to choke down the fish, only to drop it, shaking with the effort. Petey tries again and again, but he never manages it. For weeks, his parents kept bringing him butterfish, and he kept struggling. Eventually, he began moving less and less. On July 20, Petey expired in front of a live audience. Puffin snuff.
"When he died, there was a huge outcry from viewers," Kress tells me. "But we thought, 'Well, that's nature.' They don't all live. It's normal to have some chicks die." Puffins successfully raise chicks 77 percent of the time, and Petey's parents had a good track record; Kress assumed they were just unlucky. Then he checked the other 64 burrows he was tracking: Only 31 percent had successfully fledged. He saw dead chicks and piles of rotting butterfish everywhere. "That," he says, "was the epiphany."
Why would the veteran puffin parents of Maine start bringing their chicks food they couldn't swallow? Only because they had no choice. Herring and hake had dramatically declined in the waters surrounding Seal Island, and by August, Kress had a pretty good idea why: The water was much too hot.
Karen Minot
ON A MAP, the Gulf of Maine looks like an unremarkable bulge of the North Atlantic, but it is unique. A submerged ridge between Cape Cod and the tip of Nova Scotia turns it into a nearly self-contained bowl. Warm water surging up the East Coast glances off those banks and heads for Europe, bypassing the Gulf of Maine and leaving it shockingly cold. (I'm looking at you, Old Orchard Beach!) Meanwhile, frigid, nutrient-rich water from off the coasts of Labrador and Nova Scotia feeds into the Gulf through a deep channel and gets sucked into the powerful counterclockwise currents. Whipped by that vortex, and churned by the largest tides in the world (52 feet in one bay), the Gulf of Maine acts like a giant blender, constantly whisking nutrients up off the bottom, where they generally settle. At the surface, microscopic plants called phytoplankton combine those nutrients with the sunlight of the lengthening spring days to reproduce like mad. That's how the thick, green soup that feeds the Gulf's food web gets made. The soup is so cold that its diversity is low, but the cold-water specialists that are adapted to it do incredibly well.
At least, they used to.
Like much of the country, the Northeast experienced the warmest March on record in 2012, and the year just stayed hot after that. Records weren't merely shattered; they were ground into dust. Temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, which has been warming faster than almost any other marine environment on Earth, shot far higher than anyone had ever recorded, and the place's personality changed. The spring bloom of phytoplankton occurred exceptionally early, before most animals were ready to take advantage of it. Lobsters shifted toward shore a month ahead of schedule, leading to record landings and the lowest prices in 18 years.
Hake and herring, meanwhile, got the hell out of Dodge, heading for cooler waters. In all, at least 14 Gulf of Maine fish species have been shifting northward or deeper in search of relief. That left the puffins little to feed their chicks except butterfish, a more southerly species that has recently proliferated in the Gulf. Butterfish have also been growing larger during the past few years of intense warmth, and that, thinks Stephen Kress, might be a key. "Fish start growing in response to changes in water temperature and food," he says. "The earlier that cycle starts, the bigger they're gonna be. What seems to have happened in 2012 is that the butterfish got a head start on the puffins. If it was a little smaller, the butterfish might actually be a fine meal for a puffin chick. But if it's too big, then it's just the opposite. That's one of the interesting things about climate change. It's the slight nuances that can have huge effects on species."
Robert F. Bukaty/AP Photo
LIFE WOULD GO ON without puffins. Unfortunately, these clowns of the sea seem to be the canaries in the western Atlantic coal mine. Their decline is an ominous sign in a system that supports everything from the last 400 North Atlantic right whales to the $2 billion lobster industry.
The next sign of deep weirdness arrived in December 2012, when Florida beachcombers began spotting hundreds of what appeared to be penguins soaring above the Miami surf.They turned out to be razorbills, close relatives of puffins that also call the Gulf of Maine home.
Razorbills should be high on your reincarnation wish list. Superb fliers, they can also plunge into the sea and pursue fish underwater by flapping their wings—while dressed in black tie. James Bond, eat your heart out.
But normally, they do all this in the North Atlantic. Suddenly thousands of them had decided to move to Florida. The consensus was that they had simply kept going in a desperate attempt to find food—and that it couldn't end well for them. It didn't. By early 2013, hundreds of dead razorbills had washed up along East Coast beaches, most emaciated. So did 40 puffins. "That's very rare," Kress says. In fact, finding even a single dead puffin on the beach is unusual. "They're tough little guys! They'll live 30 years or more."
The weirdness continued. In the spring of 2013, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made its semiannual trawl survey of the Gulf of Maine, dragging a net at dozens of points throughout the Gulf and counting, weighing, and measuring everything caught. There were plenty of butterfish and mountains of spiny dogfish, a small shark that used to be relatively rare in the Gulf of Maine but now owns the place. There were very few cod, the fish that made New England, that lured thousands of fishing boats from Europe, that fed millions of people over the centuries. NOAA slashed the 2013 quota for cod to a pittance, putting hundreds of enraged fishermen out of work.
In recent history, the average ocean surface temperature of the Gulf of Maine has hovered around 44 degrees Fahrenheit. 2013 was the second-warmest year in the Gulf in three decades, with an average surface temperature of 46.6 degrees. But it was nowhere near the freakish spike to 47.5 degrees in 2012, and the phytoplankton did not repeat its crazy early bloom. Instead, it didn't bloom at all. "So poorly developed, its extent was below detection limits" was how NOAA put it in its Ecosystem Advisory, sounding surprisingly calm, considering it was saying the marine equivalent of "No grass sprouted in New England this year." Phytoplankton feeds some tiny fish and shrimp directly, but more often it feeds zooplankton, the bugs of the sea, and these in turn feed everything from herring to whales. The undetectable phytoplankton bloom did not bode well for zooplankton, and sure enough, that spring NOAA broke the grim news: "The biomass of zooplankton was the lowest on record." Even this dirge doesn't do justice to the dramatic deviation from the organisms' historical norm: Their numbers bounced along in a comfortable range for 35 years before taking a gut-wrenching nosedive in 2013.
By the time of that announcement, Project Puffin was starting its 2013 season. With spring temperatures closer to normal, Kress had hoped that his Seal Island puffins would return to their fruitful ways, but only two-thirds of the colony showed up. Still, a new chick was chosen for the Puffin Cam feed, and viewers named her Hope. For a while, all went well. Kress saw fewer butterfish being delivered, and Hope flourished. But soon Kress noticed that fewer birds than usual were hanging out at the Loafing Ledge, a rocky ridge where the parents socialize between feedings. Then he realized that the time between chick feedings was considerably longer than normal. The puffins were having to range much farther to find fish.
Too far, as it turned out. Although Hope successfully fledged on August 21, she was one of the few lucky ones. Only 10 percent of the puffin chicks survived in 2013—the worst year on record. "We've never seen two down years like this," Kress told me. "The puffins really tanked."
And how could they not? The Gulf of Maine, the great food processor of the western Atlantic, was almost out of food.
USUALLY, A SYSTEM as large and complex as the Gulf of Maine, sloshing with natural noise and randomness, will disappoint any human desire to fit it into a tidy narrative. It can take years to tease a clear trend out of the data. But by late 2013, things were so skewed that you could see the canaries dropping everywhere you looked.
November 30: Researchers announced that instead of the dozens of endangered right whales they normally spot in the Gulf of Maine during their fall aerial survey, they had spotted...one. They were quick to note that the whales couldn't all be dead, just missing—probably off in search of food. Sure enough, in January 2014, 12 of the same species of whale were spotted in Cape Cod Bay, where food is more plentiful.
By now, you'll have no trouble filling in this sentence from the December 4 Portland Press Herald: "This summer, a survey indicated that the northern shrimp stock was at its ____ ____ since the annual trawl survey began in 1984." That's right: lowest level. In fact, the sweet Gulf of Maine shrimp—a closely guarded secret in New England—had collapsed so completely that regulators closed the 2014 season and warned of "little prospect of recovery in the near future." It takes shrimp four to five years to reach harvest size, and few of the shrimp born in the Gulf of Maine since 2009 have survived. If shrimp miraculously produce a bumper crop this year, there might be a few to eat in 2018. In the meantime, throw some butterfish on the barbie.
Or maybe sailfish or cobia, two Florida species hooked by bewildered New England anglers in 2013. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute scrambled to find a bright side, publishing a paper (PDF) on the commercial potential of former Virginia standbys like black sea bass, longfin squid, and scup, which are new regulars in the Gulf. Admirable adaptability, and undoubtedly a few quick-moving fishermen will profit from the regime change. But I don't relish life in a world where only the hyperadapters survive.
"A puffin is an excellent example of a specialist bird that is going to be vulnerable to climate change," Kress says. "For a specialist bird like a warbler or a seabird, which relies on a small range of foods but lives in a vast area, if something goes wrong anywhere in the migratory range of that bird, it's in big trouble. And its ability to adapt is less than a bird with a more generalist lifestyle like a gull or a crow. Those highly adaptive birds are going to have the advantage in the long run. We see that vividly with the pictures of Petey trying to wolf down that oversized butterfish. It's scary. But it's a glimpse into a possible future."
Or present. We tend to think of climate change as incremental and inexorable, like seeing old friends age at the annual reunion. There are some new wrinkles, a step has been lost, and you know there's no going back, but at least you can still look forward to years of friendship. But ecosystems are wired with tipping points. A tweak here and there can make things unrecognizable tomorrow. Glaciers melt. Forests ignite. And suddenly your old pal isn't answering her phone anymore.
Yes, we can adapt. Us and the gulls and the rats. But it will be awfully lonely out there.
For 40 years, Stephen Kress has traveled to the same Maine islands each spring, has watched the same puffin couples return year after year to raise their chicks. Now he doesn't know what to think. "I've seen colonies go up and down, and I know one year doesn't make a pattern, but you can't help but wonder. We've worked decades to build those populations up, and in 2013 we lost a third. That's pretty dramatic."
Still, Kress, who calls himself a perennial optimist ("Who else would start Project Puffin?"), will head back out this May, on the heels of this winter's cold snap. He plans to outfit a few birds with GPS devices in hopes of finding the key places where they feed and overwinter. Perhaps there are new refuges to be found, places just a little colder or more resilient, where a puffin can still be a puffin. In May, the Puffin Cam will go live, a new chick will get a new name, and a fresh batch of schoolkids will tune in to get a look at their brave new world.
Monday, May 26, 2014
Graphic: If we hit a climate-system tipping point because of methane, our carbon dioxide problem is immaterial
“We have to control methane immediately, and natural gas is the largest methane pollution source in the United States. If we hit a climate-system tipping point because of methane, our carbon dioxide problem is immaterial. We have to get a handle on methane, or increasingly risk global catastrophe.”
‘Catastrophe’ Claim Adds Fuel to Methane Debate
Excess methane is often burned off from oil and gas production and distribution systems.
Credit: Center for Enabling New Technologies Through Catalysis
Credit: Center for Enabling New Technologies Through Catalysis
‘Catastrophe’ Claim Adds Fuel to Methane Debate
Bobby Magill, May 15th, 2014 climatecentral.org
A Cornell University scientist's claims that oil and gas development is so harmful to the climate that methane emissions and oil and gas production in general need to be cut back immediately to avoid a "global catastrophe" are adding more fuel to the scientific debate over the climate implications of shale oil and gas production.
Fossil fuels production is the largest methane pollution source in the U.S., and ignoring those emissions will lead to a climate change “tipping point” from which there is no return, Cornell environmental biology professor Robert Howarth said in a statement Wednesday. He was unavailable for an interview.
Though scientists say there are avenues to preventing catastrophe other than curbing methane emissions, Howarth’s previous research with Cornell environmental engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea and others concluded that the climate impact of natural gas produced from shale — most of which involves hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — may be worse than that of coal and crude oil. That's because methane leaks from natural gas production have a greater effect on the climate than carbon dioxide emissions, Howarth said.
Over a 100-year timeframe, methane is about 34 times as potent as a climate change-driving greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and over 20 years, it's 86 times more potent. Of all the greenhouse gases released by humans globally, methane contributes more than 40 percent of all radiative forcing, a measure of trapped heat in the atmosphere and a measuring stick of a changing climate, Howarth said.
“We have to control methane immediately, and natural gas is the largest methane pollution source in the United States,” Howarth said. “If we hit a climate-system tipping point because of methane, our carbon dioxide problem is immaterial. We have to get a handle on methane, or increasingly risk global catastrophe.”
Howarth's research is controversial, with the energy industry trying to discredit his work and other scientists questioning his methods. Those questions come amid a steady stream of studies released over the past year that strongly suggest either that methane emissions emanating from oil and gas fields are greater than U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates or that the impact those emissions will have on climate change is extremely complex and difficult to determine. And even many scientists who agree with Howarth's research say there are other ways to curb methane emissions without shutting down natural gas production.
In other words, Howarth's critics say, methane's effect on the climate is too complicated to demand that emissions be cut dramatically and immediately.
Howarth's new paper, to be published May 20 in the journal “Energy Science and Engineering,” reviews much of the oil and gas-related methane emissions research conducted nationwide over the 4 years since his initial methane research was published in 2011, and in the context of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment report released last year.
Howarth’s conclusion: Producing natural gas of any kind has a worse greenhouse gas footprint than burning coal and crude oil over a 20-year timeframe. In other words, the idea that natural gas is a “bridge fuel” between carbon-producing coal and clean renewable energy sources simply isn’t true, especially if natural gas is used for home heating, the study says.
At best, Howarth said natural gas might lead to a “very modest” reduction in greenhouse gas emissions if it is used in place of coal to generate electricity and only with “unprecedented” investment in natural gas infrastructure and regulatory oversight.
The paper is the latest in a long line of recent studies suggesting that methane emissions from shale oil and natural gas production and distribution equipment is much greater than previously thought.
A study by researchers from Purdue and Cornell universities published in April showed that natural gas drilling could emit up to 1,000 times the methane previously thought.
Just last week, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado-Boulder released a study by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration atmospheric scientist Gabrielle Petron showing that an airplane flying over a large northeast Colorado shale oil and gas field measured atmospheric methane concentrations three times greater than U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates for the area.
EPA estimates are based on oil industry-reported data. In the EPA’s summary of its latest greenhouse gas emissions inventory, the agency cited one of Petron’s earlier methane emissions studies as evidence that the EPA’s industry-based methane estimates differ from the results of research that involves actual emissions measurements. The summary says the EPA “has engaged with researchers” on how measurements could improve understanding of inventory estimates.
“These discrepancies are substantial,” Petron said in a May 7 statement. “Emission estimates or ‘inventories’ are the primary tool that policymakers and regulators use to evaluate air quality and climate impacts of various sources, including oil and gas sources. If they’re off, it’s important to know.”
But different methods of measuring methane emissions get different results, and it's critical those differences be reconciled, said Robert Jackson, a professor of global environmental change at Duke University whose research has shown methane leaks are a hazard in natural gas distribution systems in the U.S.
By using an airplane to fly over an oil and gas field to directly measure methane concentrations in the air, Petron's study used a "top-down" approach to estimating oil and gas field emissions. Other scientists have used a "bottom up" approach by measuring emissions from oil and gas facilities on the ground, a method used in a University of Texas study published last year suggesting fracked natural gas wells leak less methane than the EPA previously estimated.
The simplest explanation for the discrepancy is that a few oil and gas wells emit a lot of methane, while others measured in "bottom up" studies release much less methane, Jackson said. Hundreds or thousands of wells would have to be sampled on the ground for the "bottom up" studies to accurately measure emissions, he said.
"The key point is the data that have come in in the last couple of years, it's not a huge dataset," Jackson said. "The data that have come in seem to suggest the EPA estimates are too low. Will they turn out that they're high enough that Bob Howarth is right? We don't know that yet, and it may not be the case."
The overall implications of natural gas production on a changing climate are extremely complicated, a Duke University study published in April by researchers Richard Newall and Daniel Raimi concluded.
Natural gas use can increase overall energy use and alter economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions, but it's unclear whether that means an increase or decrease in those emissions, and without specific emission targets, trends in atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions aren't likely to change even with widespread use of natural gas, Newall and Raimi conclude.
Howarth disagrees, saying there’s enough evidence that the climate implications of methane emissions from oil and gas development could be catastrophic and that it’s important to act now.
Bobby Magill, May 15th, 2014 climatecentral.org
A Cornell University scientist's claims that oil and gas development is so harmful to the climate that methane emissions and oil and gas production in general need to be cut back immediately to avoid a "global catastrophe" are adding more fuel to the scientific debate over the climate implications of shale oil and gas production.
Fossil fuels production is the largest methane pollution source in the U.S., and ignoring those emissions will lead to a climate change “tipping point” from which there is no return, Cornell environmental biology professor Robert Howarth said in a statement Wednesday. He was unavailable for an interview.
Though scientists say there are avenues to preventing catastrophe other than curbing methane emissions, Howarth’s previous research with Cornell environmental engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea and others concluded that the climate impact of natural gas produced from shale — most of which involves hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — may be worse than that of coal and crude oil. That's because methane leaks from natural gas production have a greater effect on the climate than carbon dioxide emissions, Howarth said.
Over a 100-year timeframe, methane is about 34 times as potent as a climate change-driving greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and over 20 years, it's 86 times more potent. Of all the greenhouse gases released by humans globally, methane contributes more than 40 percent of all radiative forcing, a measure of trapped heat in the atmosphere and a measuring stick of a changing climate, Howarth said.
“We have to control methane immediately, and natural gas is the largest methane pollution source in the United States,” Howarth said. “If we hit a climate-system tipping point because of methane, our carbon dioxide problem is immaterial. We have to get a handle on methane, or increasingly risk global catastrophe.”
Howarth's research is controversial, with the energy industry trying to discredit his work and other scientists questioning his methods. Those questions come amid a steady stream of studies released over the past year that strongly suggest either that methane emissions emanating from oil and gas fields are greater than U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates or that the impact those emissions will have on climate change is extremely complex and difficult to determine. And even many scientists who agree with Howarth's research say there are other ways to curb methane emissions without shutting down natural gas production.
In other words, Howarth's critics say, methane's effect on the climate is too complicated to demand that emissions be cut dramatically and immediately.
Howarth's new paper, to be published May 20 in the journal “Energy Science and Engineering,” reviews much of the oil and gas-related methane emissions research conducted nationwide over the 4 years since his initial methane research was published in 2011, and in the context of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment report released last year.
Howarth’s conclusion: Producing natural gas of any kind has a worse greenhouse gas footprint than burning coal and crude oil over a 20-year timeframe. In other words, the idea that natural gas is a “bridge fuel” between carbon-producing coal and clean renewable energy sources simply isn’t true, especially if natural gas is used for home heating, the study says.
At best, Howarth said natural gas might lead to a “very modest” reduction in greenhouse gas emissions if it is used in place of coal to generate electricity and only with “unprecedented” investment in natural gas infrastructure and regulatory oversight.
The paper is the latest in a long line of recent studies suggesting that methane emissions from shale oil and natural gas production and distribution equipment is much greater than previously thought.
A study by researchers from Purdue and Cornell universities published in April showed that natural gas drilling could emit up to 1,000 times the methane previously thought.
Just last week, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado-Boulder released a study by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration atmospheric scientist Gabrielle Petron showing that an airplane flying over a large northeast Colorado shale oil and gas field measured atmospheric methane concentrations three times greater than U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates for the area.
EPA estimates are based on oil industry-reported data. In the EPA’s summary of its latest greenhouse gas emissions inventory, the agency cited one of Petron’s earlier methane emissions studies as evidence that the EPA’s industry-based methane estimates differ from the results of research that involves actual emissions measurements. The summary says the EPA “has engaged with researchers” on how measurements could improve understanding of inventory estimates.
“These discrepancies are substantial,” Petron said in a May 7 statement. “Emission estimates or ‘inventories’ are the primary tool that policymakers and regulators use to evaluate air quality and climate impacts of various sources, including oil and gas sources. If they’re off, it’s important to know.”
But different methods of measuring methane emissions get different results, and it's critical those differences be reconciled, said Robert Jackson, a professor of global environmental change at Duke University whose research has shown methane leaks are a hazard in natural gas distribution systems in the U.S.
By using an airplane to fly over an oil and gas field to directly measure methane concentrations in the air, Petron's study used a "top-down" approach to estimating oil and gas field emissions. Other scientists have used a "bottom up" approach by measuring emissions from oil and gas facilities on the ground, a method used in a University of Texas study published last year suggesting fracked natural gas wells leak less methane than the EPA previously estimated.
The simplest explanation for the discrepancy is that a few oil and gas wells emit a lot of methane, while others measured in "bottom up" studies release much less methane, Jackson said. Hundreds or thousands of wells would have to be sampled on the ground for the "bottom up" studies to accurately measure emissions, he said.
"The key point is the data that have come in in the last couple of years, it's not a huge dataset," Jackson said. "The data that have come in seem to suggest the EPA estimates are too low. Will they turn out that they're high enough that Bob Howarth is right? We don't know that yet, and it may not be the case."
The overall implications of natural gas production on a changing climate are extremely complicated, a Duke University study published in April by researchers Richard Newall and Daniel Raimi concluded.
Natural gas use can increase overall energy use and alter economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions, but it's unclear whether that means an increase or decrease in those emissions, and without specific emission targets, trends in atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions aren't likely to change even with widespread use of natural gas, Newall and Raimi conclude.
Howarth disagrees, saying there’s enough evidence that the climate implications of methane emissions from oil and gas development could be catastrophic and that it’s important to act now.
Crude oil tanks in northeast Colorado's suburban Wattenberg oil field, where measurements showed atmospheric methane concentrations were three times the levels reported in EPA inventories. Scientists say most of that methane came from the oil and gas operations in the area.
Credit: Bobby Magill
If shale oil and gas methane emissions aren’t reined in quickly, the earth could warm a critical 2°C within 15 to 35 years, he said. In order for the earth to avoid the most serious consequences of global warming, the planet’s average temperature cannot warm more than 2°C above where it was in the 1800s. Global average temperatures have already warmed 1°C.
Lawrence Cathles, a Cornell earth and atmospheric sciences professor whose criticism of Howarth's previous research made national headlines along with Howarth's rebuttal, said the science does not support Howarth's claim that immediate curbs on methane emissions are necessary to avoid the 2°C warming threshold.
"For methane to be a significant climate driver between now and 2035, its rate of increase in the atmosphere would need to accelerate dramatically, and so far we don't see this happening," Cathles said. "Curbs on methane emissions are desirable, but they will make a small player in climate change even smaller, and reducing emission rates below present levels is not a matter of necessity in controlling global warming."
Cathles said that substituting natural gas for coal in electricity generation would have an immediate benefit and methane leakage rates from natural gas systems would have to be much greater than they are now.
"My perception is that Howarth's views do not represent the views of most of the scientists that have considered these issues carefully, and that, contrary to the suggestions made in the subject paper, recent studies do not support the very high leakage rates he needs to make natural gas a 'bridge to nowhere.' "
Drew Shindell, a NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies scientist on whose research Howarth draws but was not involved in Howarth's study, said that Howarth’s research is sound, but slashing methane emissions from natural gas isn’t the only way to keep global warming under 2°C.
Keeping the earth from warming will involve more than cutting carbon dioxide emissions alone or methane alone. Cutting a combination of some CO2, some methane, some black carbon and anything else that contributes to radiative forcing could keep warming down, too, Shindell said.
Regarding Howarth’s views denying that natural gas is a bridge fuel, Shindell said Howarth is pointing out that unless the methane leak rate from natural gas production and distribution is extraordinarily low, the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to coal doesn’t exist.
If natural gas could be produced with the very lowest possible methane leak rate, natural gas might come out ahead of coal for greenhouse gases, Shindell said.
“Whether that’s feasible, I don’t know,” he said.
In his paper, Howarth is adamant that replacing climate-changing coal with climate-changing natural gas does nothing to slow global warming.
“Society needs to wean itself from the addiction to fossil fuels as quickly as possible,” Howarth said in a statement. “But to replace some fossil fuels — coal, oil — with another, like natural gas, will not suffice as an approach to take on global warming. Rather, we should embrace the technologies of the 21st century and convert our energy systems to ones that rely on wind, solar and water power.”
Jackson said he wouldn't quite go so far as to call for running away from natural gas.
"We need to do everything we can to cut methane emissions right now," Jackson said. "Using less natural gas might be one approach, but given that we are going to continue to use natural gas, my research (focuses on) how can we detect leaks quickly and fix them cheaply to reduce that leakage term?"
Shifting over completely to renewables would be great for human health and the environment, "but that's not the world we live in," Jackson said. "I want to know if you turn the spigot off for natural gas, do we get wind or do we get a new coal plant? And Bob (Howarth) might say that even if we got a coal plant, that's a good thing. It's not so black and white for me."
Credit: Bobby Magill
If shale oil and gas methane emissions aren’t reined in quickly, the earth could warm a critical 2°C within 15 to 35 years, he said. In order for the earth to avoid the most serious consequences of global warming, the planet’s average temperature cannot warm more than 2°C above where it was in the 1800s. Global average temperatures have already warmed 1°C.
Lawrence Cathles, a Cornell earth and atmospheric sciences professor whose criticism of Howarth's previous research made national headlines along with Howarth's rebuttal, said the science does not support Howarth's claim that immediate curbs on methane emissions are necessary to avoid the 2°C warming threshold.
"For methane to be a significant climate driver between now and 2035, its rate of increase in the atmosphere would need to accelerate dramatically, and so far we don't see this happening," Cathles said. "Curbs on methane emissions are desirable, but they will make a small player in climate change even smaller, and reducing emission rates below present levels is not a matter of necessity in controlling global warming."
Cathles said that substituting natural gas for coal in electricity generation would have an immediate benefit and methane leakage rates from natural gas systems would have to be much greater than they are now.
"My perception is that Howarth's views do not represent the views of most of the scientists that have considered these issues carefully, and that, contrary to the suggestions made in the subject paper, recent studies do not support the very high leakage rates he needs to make natural gas a 'bridge to nowhere.' "
Drew Shindell, a NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies scientist on whose research Howarth draws but was not involved in Howarth's study, said that Howarth’s research is sound, but slashing methane emissions from natural gas isn’t the only way to keep global warming under 2°C.
Keeping the earth from warming will involve more than cutting carbon dioxide emissions alone or methane alone. Cutting a combination of some CO2, some methane, some black carbon and anything else that contributes to radiative forcing could keep warming down, too, Shindell said.
Regarding Howarth’s views denying that natural gas is a bridge fuel, Shindell said Howarth is pointing out that unless the methane leak rate from natural gas production and distribution is extraordinarily low, the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to coal doesn’t exist.
If natural gas could be produced with the very lowest possible methane leak rate, natural gas might come out ahead of coal for greenhouse gases, Shindell said.
“Whether that’s feasible, I don’t know,” he said.
In his paper, Howarth is adamant that replacing climate-changing coal with climate-changing natural gas does nothing to slow global warming.
“Society needs to wean itself from the addiction to fossil fuels as quickly as possible,” Howarth said in a statement. “But to replace some fossil fuels — coal, oil — with another, like natural gas, will not suffice as an approach to take on global warming. Rather, we should embrace the technologies of the 21st century and convert our energy systems to ones that rely on wind, solar and water power.”
Jackson said he wouldn't quite go so far as to call for running away from natural gas.
"We need to do everything we can to cut methane emissions right now," Jackson said. "Using less natural gas might be one approach, but given that we are going to continue to use natural gas, my research (focuses on) how can we detect leaks quickly and fix them cheaply to reduce that leakage term?"
Shifting over completely to renewables would be great for human health and the environment, "but that's not the world we live in," Jackson said. "I want to know if you turn the spigot off for natural gas, do we get wind or do we get a new coal plant? And Bob (Howarth) might say that even if we got a coal plant, that's a good thing. It's not so black and white for me."
The 95% Doctrine - Climate Change as a Weapon of Mass Destruction
The 95% Doctrine - Climate Change as a Weapon of Mass Destruction
Tom Engelhardt, May 22, 2014. tomdispatch.com
Who could forget? At the time, in the fall of 2002, there was such a drumbeat of “information” from top figures in the Bush administration about the secret Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and so endanger the United States. And who -- other than a few suckers -- could have doubted that Saddam Hussein was eventually going to get a nuclear weapon? The only question, as our vice president suggested on “Meet the Press,” was: Would it take one year or five? And he wasn’t alone in his fears, since there was plenty of proof of what was going on. For starters, there were those “specially designed aluminum tubes” that the Iraqi autocrat had ordered as components for centrifuges to enrich uranium in his thriving nuclear weapons program. Reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon hit the front page of the New York Times with that story on September 8, 2002.
Then there were those “mushroom clouds” that Condoleezza Rice, our national security advisor, was so publicly worried about -- the ones destined to rise over American cities if we didn’t do something to stop Saddam. As she fretted in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer on that same September 8th, “[W]e don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” No, indeed, and nor, it turned out, did Congress!
And just in case you weren’t anxious enough about the looming Iraqi threat, there were those unmanned aerial vehicles -- Saddam’s drones! -- that could be armed with chemical or biological WMD from his arsenal and flown over America’s East Coast cities with unimaginable results. President George W. Bush went on TV to talk about them and congressional votes were changed in favor of war thanks to hair-raising secret administration briefings about them on Capitol Hill.
In the end, it turned out that Saddam had no weapons program, no nuclear bomb in the offing, no centrifuges for those aluminum pipes, no biological or chemical weapons caches, and no drone aircraft to deliver his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (nor any ships capable of putting those nonexistent robotic planes in the vicinity of the U.S. coast). But what if he had? Who wanted to take that chance? Not Vice President Dick Cheney, certainly. Inside the Bush administration he propounded something that journalist Ron Suskind later dubbed the “one percent doctrine.” Its essence was this: if there was even a 1% chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, it must be dealt with as if it were a 95%-100% certainty.
Here’s the curious thing: if you look back on America's apocalyptic fears of destruction during the first 14 years of this century, they largely involved three city-busting weapons that were fantasies of Washington’s fertile imperial imagination. There was that “bomb” of Saddam’s, which provided part of the pretext for a much-desired invasion of Iraq. There was the “bomb” of the mullahs, the Iranian fundamentalist regime that we’ve just loved to hate ever since they repaid us, in 1979, for the CIA’s overthrow of an elected government in 1953 and the installation of the Shah by taking the staff of the U.S. embassy in Tehran hostage. If you believed the news from Washington and Tel Aviv, the Iranians, too, were perilously close to producing a nuclear weapon or at least repeatedly on the verge of the verge of doing so. The production of that “Iranian bomb” has, for years, been a focus of American policy in the Middle East, the “brink” beyond which war has endlessly loomed. And yet there was and is no Iranian bomb, nor evidence that the Iranians were or are on the verge of producing one.
Finally, of course, there was al-Qaeda’s bomb, the “dirty bomb” that organization might somehow assemble, transport to the U.S., and set off in an American city, or the “loose nuke,” maybe from the Pakistani arsenal, with which it might do the same. This is the third fantasy bomb that has riveted American attention in these last years, even though there is less evidence for or likelihood of its imminent existence than of the Iraqi and Iranian ones.
To sum up, the strange thing about end-of-the-world-as-we’ve-known-it scenarios from Washington, post-9/11, is this: with a single exception, they involved only non-existent weapons of mass destruction. A fourth weapon -- one that existed but played a more modest role in Washington’s fantasies -- was North Korea’s perfectly real bomb, which in these years the North Koreans were incapable of delivering to American shores.
The "Good News" About Climate Change
In a world in which nuclear weapons remain a crucial coin of the realm when it comes to global power, none of these examples could quite be classified as 0% dangers. Saddam had once had anuclear program, just not in 2002-2003, and also chemical weapons, which he used against Iranian troops in his 1980s war with their country (with the help of targeting information from the U.S. military) and against his own Kurdish population. The Iranians might (or might not) have been preparing their nuclear program for a possible weapons breakout capability, and al-Qaeda certainly would not have rejected a loose nuke, if one were available (though that organization’s ability to use it would still have been questionable).
In the meantime, the giant arsenals of WMD in existence, the American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, Pakistani, and Indian ones that might actually have left a crippled or devastated planet behind, remained largely off the American radar screen. In the case of the Indian arsenal, the Bush administration actually lent an indirect hand to its expansion. So it was twenty-first-century typical when President Obama, trying to put Russia's recent actions in the Ukraine in perspective, said, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors. I continue to be much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.”
Once again, an American president was focused on a bomb that would raise a mushroom cloud over Manhattan. And which bomb, exactly, was that, Mr. President?
Of course, there was a weapon of mass destruction that could indeed do staggering damage to or someday simply drown New York City, Washington D.C., Miami, and other East coast cities. It had its own efficient delivery systems -- no nonexistent drones or Islamic fanatics needed. And unlike the Iraqi, Iranian, or al-Qaeda bombs, it was guaranteed to be delivered to our shores unless preventive action was taken soon. No one needed to hunt for its secret facilities. It was a weapons system whose production plants sat in full view right here in the United States, as well as in Europe, China, and India, as well as in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and other energy states.
So here’s a question I’d like any of you living in or visiting Wyoming to ask the former vice president, should you run into him in a state that’s notoriously thin on population: How would he feel about acting preventively, if instead of a 1% chance that some country with weapons of mass destruction might use them against us, there was at least a 95% -- and likely as not a 100% -- chance of them being set off on our soil? Let’s be conservative, since the question is being posed to a well-known neoconservative. Ask him whether he would be in favor of pursuing the 95% doctrine the way he was the 1% version.
After all, thanks to a grim report in 2013 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we know that there is now a 95%-100% likelihood that “human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming [of the planet] since the mid-20th century.” We know as well that the warming of the planet -- thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere -- is already doing real damage to our world and specifically to the United States, as a recent scientific report released by the White House made clear. We also know, with grimly reasonable certainty, what kinds of damage those 95%-100% odds are likely totranslate into in the decades, and even centuries, to come if nothing changes radically: a temperature rise by century’s end that could exceed 10 degrees Fahrenheit, cascading species extinctions, staggeringly severe droughts across larger parts of the planet (as in the present long-term drought in the American West and Southwest), far more severe rainfall across other areas, more intense storms causing far greater damage, devastating heat waves on a scale no one in human history has ever experienced, masses of refugees, rising global food prices, and among other catastrophes on the human agenda, rising sea levels that will drown coastal areas of the planet.
From two scientific studies just released, for example, comes thenews that the West Antarctic ice sheet, one of the great ice accumulations on the planet, has now begun a process of melting and collapse that could, centuries from now, raise world sea levels by a nightmarish 10 to 13 feet. That mass of ice is, according to the lead authors of one of the studies, already in “irreversible retreat,” which means -- no matter what acts are taken from now on -- a future death sentence for some of the world's great cities. (And that’s without even the melting of the Greenland ice shield, not to speak of the rest of the ice in Antarctica.)
All of this, of course, will happen mainly because we humans continue to burn fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate and soannually deposit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at record levels. In other words, we’re talking about weapons of mass destruction of a new kind. While some of their effects are already in play, the planetary destruction that nuclear weapons could cause almost instantaneously, or at least (given “nuclear winter” scenarios) within months, will, with climate change, take decades, if not centuries, to deliver its full, devastating planetary impact.
When we speak of WMD, we usually think of weapons -- nuclear, biological, or chemical -- that are delivered in a measurable moment in time. Consider climate change, then, a WMD on a particularly long fuse, already lit and there for any of us to see. Unlike the feared Iranian bomb or the Pakistani arsenal, you don’t need the CIA or the NSA to ferret such "weaponry" out. From oil wells to fracking structures, deep sea drilling rigs to platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, the machinery that produces this kind of WMD and ensures that it is continuously delivered to its planetary targets is in plain sight. Powerful as it may be, destructive as it will be, those who control it have faith that, being so long developing, it can remain in the open without panicking populations or calling any kind of destruction down on them.
The companies and energy states that produce such WMD remain remarkably open about what they’re doing. Generally speaking, they don’t hesitate to make public, or even boast about, their plans for the wholesale destruction of the planet, though of course they are never described that way. Nonetheless, if an Iraqi autocrat or Iranian mullahs spoke in similar fashion about producing nuclear weapons and how they were to be used, they would be toast.
Take ExxonMobil, one of the most profitable corporations in history. In early April, it released two reports that focused on how the company, as Bill McKibben has written, “planned to deal with the fact that [it] and other oil giants have many times more carbon in their collective reserves than scientists say we can safely burn." He went on:
The company said that government restrictions that would force it to keep its [fossil fuel] reserves in the ground were 'highly unlikely,' and that they would not only dig them all up and burn them, but would continue to search for more gas and oil -- a search that currently consumes about $100 million of its investors’ money every single day. 'Based on this analysis, we are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become "stranded."'
In other words, Exxon plans to exploit whatever fossil fuel reserves it possesses to their fullest extent. Government leaders involved in supporting the production of such weapons of mass destruction and their use are often similarly open about it, even while also discussing steps to mitigate their destructive effects. Take the White House, for instance. Here was a statement President Obama proudly made in Oklahoma in March 2012 on his energy policy:
Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That's important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.
Similarly, on May 5th, just before the White House was to reveal that grim report on climate change in America, and with a Congress incapable of passing even the most rudimentary climate legislation aimed at making the country modestly more energy efficient, senior Obama adviser John Podesta appeared in the White House briefing room to brag about the administration’s “green” energy policy. “The United States,” he said, “is now the largest producer of natural gas in the world and the largest producer of gas and oil in the world. It's projected that the United States will continue to be the largest producer of natural gas through 2030. For six straight months now, we've produced more oil here at home than we've imported from overseas. So that's all a good-news story.”
Good news indeed, and from Vladmir Putin’s Russia, which just expanded its vast oil and gas holdings by a Maine-sized chunk of the Black Sea off Crimea, to Chinese “carbon bombs,” to Saudi Arabian production guarantees, similar “good-news stories” are similarly promoted. In essence, the creation of ever more greenhouse gases -- of, that is, the engine of our future destruction -- remains a “good news” story for ruling elites on planet Earth.
Weapons of Planetary Destruction
We know exactly what Dick Cheney -- ready to go to war on a 1% possibility that some country might mean us harm -- would answer, if asked about acting on the 95% doctrine. Who can doubt that his response would be similar to those of the giant energy companies, which have funded so much climate-change denialism and false science over the years? He would claim that the science simply isn’t “certain” enough (though “uncertainty” can, in fact, cut two ways), that before we commit vast sums to taking on the phenomenon, we need to know far more, and that, in any case, climate-change science is driven by a political agenda.
For Cheney & Co., it seemed obvious that acting on a 1% possibility was a sensible way to go in America’s “defense” and it’s no less gospel for them that acting on at least a 95% possibility isn’t. For the Republican Party as a whole, climate-change denial is by now nothing less than a litmus testof loyalty, and so even a 101% doctrine wouldn’t do when it comes to fossil fuels and this planet.
No point, of course, in blaming this on fossil fuels or even the carbon dioxide they give off when burned. These are no more weapons of mass destruction than are uranium-235 and plutonium-239. In this case, the weaponry is the production system that’s been set up to find, extract, sell at staggering profits, and burn those fossil fuels, and so create a greenhouse-gas planet. With climate change, there is no “Little Boy” or “Fat Man” equivalent, no simple weapon to focus on. In this sense, fracking is the weapons system, as is deep-sea drilling, as are those pipelines, and the gas stations, and the coal-fueled power plants, and the millions of cars filling global roads, and the accountants of the most profitable corporations in history.
All of it -- everything that brings endless fossil fuels to market, makes those fuels eminently burnable, and helps suppress the development of non-fossil fuel alternatives -- is the WMD. The CEOs of the planet's giant energy corporations are the dangerous mullahs, the true fundamentalists, of planet Earth, since they are promoting a faith in fossil fuels which is guaranteed to lead us to some version of End Times.
Perhaps we need a new category of weapons with a new acronym to focus us on the nature of our present 95%-100% circumstances. Call them weapons of planetary destruction (WPD) or weapons of planetary harm (WPH). Only two weapons systems would clearly fit such categories. One would be nuclear weapons which, even in a localized war between Pakistan and India, could create some version of “nuclear winter” in which the planet was cut off from the sun by so much smoke and soot that it would grow colder fast, experience a massive loss of crops, of growing seasons, and of life. In the case of a major exchange of such weapons, we would be talking about “the sixth extinction” of planetary history.
Though on a different and harder to grasp time-scale, the burning of fossil fuels could end in a similar fashion -- with a series of “irreversible” disasters that could essentially burn us and much other life off the Earth. This system of destruction on a planetary scale, facilitated by most of the ruling and corporate elites on the planet, is becoming (to bring into play another category not usually used in connection with climate change) the ultimate “crime against humanity” and, in fact, against most living things. It is becoming a “terracide.”
Who could forget? At the time, in the fall of 2002, there was such a drumbeat of “information” from top figures in the Bush administration about the secret Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and so endanger the United States. And who -- other than a few suckers -- could have doubted that Saddam Hussein was eventually going to get a nuclear weapon? The only question, as our vice president suggested on “Meet the Press,” was: Would it take one year or five? And he wasn’t alone in his fears, since there was plenty of proof of what was going on. For starters, there were those “specially designed aluminum tubes” that the Iraqi autocrat had ordered as components for centrifuges to enrich uranium in his thriving nuclear weapons program. Reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon hit the front page of the New York Times with that story on September 8, 2002.
Then there were those “mushroom clouds” that Condoleezza Rice, our national security advisor, was so publicly worried about -- the ones destined to rise over American cities if we didn’t do something to stop Saddam. As she fretted in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer on that same September 8th, “[W]e don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” No, indeed, and nor, it turned out, did Congress!
And just in case you weren’t anxious enough about the looming Iraqi threat, there were those unmanned aerial vehicles -- Saddam’s drones! -- that could be armed with chemical or biological WMD from his arsenal and flown over America’s East Coast cities with unimaginable results. President George W. Bush went on TV to talk about them and congressional votes were changed in favor of war thanks to hair-raising secret administration briefings about them on Capitol Hill.
In the end, it turned out that Saddam had no weapons program, no nuclear bomb in the offing, no centrifuges for those aluminum pipes, no biological or chemical weapons caches, and no drone aircraft to deliver his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (nor any ships capable of putting those nonexistent robotic planes in the vicinity of the U.S. coast). But what if he had? Who wanted to take that chance? Not Vice President Dick Cheney, certainly. Inside the Bush administration he propounded something that journalist Ron Suskind later dubbed the “one percent doctrine.” Its essence was this: if there was even a 1% chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, it must be dealt with as if it were a 95%-100% certainty.
Here’s the curious thing: if you look back on America's apocalyptic fears of destruction during the first 14 years of this century, they largely involved three city-busting weapons that were fantasies of Washington’s fertile imperial imagination. There was that “bomb” of Saddam’s, which provided part of the pretext for a much-desired invasion of Iraq. There was the “bomb” of the mullahs, the Iranian fundamentalist regime that we’ve just loved to hate ever since they repaid us, in 1979, for the CIA’s overthrow of an elected government in 1953 and the installation of the Shah by taking the staff of the U.S. embassy in Tehran hostage. If you believed the news from Washington and Tel Aviv, the Iranians, too, were perilously close to producing a nuclear weapon or at least repeatedly on the verge of the verge of doing so. The production of that “Iranian bomb” has, for years, been a focus of American policy in the Middle East, the “brink” beyond which war has endlessly loomed. And yet there was and is no Iranian bomb, nor evidence that the Iranians were or are on the verge of producing one.
Finally, of course, there was al-Qaeda’s bomb, the “dirty bomb” that organization might somehow assemble, transport to the U.S., and set off in an American city, or the “loose nuke,” maybe from the Pakistani arsenal, with which it might do the same. This is the third fantasy bomb that has riveted American attention in these last years, even though there is less evidence for or likelihood of its imminent existence than of the Iraqi and Iranian ones.
To sum up, the strange thing about end-of-the-world-as-we’ve-known-it scenarios from Washington, post-9/11, is this: with a single exception, they involved only non-existent weapons of mass destruction. A fourth weapon -- one that existed but played a more modest role in Washington’s fantasies -- was North Korea’s perfectly real bomb, which in these years the North Koreans were incapable of delivering to American shores.
The "Good News" About Climate Change
In a world in which nuclear weapons remain a crucial coin of the realm when it comes to global power, none of these examples could quite be classified as 0% dangers. Saddam had once had anuclear program, just not in 2002-2003, and also chemical weapons, which he used against Iranian troops in his 1980s war with their country (with the help of targeting information from the U.S. military) and against his own Kurdish population. The Iranians might (or might not) have been preparing their nuclear program for a possible weapons breakout capability, and al-Qaeda certainly would not have rejected a loose nuke, if one were available (though that organization’s ability to use it would still have been questionable).
In the meantime, the giant arsenals of WMD in existence, the American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, Pakistani, and Indian ones that might actually have left a crippled or devastated planet behind, remained largely off the American radar screen. In the case of the Indian arsenal, the Bush administration actually lent an indirect hand to its expansion. So it was twenty-first-century typical when President Obama, trying to put Russia's recent actions in the Ukraine in perspective, said, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors. I continue to be much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.”
Once again, an American president was focused on a bomb that would raise a mushroom cloud over Manhattan. And which bomb, exactly, was that, Mr. President?
Of course, there was a weapon of mass destruction that could indeed do staggering damage to or someday simply drown New York City, Washington D.C., Miami, and other East coast cities. It had its own efficient delivery systems -- no nonexistent drones or Islamic fanatics needed. And unlike the Iraqi, Iranian, or al-Qaeda bombs, it was guaranteed to be delivered to our shores unless preventive action was taken soon. No one needed to hunt for its secret facilities. It was a weapons system whose production plants sat in full view right here in the United States, as well as in Europe, China, and India, as well as in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and other energy states.
So here’s a question I’d like any of you living in or visiting Wyoming to ask the former vice president, should you run into him in a state that’s notoriously thin on population: How would he feel about acting preventively, if instead of a 1% chance that some country with weapons of mass destruction might use them against us, there was at least a 95% -- and likely as not a 100% -- chance of them being set off on our soil? Let’s be conservative, since the question is being posed to a well-known neoconservative. Ask him whether he would be in favor of pursuing the 95% doctrine the way he was the 1% version.
After all, thanks to a grim report in 2013 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we know that there is now a 95%-100% likelihood that “human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming [of the planet] since the mid-20th century.” We know as well that the warming of the planet -- thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere -- is already doing real damage to our world and specifically to the United States, as a recent scientific report released by the White House made clear. We also know, with grimly reasonable certainty, what kinds of damage those 95%-100% odds are likely totranslate into in the decades, and even centuries, to come if nothing changes radically: a temperature rise by century’s end that could exceed 10 degrees Fahrenheit, cascading species extinctions, staggeringly severe droughts across larger parts of the planet (as in the present long-term drought in the American West and Southwest), far more severe rainfall across other areas, more intense storms causing far greater damage, devastating heat waves on a scale no one in human history has ever experienced, masses of refugees, rising global food prices, and among other catastrophes on the human agenda, rising sea levels that will drown coastal areas of the planet.
From two scientific studies just released, for example, comes thenews that the West Antarctic ice sheet, one of the great ice accumulations on the planet, has now begun a process of melting and collapse that could, centuries from now, raise world sea levels by a nightmarish 10 to 13 feet. That mass of ice is, according to the lead authors of one of the studies, already in “irreversible retreat,” which means -- no matter what acts are taken from now on -- a future death sentence for some of the world's great cities. (And that’s without even the melting of the Greenland ice shield, not to speak of the rest of the ice in Antarctica.)
All of this, of course, will happen mainly because we humans continue to burn fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate and soannually deposit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at record levels. In other words, we’re talking about weapons of mass destruction of a new kind. While some of their effects are already in play, the planetary destruction that nuclear weapons could cause almost instantaneously, or at least (given “nuclear winter” scenarios) within months, will, with climate change, take decades, if not centuries, to deliver its full, devastating planetary impact.
When we speak of WMD, we usually think of weapons -- nuclear, biological, or chemical -- that are delivered in a measurable moment in time. Consider climate change, then, a WMD on a particularly long fuse, already lit and there for any of us to see. Unlike the feared Iranian bomb or the Pakistani arsenal, you don’t need the CIA or the NSA to ferret such "weaponry" out. From oil wells to fracking structures, deep sea drilling rigs to platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, the machinery that produces this kind of WMD and ensures that it is continuously delivered to its planetary targets is in plain sight. Powerful as it may be, destructive as it will be, those who control it have faith that, being so long developing, it can remain in the open without panicking populations or calling any kind of destruction down on them.
The companies and energy states that produce such WMD remain remarkably open about what they’re doing. Generally speaking, they don’t hesitate to make public, or even boast about, their plans for the wholesale destruction of the planet, though of course they are never described that way. Nonetheless, if an Iraqi autocrat or Iranian mullahs spoke in similar fashion about producing nuclear weapons and how they were to be used, they would be toast.
Take ExxonMobil, one of the most profitable corporations in history. In early April, it released two reports that focused on how the company, as Bill McKibben has written, “planned to deal with the fact that [it] and other oil giants have many times more carbon in their collective reserves than scientists say we can safely burn." He went on:
The company said that government restrictions that would force it to keep its [fossil fuel] reserves in the ground were 'highly unlikely,' and that they would not only dig them all up and burn them, but would continue to search for more gas and oil -- a search that currently consumes about $100 million of its investors’ money every single day. 'Based on this analysis, we are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become "stranded."'
In other words, Exxon plans to exploit whatever fossil fuel reserves it possesses to their fullest extent. Government leaders involved in supporting the production of such weapons of mass destruction and their use are often similarly open about it, even while also discussing steps to mitigate their destructive effects. Take the White House, for instance. Here was a statement President Obama proudly made in Oklahoma in March 2012 on his energy policy:
Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That's important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.
Similarly, on May 5th, just before the White House was to reveal that grim report on climate change in America, and with a Congress incapable of passing even the most rudimentary climate legislation aimed at making the country modestly more energy efficient, senior Obama adviser John Podesta appeared in the White House briefing room to brag about the administration’s “green” energy policy. “The United States,” he said, “is now the largest producer of natural gas in the world and the largest producer of gas and oil in the world. It's projected that the United States will continue to be the largest producer of natural gas through 2030. For six straight months now, we've produced more oil here at home than we've imported from overseas. So that's all a good-news story.”
Good news indeed, and from Vladmir Putin’s Russia, which just expanded its vast oil and gas holdings by a Maine-sized chunk of the Black Sea off Crimea, to Chinese “carbon bombs,” to Saudi Arabian production guarantees, similar “good-news stories” are similarly promoted. In essence, the creation of ever more greenhouse gases -- of, that is, the engine of our future destruction -- remains a “good news” story for ruling elites on planet Earth.
Weapons of Planetary Destruction
We know exactly what Dick Cheney -- ready to go to war on a 1% possibility that some country might mean us harm -- would answer, if asked about acting on the 95% doctrine. Who can doubt that his response would be similar to those of the giant energy companies, which have funded so much climate-change denialism and false science over the years? He would claim that the science simply isn’t “certain” enough (though “uncertainty” can, in fact, cut two ways), that before we commit vast sums to taking on the phenomenon, we need to know far more, and that, in any case, climate-change science is driven by a political agenda.
For Cheney & Co., it seemed obvious that acting on a 1% possibility was a sensible way to go in America’s “defense” and it’s no less gospel for them that acting on at least a 95% possibility isn’t. For the Republican Party as a whole, climate-change denial is by now nothing less than a litmus testof loyalty, and so even a 101% doctrine wouldn’t do when it comes to fossil fuels and this planet.
No point, of course, in blaming this on fossil fuels or even the carbon dioxide they give off when burned. These are no more weapons of mass destruction than are uranium-235 and plutonium-239. In this case, the weaponry is the production system that’s been set up to find, extract, sell at staggering profits, and burn those fossil fuels, and so create a greenhouse-gas planet. With climate change, there is no “Little Boy” or “Fat Man” equivalent, no simple weapon to focus on. In this sense, fracking is the weapons system, as is deep-sea drilling, as are those pipelines, and the gas stations, and the coal-fueled power plants, and the millions of cars filling global roads, and the accountants of the most profitable corporations in history.
All of it -- everything that brings endless fossil fuels to market, makes those fuels eminently burnable, and helps suppress the development of non-fossil fuel alternatives -- is the WMD. The CEOs of the planet's giant energy corporations are the dangerous mullahs, the true fundamentalists, of planet Earth, since they are promoting a faith in fossil fuels which is guaranteed to lead us to some version of End Times.
Perhaps we need a new category of weapons with a new acronym to focus us on the nature of our present 95%-100% circumstances. Call them weapons of planetary destruction (WPD) or weapons of planetary harm (WPH). Only two weapons systems would clearly fit such categories. One would be nuclear weapons which, even in a localized war between Pakistan and India, could create some version of “nuclear winter” in which the planet was cut off from the sun by so much smoke and soot that it would grow colder fast, experience a massive loss of crops, of growing seasons, and of life. In the case of a major exchange of such weapons, we would be talking about “the sixth extinction” of planetary history.
Though on a different and harder to grasp time-scale, the burning of fossil fuels could end in a similar fashion -- with a series of “irreversible” disasters that could essentially burn us and much other life off the Earth. This system of destruction on a planetary scale, facilitated by most of the ruling and corporate elites on the planet, is becoming (to bring into play another category not usually used in connection with climate change) the ultimate “crime against humanity” and, in fact, against most living things. It is becoming a “terracide.”
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Anthropocene: The closing doors of climate targets
Anthropocene: The closing doors of climate targets
Published on Dec 6, 2013
The Grantham Institute for Climate Change Annual Lecture 2013, given by Professor Thomas Stocker, University of Bern, Switzerland and Co-chair of IPCC WGI
CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are now unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years, and they rise more than 100 times faster than during the past 20,000 years. This is caused by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels and land use change with consequent changes in the entire Earth System. The newest comprehensive assessment Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documents a rapidly and profoundly changing Earth System and provides the latest understanding of changes ahead of us. There is no doubt that warming and many of the consequent changes are caused by human activity which makes this new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. How climate scientists many centuries and millennia hence will characterize the Anthropocene depends on us, on our decisions today. The implementation of international agreements to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" requires limiting CO2 emissions substantially and sustainably. Specific climate targets to limit the warming to 2°C, or even 1.5°C, are already now ambitious. But both further delay and insufficient emissions reductions close the door on limiting global mean warming, and consequent impacts, permanently.
For more information please visithttp://www.imperial.ac.uk/climatechange
Thursday, May 22, 2014
“Erring on the side of least drama” — Why climate scientists are inherently conservative (video)
“Erring on the side of least drama” — Why climate scientists are inherently conservative (video)
Gaius Publius 5/21/2014
I’ve been writing for a while that predictions from climate scientists are consistently “wrong to the slow side” — a statement that, if true, adds even greater urgency to stopping carbon emissions.
My favorite “wrong to the slow side” graphic is from the Copenhagen Diagnosis, the climate document produced ahead of the 2009 summit in Copenhagen. It shows loss of Arctic summer ice, both modeled and observed. In other words, IPCC models were run that showed the likely range of loss of Arctic summer ice, year by year, and over that, the actual, observed loss for the same time period was shown. As the accompanying caption says:
Observed (red line) and modeled September Arctic sea ice extent in millions of square kilometers. The solid black line gives the ensemble mean of the 13 IPCC AR4 models while the dashed black lines represent their range.
“AR4″ is the 2007 IPCC Assessment Report 4, the most recent at the time. Here’s that figure:
Arctic sea ice — modeled vs. observed as of 2009, Fig. 13 from the Copenhagen Diagnosis (source)
See what I mean? Wrong to the slow side. Arctic ice is disappearing fast.
Scientists tend to “err on the side of least drama”
There are many examples of the above, where models are more conservative than observations and tend to “under-predict.” In addition, scientists also tend to throw away the more extreme conclusions (or most “dramatic,” as you’ll see below), even when those extreme conclusions are also the most likely.
Why is that? History of Science professor Naomi Oreskes has studied that phenomenon. In a 2012 peer-reviewed paper, “Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?” (pdf), she and her colleagues put to the test the claim of climate deniers that “climate scientists are alarmists.” When they tested that conclusion by looking at actual data — climate projections and how they compare to climate outcomes — they discovered something very interesting. In fact, the opposite is true. Climate scientists tend to underplay their results.
Here’s Dr. Oreskes in a short video to explain. When she says “this particular piece of work” at the beginning, she’s referring to the 2012 paper I mentioned above, then in preparation.
The source of this interview is this entry in the American Geophysical Union blog. The writer, Dan Satterfield, has interesting comments of his own as well.
As Dr. Oreskes says in introducing her main point (my emphasis):
“What we’re proposing is that the core values of science, the core values of the scientific community — rationality, objectivity, dispassion, restraint, moderation — actually introduce a bias into scientific evaluation in cases where some possible outcomes are, in fact, dramatic.
“And that when scientists encounter outcomes that are potentially quite dramatic — or even potentially alarming — that it actually makes them uncomfortable. And they have a tendency, and I would argue subconsciously, to emphasize the more cautious range of their data, erring on the side of least drama. Erring on the side of the data that seems less dramatic and less alarming.
“The argument of the paper is that, this is really a problem, a source of bias.”
More than a “source of bias,” I would argue. For a situation this serious to be this underplayed is genuinely dangerous.
The evidence
The evidence in the paper is compelling. The link is here (pdf); note that the annotation was added by the hosting site and is not part of the original. For example, from a 2007 paper by Rahmstorf et al, Oreskes and her colleagues write (my emphasis and some re-paragraphing everywhere):
In a 2007 article, Rahmstorf and colleagues compared projections of global mean temperature change, sea level rise, and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (TAR) with observations made since 1973 and concluded:
‘‘Overall, these observational data underscore the concerns about global climate change. Previous projections, as summarized by IPCC, have not exaggerated but may in some respects even have underestimated the change, in particular for sea level’’ (p. 709).
In the TAR, released in 2001, the IPCC predicted an average sea level rise of less than 2 mm/yr, but from 1993 to 2006, sea level actually rose 3.3 mm/yr—more than 50% above the IPCC prediction (Houghton et al., 2001). Furthermore, the temperature change over the period ‘‘is 0.33 8C for the 16 years since 1990, which is in the upper part of the range projected by the IPCC (in the TAR).’’ The underestimate in sea level rise can be traced in part to under-projection of ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland, as discussed in detail later in this paper.
And:
In a 2008 paper, Roger Pielke, Jr. … observed that for sea level rise, actual changes have been greater than forecast in two of three prior IPCC reports, while falling below the median prediction in the First Assessment Report (FAR).
And:
These conclusions are also supported in a report prepared by the Committee on Strategic Advice on the U.S. Climate Change Science Program [NRC, 2009] … The results of the three-year study … were consistent with the conclusion that IPCC projections have systematically underestimated key climate change drivers and impacts. … The key climate metrics of global mean temperature and sea level rise are biased toward underestimation, so far as the evidence in this analysis shows.
And from the 2009 Copenhagen Diagnosis, mentioned above:
The Copenhagen Diagnosis (Allison et al., 2009), reviewed ‘‘hundreds of papers . . . on a suite of topics related to human-induced climate change’’ since the drafting of AR4 [IPCC Assessment Report 4, 2007], and, like the NRC report, found that key changes were happening either at the same rate as, or more quickly than, anticipated (p. 5).
Among their key findings were that global temperature increases over the past 25 years have been consistent with model predictions (0.19 °C per decade, virtually the same rate as for the 16 years mentioned in Rahmstorf et al., 2007), while other important impacts are proceeding faster than expected, including CO2 emissions, increased rainfall in already rainy areas, continental ice-sheet melting, arctic sea-ice decline, and sea level rise.
The paper goes on to elaborate those findings, and then offers quite a number of other examples similar to those above — predictions of hurricane intensity and frequency, ozone depletion, ice sheet destruction, predictions of permafrost melt, and so on.
About the latter (permafrost and its melting methane), the paper observes:
The total carbon contained in permafrost [in the form of frozen methane] has been estimated at 1672 gigatons, more than twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere(Tarnocai et al., 2009). This means that the potential amplifying effect of greenhouse gas release from permafrost melting is enormous. Yet this feedback ‘‘has not been accounted for in any of the IPCC projections’’ (Allison et al., 2009, p. 21). This omission introduces a potentially profound bias in the climate projections—not toward overestimation of climate change, but toward its underestimation.
I’ve written about methane here, and will write more as we look into James Hansen’s work on climate sensitivity — how responsive our climate system is to destabilizing influences — and slower amplifying feedbacks like permafrost melt. Oreskes and her colleagues are right that, through 2009, the IPCC hasn’t included the feedback from melting methane in their projections — partly because it’s hard to model and partly because the conclusionstend to be extreme (if you click, note McPherson’s comments).
Among their key findings were that global temperature increases over the past 25 years have been consistent with model predictions (0.19 °C per decade, virtually the same rate as for the 16 years mentioned in Rahmstorf et al., 2007), while other important impacts are proceeding faster than expected, including CO2 emissions, increased rainfall in already rainy areas, continental ice-sheet melting, arctic sea-ice decline, and sea level rise.
The paper goes on to elaborate those findings, and then offers quite a number of other examples similar to those above — predictions of hurricane intensity and frequency, ozone depletion, ice sheet destruction, predictions of permafrost melt, and so on.
About the latter (permafrost and its melting methane), the paper observes:
The total carbon contained in permafrost [in the form of frozen methane] has been estimated at 1672 gigatons, more than twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere(Tarnocai et al., 2009). This means that the potential amplifying effect of greenhouse gas release from permafrost melting is enormous. Yet this feedback ‘‘has not been accounted for in any of the IPCC projections’’ (Allison et al., 2009, p. 21). This omission introduces a potentially profound bias in the climate projections—not toward overestimation of climate change, but toward its underestimation.
I’ve written about methane here, and will write more as we look into James Hansen’s work on climate sensitivity — how responsive our climate system is to destabilizing influences — and slower amplifying feedbacks like permafrost melt. Oreskes and her colleagues are right that, through 2009, the IPCC hasn’t included the feedback from melting methane in their projections — partly because it’s hard to model and partly because the conclusionstend to be extreme (if you click, note McPherson’s comments).
Climate sensitivity and “extreme” results
As an example of those “extreme” results, consider this, from something I’m working on now. In general, “climate sensitivity” is an attempt to quantify how much earth’s climate system reacts to stimulus. Do quantified changes in stimulus (more CO2, for example, or increased radiation by the sun) produce large temperature changes, or smaller ones?
The standard measure of “climate sensitivity,” one which includes only fast and easily modeled feedbacks — water vapor, clouds, volcanic dust and so on — says that if you would instantly double atmospheric CO2 in ppm (parts per million) — a known amount of “forcing” — global temperature would increase +3°C before it restabilizes. In other words, by this measure, “climate sensitivity” is “3°C”. That number for sensitivity is widely used; you see it in Michael Mann’s recent work, for instance (the link is to my write-up).
NASA’s James Hansen, however, has convincingly shown that the sensitivity number is low by half if you also include slow feedbacks like loss of reflective sea ice and, yes, melted Arctic methane. To make that real — if Hansen is right and we succeed in doubling atmospheric CO2 from the stable pre-industrial level of 280 ppm to 560 ppm, and then stop, we’ll have handed ourselves +6°C global warming, guaranteed, after restabilization. +6°C, a world before any glaciers formed, more than 50 million years ago.
We’re at roughly 400 ppm now, and emissions are accelerating. How long before we get to 560 ppm? If we keep going like this, it happens this century. “Extreme” results.
Causes of “conservative bias” in climate pronouncements
Oreskes nicely explains in the video most of the causes of “erring on the side of least drama.” One cause she doesn’t emphasize above — but does treat in the paper — is the constant hammering scientists are subjected to, especially in the U.S., by the well-funded denialist machine (my phrasing).
Oreskes (again, my emphasis and paragraphing):
Given the challenging political environment in which climate scientists operate, and the fact that climate scientists have been repeatedly accused of fear-mongering and alarmism, we might conclude that scientific reticence with respect to global warming is a consequence of the charged political context in which climate scientists operate.
Freudenberg and Muselli (2010) have suggested that the asymmetry of political pressure, particularly in the United States, has contributed to a conservative bias in IPCC assessments. These authors emphasize that most analyses of scientific communication focus on the flow (and impact) of information from scientists to the larger public, paying far less attention to the reverse flow—in this case, the strongly stated criticism of scientists by contrarians and skeptics, widely repeated in the North American press, and then spread more widely on the internet.
They suggest that this reverse flow [of information back to climate scientists] has contributed to a bias in which scientists not only bend over backward to ensure that their results are absolutely warranted by the evidence, but actually take positions that are more conservative than warranted by the evidence to disprove contrarian accusations of scientific ‘‘alarmism.’’
I’ll leave you to check out the rest of this fine work. I found the paper fascinating. Again, it’s data-driven and peer-reviewed. This is not just someone making an “eyeball” estimate.
Oreskes, by the way, knows about denialism. Her recent book, Merchants of Doubt, How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming, discusses in very accessible terms the intersection between scientists siding with the tobacco industry and scientists siding with the Koch Bros. For an excellent intro to this book, listen to this interview with Naomi Oreskes on Virtually Speaking Science. I found it riveting, a must-listen.
And I’ll say this about the billionaires — the David Kochs and other deep-pocket funders of our collective lemming-walk to the cliff — they’re definitely getting their money’s worth. Those denial dollars have bought a lot of time. It’s down to just a few more years as I see it. Time to make a strong move for our side.
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