Democrats - Global Warming be Damned!

Cause of global warming hiatus found deep in the Atlantic Ocean

(Top) Global average surface temperatures, where black dots are yearly averages. Two flat periods (hiatus) are separated by rapid warming from 1976-1999. (Middle) Observations of heat content, compared to the average, in the north Atlantic Ocean. (Bottom) Salinity of the seawater in the same part of the Atlantic. Higher salinity is seen to coincide with more ocean heat storage. Credit: K. Tung / Univ. of Washington

Cause of global warming hiatus found deep in the Atlantic Ocean

August 21st, 2014

Following rapid warming in the late 20th century, this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth's surface. At first this was a blip, then a trend, then a puzzle for the climate science community.

More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots. New research from the University of Washington shows that the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle. The study is published Aug. 22 in Science.

Subsurface warming in the ocean explains why global average air temperatures have flatlined since 1999, despite greenhouse gases trapping more solar heat at the Earth's surface.

"Every week there's a new explanation of the hiatus," said corresponding author Ka-Kit Tung, a UW professor of applied mathematics and adjunct faculty member in atmospheric sciences. "Many of the earlier papers had necessarily focused on symptoms at the surface of the Earth, where we see many different and related phenomena. We looked at observations in the ocean to try to find the underlying cause."

The results show that a slow-moving current in the Atlantic, which carries heat between the two poles, sped up earlier this century to draw heat down almost a mile (1,500 meters). Most of the previous studies focused on shorter-term variability or particles that could block incoming sunlight, but they could not explain the massive amount of heat missing for more than a decade.

"The finding is a surprise, since the current theories had pointed to the Pacific Ocean as the culprit for hiding heat," Tung said. "But the data are quite convincing and they show otherwise."

Tung and co-author Xianyao Chen of the Ocean University of China, who was a UW visiting professor last year, used recent observations of deep-sea temperatures from Argo floats that sample the water down to 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) depth. The data show an increase in heat sinking around 1999, when the rapid warming of the 20th century stopped.

"There are recurrent cycles that are salinity-driven that can store heat deep in the Atlantic and Southern oceans," Tung said. "After 30 years of rapid warming in the warm phase, now it's time for the cool phase."

Rapid warming in the last three decades of the 20th century, they found, was roughly half due to global warming and half to the natural Atlantic Ocean cycle that kept more heat near the surface. When observations show the ocean cycle flipped, around the year 2000, the current began to draw heat deeper into the ocean, working to counteract human-driven warming.

The cycle starts when saltier, denser water at the surface northern part of the Atlantic, near Iceland, causes the water to sink. This changes the speed of the huge current in the Atlantic Ocean that circulates heat throughout the planet.

"When it's heavy water on top of light water, it just plunges very fast and takes heat with it," Tung said. Recent observations at the surface in the North Atlantic show record-high saltiness, Tung said, while at the same time, deeper water in the North Atlantic shows increasing amounts of heat.

The authors dug up historical data to show that the cooling in the three decades between 1945 to 1975 – which caused people to worry about the start of an Ice Age – was during a cooling phase. (It was thought to be caused by air pollution.) Earlier records in Central England show the 40- to 70-year cycle goes back centuries, and other records show it has existed for millennia.

Changes in Atlantic Ocean circulation historically meant roughly 30 warmer years followed by 30 cooler years. Now that it is happening on top of global warming, however, the trend looks more like a staircase.

The temperature oscillations have a natural switch. During the warm period, faster currents cause more tropical water to travel to the North Atlantic, warming both the surface and the deep water. At the surface this warming melts ice. This eventually makes the surface water there less dense and after a few decades puts the brakes on the circulation, setting off a 30-year cooling phase.

This explanation implies that the current slowdown in global warming could last for another decade, or longer, and then rapid warming will return. But Tung emphasizes it's hard to predict what will happen next.

A pool of freshwater from melting ice, now sitting in the Arctic Ocean, could overflow into the North Atlantic to upset the cycle.

"We are not talking about a normal situation because there are so many other things happening due to climate change," Tung said.

More information: "Varying planetary heat sink led to global-warming slowdown and acceleration," by X. Chen et al. Science, www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/… 1126/science.1254937


Provided by University of Washington



"Cause of global warming hiatus found deep in the Atlantic Ocean." August 21st, 2014. http://phys.org/news/2014-08-global-hiatus-deep-atlantic-ocean.html

Graphic: Summit Takeaway

Dr. James Hansen

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

Obama Climate Rules Not Enough to Fight Global Warming

Obama Climate Rules Not Enough to Fight Global Warming
Climate change experts want more certain actions than are called for in the new proposed rule to cut carbon dioxide from power plants. Climate change is a global problem, and addressing it would require concerted action by all nations. Yet the EPA regulations are a step in the right direction. 

Gayathri Vaidyanathan, Jun 3, 2014 ClimateWire

If the measure of President Obama's proposed power plant regulations is their impact on climate change, they would be doomed to failure, according to climate scientists.

Under the U.S. EPA proposal, carbon emissions from the power generation sector would fall by 30 percent below 2005 levels. The reductions would be split among the states, with each state assigned a distinct target by EPA. The power sector contributes 40 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions of the United States, and coal-fired power plants are the sector's biggest emitters.

EPA's proposal is remarkable given the relative paralysis on climate action in Washington, but it would not budge the world's ever-rising emissions trajectory. That's because climate change is a global problem, and addressing it would require concerted action by all nations, heavy investments in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and near-zero emissions before 2050.

The new EPA rules as currently structured do not promote CCS and will likely shift the nation toward reliance on natural gas, which is also a greenhouse gas emitter, for power generation, cautioned Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics Group at the University of Oxford.

The reason for climate scientists' pessimism is this: Carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere for centuries, so today's emissions would trap heat at the Earth's surface well into the future. And at the rate we are emitting, the world would exceed the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature change limit for 2100 that nations aspire to, according to climate models in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) fifth assessment report.

Curbing emissions from just coal-powered electricity, and in just one country, would not change that reality, said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.

"Marginal cuts by the U.S. don't have a long-term overall big effect on the climate," he said. "What has to happen to have a big effect on the global climate is for all the big emitters to get together and decide that they are all going to cut some substantial fraction [of emissions]."

He said that global action, especially from developing nations such as China and India, could be more likely now that the U.S. has indicated its commitment to the problem. But observers of international treaty negotiations remain pessimistic about that prospect (ClimateWire, June 2).

A switch to natural gas won't do
Kenneth Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, said EPA's actions have to be the first step, and the agency needs to take similar steps every two years or so. And on top of that, the rest of the world needs to follow the United States' lead.

"But if this is the effort, and that is the end of it, then it's nowhere near the scale of what needs to be done," Caldeira said.

However, EPA's power plant regulations are likely the last major step toward achieving emissions reductions by 2020.

EPA is expecting some states to cut emissions by switching to natural gas for electricity generation, according to senior agency officials on a media briefing. Natural gas combined-cycle power plants are already heavily favored by utilities to the near exclusion of coal, said Joost de Gouw, an atmospheric scientist with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. On a per-megawatt basis, these plants emit just 40 percent of the emissions as coal-fired power plants.

But switching to natural gas for power generation does not solve the climate problem, scientists cautioned. Climate models in the IPCC's latest report indicate that to keep within the 2 C target by 2100, the world would have to emit close to zero, or even negative, quantities of greenhouse gases by 2050.

CCS, in which power plants trap carbon from flue gases and bury it underground, would be the only way to bring emissions to zero, Allen of Oxford said. The EPA proposal does not require CCS for either coal- or natural-gas-fired power plants.

Carbon capture is required
To ensure CCS development by 2050, EPA needs to regulate emissions from all fossil fuels—not just coal—today, Allen said. And immediate action is needed on CCS because any new power plants built now would still be operational in 2050. The energy system of the future would have to be implemented today.

"You would get exactly the same impact and guarantee a climate win, if instead of just targeting coal, the EPA would require a fraction of the carbon content of all forms of fossil energy should be sequestered," he said. "If they did that, job done."

Another potential problem with relying too much on natural gas is that the fuel is primarily made up of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Studies have suggested that leaks of methane during production from oil and gas wells are so high that the fuel may be no better for the climate than coal. Research into the problem is ongoing.

The EPA-proposed rules apply to existing coal-fired power plants and would be implemented by executive order rather than as law. That means the rule could be changed by successive administrations, which creates regulatory uncertainty.

The rules may even be altered to allow coal back into the energy mix if the U.S. is faced with scarce resources, Allen said.

A step in the right direction?
"If the impact of these cuts is to mean the U.S. burns gas faster, and then goes back to burning its coal reserves in 2030, arguably it will make the problem worse," he said.

Richard Tol, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex, said the less permanent nature of executive orders can discourage investments in power plants, which are long-lasting infrastructure. He pointed to the United Kingdom, where long-term investments in power generation have stalled because climate and energy policy keeps changing "week to week."

"If you have a good reason to believe the rules of the game will change, then you are better off waiting and not investing," he said. "The next president may not agree with whatever Obama has done, and it creates an uncertainty that is very, very detrimental to investors."

Tol, at the same time, praised the EPA regulations as a step in the right direction. Given the humongous scope of the problem, action can seem beside the point, but "that creates a sense of defeatism right?" he said.

"If nobody does anything, then the problem will not go away," he said. "Every little bit will help."

Obama’s climate change regulations are less ambitious than what Republicans were proposing in 2008

Obama’s climate change regulations are less ambitious than what Republicans were proposing in 2008
Ezra Klein, June 2, 2014 vox.com

In May 2008, Sen. John McCain traveled to Portland, Oregon, and delivered a speech that no Republican presidential candidate would consider giving today.

It doesn't matter "whether we call it 'climate change' or 'global warming,'" McCain warned. "Among environmental dangers it is surely the most serious of all." McCain went on to propose a cap-and-trade plan far more aggressive than the power-plant rules the Obama administration is announcing today.

McCain's plan would have limited emissions not just from power plants, but also from transportation, manufacturing, and commercial businesses. It sought to bring total US emissions 66 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. It wasn't quite as ambitious as the cap-and-trade plan Obama proposed (here's a good comparison, if you're interested), but it was a real effort to deal with an urgent problem.

Three months later, Sarah Palin accepted McCain's invitation to join the ticket — which meant running on is cap-and-trade plan. Then, at the September convention, the Republican Party officially endorsed the McCain/Palin ticket, which still included a cap-and-trade plan. When Gwen Ifill asked Sarah Palin whether she supported capping carbon emissions, Palin's answer left no room for confusion: "I do," she replied.

This wasn't a huge surprise. Not every national Republican was worried about climate change in those days. But in the mid-Aughts, it was perfectly acceptable to be a national Republican who worried about climate change. You could even sit on a couch with Nancy Pelosi and fret about global warming on TV:

President George W. Bush was worried about climate change, too. As Peter Baker records in his book Days of Fire:

[Bush] found the science increasingly persuasive and believed more needed to be done. The end of his presidency loomed, and he did not want to be known as the president who stood by while a crisis gathered. Now he bristled not at the Hollywood types but at the notion that he did not care. In thepast eighteen months, he had cited the danger of climate change in his State of the Union address for the first time, convened a conference of major world polluters to start working on an international accord to follow Kyoto, and signed legislation cutting gasoline consumption and, by extension, greenhouse gases. He even invited his old rival Al Gore for a forty-minute talk about global warming.

In 2008, it still looked plausible that with American leadership, the world could limit the rise in temperatures to about two degrees Celsius. Today, that goal looks laughable. We're on track to see temperatures rise by about four degrees Celsius. It's worth quoting my colleague Brad Plumer at length on what that might mean:

Four degrees (or 7.2° Fahrenheit) may not sound like much. But the world was only about 4°C to 7°C cooler, on average, during the last ice age, when large parts of Europe and the United States were covered by glaciers. The IPCC concluded that changing the world's temperature in the opposite direction could bring similarly drastic changes, such as "substantial species extinctions," or irreversibly destabilizing Greenland's massive ice sheet.

In 2013, researchers with the World Bank took a look at the science on projected effects of 4°C warming and were appalled by what they found...Most climate models currently make predictions in a linear fashion. That is, they basically assume that the impacts of 4°C of warming will be twice as bad as those of 2°C. But that might be wrong. Impacts may interact with each other in unpredictable ways. Current agriculture models, they noted, don't have a good sense for what will happen to crops if heat waves, droughts, new pests and diseases all combine together.

Here's an analogy that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who helped compile some of the research for the World Bank, likes to use. "Take the human body. If your temperature rises 2°C, you have a significant fever. If it rises 4°C or 6°C you can die. It's not a linear change. You're pushing a complex system outside the range it's adapted to. And all our assessments indicate that once you do that, the system's resilience gets stretched thin."

Perhaps most significantly, the World Bank report wasn't even sure if humanity could adapt to a 4°C world. At the moment, the large lender is helping poorer countries prepare for global warming by building seawalls, conducting crop research, and improving freshwater management. But, as an internal review found, most of these efforts are being done with relatively small temperature increases in mind. The bank wasn't planning for 3°C or 4°C of global warming - because no one really knew what that might entail.

"[G]iven that uncertainty remains about the full nature and scale of impacts," the report said, "there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible." And its conclusion was stark: "The projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur."

The power plant regulations the Obama administration will announce today are far less ambitious than the proposal McCain offered in Oregon in 2008. They're less ambitious than the proposals Newt Gingrich championed through the Aughts. They're far less than what's required to keep the rise in temperatures to two degrees Celsius.

But they're probably at the outer limit of what can be done so long as the Republican Party refuses to even believe in climate change, much less work with the Obama administration on a bill. The good news, if there is any, is that the Republican Party hasn't always refused to believe in climate change. There was even a time when its key national leaders were committed to doing something about it. Those leaders are still around today. They could still do something about it today.

"We have many advantages in the fight against global warming, but time is not one of them," McCain said in 2008. "Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge."

We're about to find out.

The $4 Trillion Mistake: Climate Action Delayed Is Climate Action Denied

CREDIT: IEA

The $4 Trillion Mistake: Climate Action Delayed Is Climate Action Denied
JOE ROMM, MAY 14, 2014  thinkprogress.org

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has issued another major report warning that we are headed for a beyond-catastrophic 11°F warming (6°C). The IEA report, “Energy Technology Perspectives” (ETP 2014), explains that delaying climate action has cost the world trillions of dollars in just the past two years

The good news is that the new report “confirms that global population and economic growth can be decoupled from energy demand.”

The IEA says that an aggressive effort to deploy renewable energy and energy efficiency (and energy storage) to keep global warming below the dangerous threshold of 2°C — their 2DS scenario — would require investment in clean energy of only about 1% of global GDP per year. But it would still be astoundingly cost-effective:

The $44 trillion additional investment needed to decarbonise the energy system in line with the 2DS by 2050 is more than offset by over $115 trillion in fuel savings – resulting in net savings of $71 trillion.

This is in line with the latest finding by the world’s scientists and governments that stabilizing at 2°C would have a net effect on growth of 0.06% per year — essentially no effect at all compared to the staggering amount of climate damages avoided.

While serious progress would be low-cost, the new report explains that “the overall picture of progress remains bleak.” That’s why the new $44 trillion estimate for stabilizing below 2°C replaces a $36 trillion estimate in ETP 2012:

Some of the increase is due to accounting changes, but the calculations show that the cost of decarbonising the energy system – in real terms – is about 10% higher than it was two years ago. In part, this illustrates something the IEA has been saying for some time: the longer we wait, the more expensive it becomes to transform our energy system.

So the most recent two-year delay has added nearly $4 trillion to the cost of averting climate catastrophe. And the report makes crystal clear that is where we are headed, by analyzing three possible energy futures to 2050:
6°C Scenario (6DS), where the world is now heading with potentially devastating results
4°C Scenario (4DS) reflects stated intentions by countries to cut emissions and boost energy efficiency
2°C Scenario (2DS) offers a vision of a sustainable energy system of reduced greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

In 2011, IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said of 6°C warming — by 2100 — “even school children know this will have catastrophic implications for all of us.” Of course he meant school children in other countries where they are taught the basic science.

It bears repeating that warming beyond 7°F (4°C) is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e. 4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level,” as climate expert Kevin Anderson explains here. The latest research makes clear that such warming would make it exceedingly difficult if not impossible to feed 9 billion people post-2050 — and would likely force us to ultimately abandon major coastal cities around the world.

If you want to know what bleak progress looks like, the IEA has the chart for you (where “carbon intensity” is a measure of carbon pollution produced per unit of energy supply delivered):


The IEA explains “emissions per unit of electricity must be drastically decreased to meet 2DS targets … a reduction of more than 90%” by 2050. What does this mean for that ever popular bridge fuel:

After 2025 in the 2DS, emissions from gas-fired plants are higher than the average carbon intensity of the global electricity mix; natural gas loses its status as a low-carbon fuel.

Again, what precisely is the value of spending tens of billions of dollars on new long-lived natural gas infrastructure and power plants if we need to start getting off of natural gas in about a decade? Worse, the IEA doesn’t even look at the climate impact from the high levels of methane emissions we’re seeing in the natural gas production and distribution system, which renders gas-fired plants actually worse than coal-fired plants from a climate perspective over a multi-decade period.

The IEA was once a staid and conservative organization that the opinion-makers ignored because it was staid and conservative. Now opinion-makers ignore the IEA because it has become a blunt truth teller on climate.

That’s why the right-wing tactic of saying it’s too expensive to cut carbon pollution is so destructive. Every year that argument wins, the cost of action goes up.

Climate action delayed is climate action denied.

Time to Get Real on Climate Change

Time to Get Real on Climate Change 
Published on Saturday, May 10, 2014 by BillMoyers.com

A geneticist who has made science exciting to millions of TV viewers warns that we’re burning up the planet, but there’s still a chance we can make it.

This week, as the White House issued a landmark report detailing the frightening affects of global warming on our country and President Obama took to the airwaves to drive home that message, Bill Moyers talks with a scientist who has sounded the alarm for decades.

For nearly 35 years, David Suzuki has brought science into the homes of millions on the Canadian television series, The Nature of Things. He has become a godfather of the environmental movement, and in a poll of his fellow Canadians last fall he was named that country’s most admired figure. Nonetheless, his outspoken views on climate change and the government’s collusion with the petrochemical industry in developing Canada’s oil-rich tar sands have made him the target of relentless attacks from his nation’s prime minister, corporations and right-wing ideologues.

“Our politicians should be thrown in the slammer for willful blindness. …I think that we are being willfully blind to the consequences for our children and grandchildren. It’s an intergenerational crime,” Suzuki tells Moyers.

Is Rupert Murdoch Destroying the World?

Is Rupert Murdoch Destroying the World?
Michael Tobis, May 9, 2014

People like to blame the Koch Brothers, and they are important within the US, but a recent article by George Monbiot points out how English-speaking countries lag the rest of the world in understanding the crucial physics, chemistry and biology that directly impact the future in coming centuries, or to put it more neutrally, are at odds with the rest of the world in their perspective.

Monbiot’s attribution is that “The richer we are and the more we consume, the more self-centred and careless of the lives of others we appear to become”, but I propose the alternative hypothesis that the Murdoch empire’s strategies have been effective in promoting a shallow and shabby self-centeredness in the countries that they directly affect.

National Climate Assessment Report: Who Cares?

National Climate Assessment Report: Who Cares?
THOMAS SCHUENEMAN, MAY 9TH, 2014

Earlier this week the White House released the latest National Climate Assessment Report, causing the rare flurry of attention in the mainstream press. The report summarized what anyone paying attention already knows; that climate change is happening now and impacting all parts of the country (and world), and those impacts can only get worse in a “business-as-usual” future.

As the introduction to the Report states: “Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present.

Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington State, and maple syrup producers in Vermont are all observing climate-related changes that are outside of recent experience. So, too, are coastal planners in Florida, water managers in the arid Southwest, city dwellers from Phoenix to New York, and Native Peoples on tribal lands from Louisiana to Alaska. This National Climate Assessment concludes that the evidence of human-induced climate change continues to strengthen and that impacts are increasing across the country.

Evidence for changes in Earth’s climate can be found from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans. Researchers from around the world have compiled this evidence using satellites, weather balloons, thermometers at surface stations, and many other types of observing systems that monitor the Earth’s weather and climate. The sum total of this evidence tells an unambiguous story: the planet is warming.”

Nonetheless, few Americans seem to care. For stalwart conservatives it is little more than something to latch onto in order to denigrate Obama, liberal elites and the scientists “getting rich” from climate research. In other words the same tired old hash of distraction, misinformation and sheer willful blindness to the gathering reality that surrounds us.

We hear Charles Krauthammer smugly suggest that climate change is nothing more than a superstition, “like a Native American Rain Dance,” or Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell snark that he is sure Obama will “get loud cheers from liberal elites – from the kind of people who leave a giant carbon footprint and then lecture everybody else about low-flow toilets.”

Apparently McConnell has an issue with low-flow toilets. But nobody is dancing, no one is cheering. Not even those whom McConnell characterizes as “liberal elites.”
Everyone run to their corners

I am little surprised of the reaction. Climate change has long been a favored political and idealogical football used to engender doubt, distrust, ignorance and apathy about the warnings of what human development is doing to the planet. Sure, it’s uncomfortable to hear, especially for those of us enjoying the comfort of that development – liberal and conservative elites alike.

Climate scientists have had their lives, livelihoods and families threatened simply for reporting what they observe. But this is something that can’t be threatened, smugged or snarked away. Global warming is real.

One of the most disastrous consequences of the vehement dismissal of even considering solutions is that climate change is not an isolated issue – off by itself for someone else to deal with, if they be foolish enough, in the distant future, while real men deal with real issues like digging another well, draining another wetland, cutting down another forest. It effects every aspect of our lives – from infrastructure to human health, energy, agriculture and, yes, the economy.

To think that human endeavor is somehow external to the natural world, that our growing numbers and soaring rates of consumption have no impact on the viability and health of the ecosystems that sustain all of it is folly. Folly that will bring down all that the McConnells and Krauthhammers in this world claim to champion. They are fools.

What is superstition is thinking we can continue on this road with no consequence.

Who cares?

Graphic: What's our excuse?

Climate Change: The 40 Year Delay Between Cause and Effect

Climate Change: The 40 Year Delay Between Cause and Effect (via Skeptical Science)

Posted on 22 September 2010 by alan_marshall Guest post by Alan Marshall from climatechangeanswers.org Following the failure to reach a strong agreement at the Copenhagen conference, climate skeptics have had a good run in the Australian media, continuing…

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Peter Sinclair interviewing Maureen Raymo

Peter Sinclair interviewing Maureen Raymo
Published on Apr 8, 2014
The climate community traditionally underestimates the rate of change in the climate system, Columbia University scientist Maureen Raymo cautions, raising questions about where things will stand once everything "comes into equilibrium" with the Pleistocene era atmosphere we're now experiencing.

Graphic: Scientists Irrelevant to Society?

Interpreting the Climate Impasse

Interpreting the Climate Impasse: A View from Indo–America
by Subhankar Banerjee, 26 February 2014 Climate Storytellers.org

The two countries I know best are India and the US. I spent the first 22 years of my life in the former, and the following 24 in the latter, where I continue to live. Recently I returned home, after spending three months in India. The combination of what I saw there in plain view, and what I see here in America, may shed some light on—why we have arrived at the climate impasse.

Soon I’ll get to—what is climate impasse, but first, here is what got me motivated to write this piece, before even I could recover from the jet lag.

As soon as I sat down in the shuttle van outside the Seattle airport, the discussion with fellow passengers turned to the severe snowstorm in the East Coast that killed at least 18 people. That day, all of us had contributed to global warming, in varying amount, through the burning of jet fuel, and then gasoline. It was February 13.

Scientists were quick to point out that the rapid warming of the Arctic will continue to cause longer and harsher winter over North America and northern Europe. The Arctic is warming at a rate of two to three times more than the rest of the planet. This has reduced the temperature differential between the cold Arctic air and the warm air from the south, causing the Arctic jet stream to weaken, and “meander, like a river heading off course.”

That the Arctic is warming rapidly is not news anymore, nor is the melting of the Arctic sea ice, or Greenland ice sheets, or even the subsea methane release from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

But have you heard about—Fires in February, in the far North?

Alaska gets few hours of sunlight during February—a bit more in the south, a bit less in the north; temperatures stay well below zero. During those cold, dark, long, winter nights, Alaskans are used to seeing, not dancing flames of forest fires, but instead, dancing curtains of—green, yellow, pink, red—aurora borealis. On 5 November 2001, I was lucky to photograph an extremely rare display of red aurora over the Brooks Range Mountains and the Hulahula River valley, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (here). The display was so intense that it was visible as far south as Alabama, Georgia and California. On seeing red in the sky people of the south had thought it was a terrorist attack and called the police department. In the Hulahula River valley, it was minus 50 degrees F; I got frostbite on my nose and three fingers.



Fran Mauer had worked as a biologist with the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge office in Fairbanks, Alaska, for 23 years, until he retired in 2002. Over the past 14 years, for all things Arctic, I’ve reached out to him for advice. “There continues to be significant weather events that are out of the ‘normal.’ During January, Alaska experienced very warm temperatures and some all time records were broken,” Fran wrote to me in an email on February 11. “Last week, the weather service had extreme fire warnings out for the Kenai lowlands and Anchorage area. The warm temperatures have melted the snow and dried the grasses and shrubs, creating extreme fire danger, as winds up to 80 mph were forecast. We are not used to having a fire season in February!” The exclamation mark in the end is Fran’s, not mine.

Moreover, with a map (here), NASA’s Earth Observatory has shown vividly how winter heat has swamped Alaska, from the Aleutian in the southeast, to the North Slope of the Arctic. “While much of the continental United States endured several cold snaps in January 2014, record–breaking warmth gripped Alaska. Spring–like conditions set rivers rising and avalanches tumbling,” NASA reports.

The winter heat in Alaska and the snowstorm in northeastern America—are likely linked through the Arctic warming. Additionally, these, and other recent extreme weather events, from around the globe, including drought in California and floods in the UK, should be understood and discussed within the context of a globally warmed Earth, in which extreme weather events aren’t exceptions, it’s the norm. Sequence of extreme weather events across geographies also happened in 2013, and in 2012, in 2011.

What is new this year, however, is the realization that we have arrived at a climate impasse. The US government hasn’t done anything meaningful to address the climate crisis, despite lofty rhetoric from Obama. On the contrary, the government has done, what it can, to foil the international efforts to address the crisis. Recently leaked documents by Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA had spied on the delegates of other countries during the 2009 UN Climate Conference COP15 in Copenhagen. Moreover, last year Chris Williams made an assertion that “it was, after all, he [Obama], who was the lead protagonist in wrecking the international climate talks in Copenhagen.” But why did the US wreck the Copenhagen climate talks? This will become clear a bit later. Additionally, the dismal failure of the subsequent UN climate negotiations has made abundantly clear that most nation states are not interested in solving the climate crisis, either. I’ll call this collective global inaction—climate impasse.

The burning of—first coal, then oil and gas—since the beginning of industrialization in the mid 18th century, has brought us to the anthropogenic climate crisis that we now find ourselves in. We know this already.

What I’m urging us to consider now, is why we have arrived, not at the crisis, but at the impasse. There are three agents—the governments, the corporations, and the human animal—all are implicated, and interlinked in intricate ways, in the drama of this impasse.

The climate impasse is rooted, not simply in our dependence on a fossil fuel economy, but more broadly, in our love affair with mass consumption, made possible by global capitalism, and in our faith in Progress—that science and technology will forever improve the conditions of human life.

In this piece, I’ll discuss mass consumption—with a view from India. I must admit though, that what I’m sharing with you here is not an in–depth social science analysis of mass consumption in contemporary India, but instead, what I saw during my three–months long sojourn there; a kind of breezy travelogue you might say.

India’s road to—roads everywhere!

During my stay in India I had a chance to visit a few places—to see birds and animals, coffee and tea plantations, attend wedding receptions. Northeast, southeast, southwest, everywhere I went, I saw brand new roads, completed or being built. In Maharashtra, I saw dividers on four lane highways that were lined with plants, packed with magnificent flowers. Line of bullock carts carrying sugarcane on the highway, however, reminded me that I was indeed in India.

New roads everywhere—is the face of economic development in India, I was reminded, again and again. “What’s an XUV,” I inquired. “Don’t you know? It’s bigger than SUV,” I was told. Fair enough. With great excitement a young person told me that before the end of this decade, India will become the third largest auto—producer or consumer, he wasn’t sure which—in the world.

Where will India get the oil to fuel all these cars, the LUVs, SUVs, XUVs? It seems, among other places, from the US.

“The United States is projected to become the largest global oil producer” by around 2020, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2012; and with the shale production in the US and tar sands in Canada, “North America becomes a net oil exporter around 2030.” The US wants to sell oil to the rest of the world, not keep it in the ground and solve the climate crisis. This is as good a reason as I can give for why the US wrecked the Copenhagen climate talks.

“[B]ilateral cooperation in energy has acquired an expanded significance on account of America’s shale gas production and US liquefied natural gas exports,” K. P. Nayar wrote in The Telegraph in India. The US energy secretary Ernest Moniz, a champion of fracking, was to visit India in January for the Indo–US Energy Dialogue. The meeting was nixed, however. As part of a larger retaliatory measure against the US’ humiliating treatment (that included a strip search) of the Indian Diplomat Devyani Khobragade, New Delhi called off the meeting. The Indo–US Energy Dialogue is now set to resume on March 10.

The Argumentative Indian is an important book by Nobel–laureate economist–philosopher Amartya Sen. “I wish we in India will recognize our strength which comes from the argumentative nature of our country,” Sen said in his keynote speech at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January. Fearing I might loose my fair share of maach andmisti, however, I didn’t become too argumentative with my family members and friends, about materials consumption, global warming, resource wars. During those three months, I didn’t find any Argumentative Indian debating these issues in the national press, either.

Unlike the US, in India, the circulation of newspapers—national English–language daily papers, and dozens of regional papers published in numerous local languages—is enormous. Lot of people from across the economic strata get (buy or borrow) newspapers, read some of it, and then argue.

“Why is there such a silence about pressing environmental issues, including materials consumption and global warming in the Indian newspapers?” I asked a New Delhi–based environmental journalist friend. “Mainstream Indian newspapers report on three things: cricket, politics, and sleaze,” he told me as a matter of fact. There is a fourth element that he could have added. It’s not reporting though, but it gets the greatest prominence—offerings from the Merchants of Desire. The big newspapers, for most days, open not with the front–page filled with news items, but with a full–page ad about—cars and flats that you can buy. And it’s not just the front–page, but like a book cover, where the front, the back, and insides of both, are also full–page ads about—cars and flats that you can buy. Sometimes you get two such covers, glued to the main newspaper.

Let’s dig a little deeper into—India’s road—to roads everywhere! Why are these roads being built and what would their eventual purpose be?

These roads are being built as part of Indian’s larger project of economic development. India needs economic development—to pull the masses (hundreds of millions) out of abject poverty, to provide basic education to every children, to provide basic preventive medical care to every citizen, to provide equality among men and women, to feed every undernourished children (“not to mention the most undernourished in the world”), to provide toilet to every house so that half the population won’t “have to defecate in the open.” Such is the egalitarian vision of economic development that Amartya Sen, who has great empathy for the world’s poor and the dispossessed, has been advocating for decades. Furthermore, he sees development as a means to increase “freedom,” as the title of his immensely influential book, Development As Freedom, suggests.

With my naïve eyes what I saw in India, however, doesn’t seem to match Sen’s vision. Let me discuss by asking the question: Who are the likely beneficiaries of India’s ‘roads everywhere’?

One justification for building roads everywhere goes like this: A better distribution network would enable better distribution of foods to the masses, across the country. There is some validity to this argument. Take for example, the devastating cyclone Phailin last year, destroyed $4 billion worth of crops in the states of Orissa and Andhra Pradesh. During extreme weather events, and have no doubt that there will be plenty of those to come—a better distribution network can indeed help in bringing much–needed food from elsewhere, for those in dire needs. But let’s now turn the coin and look at the other side.

When I was growing up in India, we would get all our food, at the local market. Almost everything came from the local farmers and fisherfolks, from within a small radius—2 km, 10 km, 50 km, maybe even 100 km, at most. Such daily, fresh foods, isn’t enough though, if you desire for—Kellog’s Müeslix with Silk Kesar Pista Soymilk, for breakfast. The Merchants of Desires are busy creating a whole host of desires in India. But who would deny the devastating social and economic consequences for the small–scale farmers and fisherfolks, and ecological consequences of materials consumption (plastic, aluminum, for packaging) and contribution to global warming (large trucks spewing carbon in the air, massive air conditioning to keep foods edible)—caused by the juggernaut of transport–of–industrial–foods–by–road? Indeed, one of the biggest beneficiaries of India’s ‘roads everywhere’ is—the industrial Big Ag—both multinational and Indian corporations.

In contemporary India, there is a chicken–and–egg dilemma. Which one arrived first: the new Road or the newMall? It seems to me, defying biology, both arrived at once, and growing together symbiotically. I saw people talk about “going to the mall”, with as much enthusiasm and (almost) reverence, as previous generations used to talk about when going to a temple. Malls are popping up in the Indian urban jungle with as much rapidity as fracking rigs in the American rural landscape. These malls have to be filled with stuff; the stuff has to be brought in from far away places, by blowing a lot of carbon puff. We need roads, we need roads, everywhere—is not the cry of the loon, but the sweet music from the bamboo flutes of India’s consumerist boom. The phonetic sound of the word, mall—mol—in Bengali, literally means—poop, feces, shit. Inside a mall, corporations from far away and near, are selling—a lot of shit. It is debatable, in this context, who is the bigger beneficiary—of India’s ‘roads everywhere’—the citizen who is accumulating stuff, or the corporation who is selling it? But where do the hundreds of millions of India’s poor, fit into this discussion—of the mol?

I found it quite difficult to get a train ticket in India these days. The tickets often sell out months in advance. But when you can drive your own XUV, on newly built roads, why bother trying to get a ticket on a public train? And, with your XUV, you can go to places, where few Indians have gone before—the National Parks—to see–and–shoot (with a camera) the magnificent Indian megafauna: the Indian one–horned rhinoceros, the Asiatic elephant, the Bengal tiger. One of the highest pursuits of a wealthy society is—to engage in leisure, philosopher John Gray has suggested. So it is no surprise that India’s economic development has given rise to a significantly large ‘leisure class,’ who has no time to think about the ecological consequences of an XUV—the massive materials that go into making one, or its massive carbon emissions that contribute to global warming. Among the beneficiaries of India’s ‘roads everywhere’—are the ‘leisure class’ and the auto manufacturers. But where do the hundreds of millions of India’s poor, fit into this discussion—of leisure?

Where will India get the raw materials to fuel all aspects of ‘roads everywhere’? Inside India, mostly it is from the territories inhabited by the Adivasis (indigenous people of India). Unsurprisingly, there is resistance. Take for example, the Adivasis of the state of Chhattisgarh are extremely poor, but their land is extremely rich, both in terms of minerals and forests. The state government has been trying to take away their lands. Physician and human rights activist Dr. Binayak Sen, who should win the Nobel Peace Prize for his life–long work with India’s poor, as I have suggested before, instead, has spent years in prison on charges of sedition.

In 2005 the state of Chhattisgarh had set up a vigilante army called Salwa Judum to counter the Maoists and forcibly take away lands from the Adivasis. “In Chhattisgarh, the Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) has been in the forefront of exposing the atrocities of the police. … The PUCL has acted as a whistleblower in the matter of exposing the true nature of the Salwa Judum,” Binayak Sen, the vice–president of PUCL said in 2011, and continued that “an investigation led by the PUCL and involving several other Human Rights organizations revealed that it was in reality a state sponsored and state funded as well as completely unaccountable vigilante force, to which arms were provided by the government. The activities of the Salwa Judum have led to the emptying of more than 600 villages, and the forced displacement of over 60,000 people.”

In summary then, it seems to me that the biggest beneficiaries of India’s ‘roads everywhere’ are—Big Oil, Big Mineral, Big Auto, Big Ag, and the ‘leisure class’; but certainly not India’s poor, unless you consider the crumbs that they too will get from all these. The biggest looser, however, is life on Earth. The ecological impacts, including contribution to global warming, from all aspects of India’s ‘roads everywhere’ is incomprehensible.

I’d be called a Luddite (or much worse things in various Indian languages), if I now invoke Gandhi. Nevertheless, in 1928 Mahatma Gandhi wrote in Young India, an English–language weekly paper that he edited between 1918 and 1932 (when he was arrested and the paper folded): “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West. … If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.” India is making Gandhi’s nightmare come to reality. What is most disturbing, however, is that there is a complete silence in the Indian press about the ecological consequences of this massive materials consumption.

The Indo–US Energy Dialogue points to something new for America. During the last half of the 20th century, the US acquired much of its oil from around the globe through petro imperialism, which has caused deaths and devastations in far away lands that most Americans know little to nothing about. Now the table is turning; petro imperialism is returning home to America. India is attempting to acquire oil from the US. On the American soil, this will cause much suffering. As the US inches towards becoming the largest oil producer in the world, like mushrooms in a temperate forest, drilling and fracking rigs will pop up all over, on land and in the oceans, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic, from the western desert to the eastern forests, locking us into another one hundred years of fossil fuel digging in North America. The extremely uneven burden of this 21st century American petro imperialism will fall on the Native American, rural, and the underprivileged communities. There is resistance in the US also, from the Arctic to the Cove Point.

The 21st century petro imperialism in America has the potential to fuel in part the mass consumerism in India. As you can see the climate impasse—binds India and America.

How much should a person consume?

“But you drive a car, in the US, right?” a friend from New Delhi asked. “Yes, I do,” I said, and continued with some hesitation, “but I put only a few thousand miles on the car each year; bicycle is my primary mode of transportation.” I wasn’t convinced with what I said, and began to wonder: Am I a hypocrite? On the grayscale of hypocrisy I certainly have my place secured, but let’s take this discussion a bit further.

A nonhuman animal consumes what is immediately available to it—for survival. At times, though, but very rarely, it consumes more than its need. Sometimes a wolf may kill a few more caribou than it eats, for example. I have seen it in the Arctic. We humans also consume what is immediately available to us (a car that runs on gasoline)—for survival. We, however, differ from the nonhuman animal, in our appetite for consuming much more than what we need, and more importantly gargantuan amount of that which we do not even need, or use. This form of consumption—‘mass consumption’—is unique to the human animal and is the fundamental building block of global capitalism, like the nucleus of an atom.

In the Modern–era ‘mass consumption’ is human nature. In this regard it is more fundamental than burning of fossil fuels. “If mass consumption is human nature, can it be tamed, like anger?” you might ask. To do so we need to ask, not what we consume, but how much we consume. And that question, historian Ramachandra Guha writes “will come finally to dominate the intellectual and political debates” of the 21st century, in his magisterial book, How Much Should A Person Consume?

To break the logjam of the climate impasse, it is imperative that we not only ask: How Much Should A Person Consume? but also, and more importantly, practice—living with less. Many in India and America, however few, and marginalized from the mainstream society, are quietly practicing—living with less.

“If we replace fossil fuels with clean, alternative technologies, won’t we be able to solve the climate crisis?” you might ask. Not so fast. The other half of the climate impasse, Progress, is coming soon.

The Closest Humanity Ever Came to Preventing Its Own Extinction from Climate Change

The Closest Humanity Ever Came to Preventing Its Own Extinction from Climate Change
Marty Kaplan, February 25, 2014 AlterNet.org

Those who tell the stories rule the world, it’s said, but it’s hard to tell a story unless you know the ending.

We don’t yet know the ending of the climate change story. The beginning of the ending happened in Kyoto, Japan in 1997, where delegates from 37 industrialized nations and the European Union agreed to the binding greenhouse gas reductions known as the Kyoto Protocol. This is the best the people of the world have been able to do so far to prevent our own extinction. Unfortunately, the Kyoto emission cuts didn’t go into force until 2008; Canada, one of the world’s biggest oil producers, wouldn’t sign it; the U.S. didn’t ratify it, nor did Australia, one of the world’s top coal producers; China, India and the rest of the developing world weren’t covered by it; and its limits lasted only until 2012. The result of the treaty was that 20 percent of the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide since people lived in caves occurred between 2000 and 2011.

When 2012 arrived, the world, meeting in Doha, gave itself an extension until 2020. But because China (now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, ahead of the U.S.), India (in third place), Brazil and the developing world were again given a pass, and the U.S., Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine didn’t sign on, the caps currently in effect cover only 15 percent of the world’s emissions — making way for last year’s news that for the first time since millions of years ago, the concentration of carbon dioxide blanketing the earth hit 400 parts per million.

So when 2020 rolls around, and the Kyoto Protocol [3] expires, what plan will be in effect for the decade beyond? Scientists say [4] our fate will likely be sealed by 2030: “Another 15 years of failure to limit carbon emissions could make the problem virtually impossible to solve with current technologies.”

These coming 15 years of negotiation and enforcement are arguably the most important 15 years in human history. If we want to have a meaningful agreement in place for 2020, a plan the U.S., Russia, China, India and the rest of the developed and developing world will commit to and that will actually move us back from the brink, we better move our global ass.

The body that will negotiate the next deal, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, meets annually. It has given itself until its 2015 meeting in Paris to come up with a plan that’s better than a suicide note. Later this year, there’ll be a U.N. climate change meeting in Lima, Peru, but Paris 2015 is le grand enchilada, when the world will call its own bluff.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon wants the world to know what’s at stake in Paris. He’s announced a September 2014 climate change summit [5] in New York to hold the world’s leaders’ feet to the fire, to put them on the spot to make bold commitments now. The presidents of the U.S. and China will be there, as will heads and ministers of more than 190 other countries. The 2014 summit offers a priceless opportunity for climate change to grab the world’s attention and change the narrative — to raise awareness and understanding of global warming, to activate people’s civic engagement with the crisis, to hear about mitigation and solutions, to demonstrate to political and business leaders that there is a deep hunger for them to lead.

I wonder what would happen if the world’s storytellers and artists were to throw themselves into making the 2014 summit succeed. Invite the wizards of digital creation and distribution, the social media entrepreneurs and software geniuses, the networks and studios, to lend their talents to a communication campaign. Imagine if film-, video- and game-makers, musicians, photographers, screenwriters, graphic novelists, comedians, actors, essayists and fashionistas were inspired to tell the tale of climate change. Think of what designers, logo makers, branders and advertisers could contribute. Picture entertainment and sports celebrities using their fame to spread the message. Take advantage of the insights of pollsters, market researchers, audience analysts, big data crunchers, behavioral scientists, neuroscientists, social scientists. Ask doctors and public health experts to tell us what carbon and methane pollution already are doing to our bodies, and how global warming is spreading infectious diseases where they haven’t penetrated before. Build alliances and coalitions with environmental advocates, grassroots movements, NGOs, religious and business leaders, philanthropists and foundations, mayors whose cities are threatened by floods, skiers who can’t find snow, farmers and ranchers devastated by drought, indigenous peoples facing extinction, young people who can’t believe how inadequate, even insane, the world’s response has been so far.

Make the narrative so compelling that the news media won’t be able to escape covering it — not just as a one-day summit story, but as the most important story of our time.

Of course, the global fossil fuel industry won’t take this lying down. Already, no doubt, their counter-narrative is being formulated; their charge that climate change is a "hoax" was only the first wave in a hugely well-financed disinformation campaign using the dark arts of propaganda and enabling the political dysfunction that billions of legal extortion can buy.

Last week, speaking in Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry said [6] we’re at a tipping point, calling climate change “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” Global warming is as threatening as the asteroid that caused the extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on earth 66 million years ago.

I don’t know if apocalyptic warnings about unthinkable human misery are the best way to mobilize the world’s people to pressure their leaders not to make Paris 2015 a joke. Maybe a message of optimism about what we can accomplish — a change of genre from horror to heroism — is a smarter approach. But I do know that if the most creative and committed lovers of this planet don’t use all their genius and all their power to make this present moment count, we’ll have to come up with a better story to tell our grandchildren than the one about how the Koch brothers, ExxonMobil and China were the bad guys who stole their effing futures.