Climate Central - Blogs

Climate Science Community Loses Giant in Jerry Mahlman

2012-12-12T16:20:08+00:00

I was deeply saddened when I learned today of Jerry Mahlman’s passing on November 28^th in Buffalo Grove, Ill. Jerry was a friend, a mentor and a true giant in the climate science community. Among his many awards, Jerry received the U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal, the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal from the American Meteorological Society and the Presidential Distinguished Rank Award — the highest honor awarded to a federal employee.

Jerry Mahlman
Credit: Carlye Calvin/UCAR

Jerry worked at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory here in Princeton from 1970 to 2000, and served as GFDL’s Director from 1984-2000. He was also a Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Princeton. His research focused on modeling how our atmosphere responds to the buildup of greenhouse gases.

For me, Jerry represents everything that is good about science. As he came to understand the grim significance of climate change and what it would mean for future generations, he saw no choice but to speak out. He was one of our first, and one of our best, climate science communicators. His voice will be greatly missed.

My colleagues at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory tell me that there are plans for a formal obituary notice in science news journals and a possible AMS/AGU symposia. Details to come.

More:
Rick Piltz of Climate Science Watch pays tribute to Jerry Mahlman.
Jerry Mahlman's obituary was published in the Longmont Times-Call on December 2.

New York Times Op-Ed: Rising Seas, Vanishing Coastlines

2012-11-25T13:59:25+00:00

By Benjamin Strauss and Robert Kopp
New York Times Sunday Review

THE oceans have risen and fallen throughout Earth’s history, following the planet’s natural temperature cycles. Twenty thousand years ago, what is now New York City was at the edge of a giant ice sheet, and the sea was roughly 400 feet lower. But as the last ice age thawed, the sea rose to where it is today.

Now we are in a new warming phase, and the oceans are rising again after thousands of years of stability. As scientists who study sea level change and storm surge, we fear that Hurricane Sandy gave only a modest preview of the dangers to come, as we continue to power our global economy by burning fuels that pollute the air with heat-trapping gases.

This past summer, a disconcerting new scientific study by the climate scientist Michiel Schaeffer and colleagues — published in the journal Nature Climate Change — suggested that no matter how quickly we cut this pollution, we are unlikely to keep the seas from climbing less than five feet.

More than six million Americans live on land less than five feet above the local high tide. (Searchable maps and analyses are available at SurgingSeas.org for every low-lying coastal community in the contiguous United States.) Worse, rising seas raise the launching pad for storm surge, the thick wall of water that the wind can drive ahead of a storm. In a world with oceans that are five feet higher, our calculations show that New York City would average one flood as high as Hurricane Sandy’s about every 15 years, . . .

Click here for the full story in the New York Times

Cutting Short-lived Pollutant Can Halve Near-term Warming

2012-11-24T15:14:28+00:00

By Michael MacCracken, The Daily Climate

Much within Amy Luers' recent Daily Climate essay on extreme weather and the climate crisis is to be commended. Indeed, cutting emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) today won't eliminate a climate change-induced pattern favoring more severe storms and extreme weather. In advocating for emissions cuts, the climate change community has to avoid backlash from a public expecting otherwise. Adaptation and resilience-building are essential to limiting impacts.

A worker walks along a charcoal field in China.
Credit: Nick McIntosh/flickr.

However, by aggressively cutting emissions of soot (black carbon), methane and air pollution (specifically tropospheric ozone), we can reduce the speed that the situation worsens. These compounds remain in the atmosphere only days to decades — versus centuries for the CO2 perturbation — so cutting their emissions can appreciably slow the rate of warming over the next several decades.

The different roles that long- and short-lived emissions play in climate change are important. So far, however, the international negotiating process has chosen to lump them into a single basket that assumes all greenhouse gases behave like CO2. This is like projecting the health of the Social Security trust fund by assuming everyone is a 40-year old male.

Halve Projected Warming

The importance of this distinction was made clear in a recent assessment led by atmospheric chemist Drew Shindell of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies [pdf]. Organized by the United Nations Environment Programme and World Meteorological Organization, the results indicated that a moderately aggressive international emissions control program focused on the short-lived compounds could roughly halve the projected warming between the present and 2050.

Cookstoves at Colorado State University's Advanced Cookstoves Laboratory.
Credit: The Daily Climate.

A brick kiln in India.
Credit: Peter Barker/flickr.

While slowing the warming through this approach might seem to also offer additional time for cutting CO2 emissions, this is not the case. Instead, these actions are more appropriately viewed as partially making up for earlier policy delays.

For there to be any chance to limit global warming to near 2º Celsius, which international leaders have set to limit the risk of dangerous change, emissions of all warming gases must be cut sharply over the next few decades. All nations must do their part; even if developing nation emissions went to zero tomorrow, projected developed nation emissions alone would cause too much warming (and vice-versa – we are all in this together).

Few Taking Steps

At present, few nations are taking sufficient steps. Developed nations think it will be unproductive to act alone, so they delay. Poorer countries with lower per-capita emissions — generally in the Global South — are willing to increase efficiency, but consider emissions caps unfair because fossil-powered energy is needed to alleviate poverty. As a result, future emissions are projected to continue increasing.

To move forward, the nations with high historic and present per-capita greenhouse gas emissions — the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, among others — need to take the lead in demonstrating that modern economies can, through efficiency gains and renewable sources of energy, prosper with low emissions. Acting alone, however, is seen as unfair. And it would not adequately address the need for emissions reductions.

Many of the developing nations already are taking actions to cut emissions of short-lived compounds to improve health and well-being: Reducing methane emissions saves energy and helps prevent coalmine disasters. Reducing soot emissions improves efficiency, clears the air, and cuts serious health impacts. Reducing ozone pollution improves health and reduces damages to crops. Accounting for the important climate-limiting role of these actions, and adding commitments for even greater efforts, would make for a very important developing nation contribution.

Break the Logjam

Together these comparable but differentiated actions by the developed and developing nations — if aggressively pursued — could create the partnership needed to break the negotiating logjam and slow and then reverse climate change.

There is already limited movement in this direction. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced earlier this year that the United States would help initiate a special international effort to cut emissions of short-lived species, and a number of nations have already joined the movement.

For the United States to do its share, aggressive limits on CO2 emissions must be complemented by aggressive limits of emissions of short-lived species. In particular, the Environmental Protection Agency will need to be more aggressive in cutting short-lived emissions, particularly of methane from the oil and gas industry, and making its voluntary methane and black carbon programs mandatory.

With climate change so far along, the question now is no longer whether impacts can be avoided, but rather how bad they will become. What we do with respect to both mitigation and adaptation will control that outcome. The longer we wait, the worse the impacts and sharper the required energy transition.

The Daily Climate is a nonprofit news service covering climate change, and a Climate Central content partner.

Sandy & Other Disasters Could Hurt Climate Change Cause

2012-11-09T14:32:57+00:00

Hurricane Sandy has proven to be a wake-up call about the potential dangers posed by climate change, and it’s even possible — though by no means certain — that we won’t just hit the snooze button and go back to sleep as the images of destruction in New York and New Jersey begin to fade.

Assuming we stay awake, however, there’s a question about what we’ll do with our new awareness (a mere 25 years or so after climate change first hit the news in a major way). Since the early 1990’s, at least, scientists, environmentalists and world leaders have called repeatedly for climate mitigation — that is, reductions in emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in order to stave off global warming. That was also the major focus of the U.N.-sponsored treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in 1997.

Hurricane Sandy damage in Seaside, N.J.
Credit: Tim Larsen/ Governor's Office.

It makes a lot of sense: better to start eating healthy foods now rather than gorge on cheeseburgers and fries and treat your heart attack when it finally comes. But for many of us, cheeseburgers, like cheap, fossil fuel-based energy, are very seductive. That’s why the climate concerned have downplayed talk of adapting to global warming by shoring up our defenses against rising seas and other dangers. As Michael Lind wrote at thebreakthrough.org,

“Rather as peace activists during the Cold War discouraged talk about civil defense, lest it make nuclear war seem more thinkable, many Greens seem to believe that discussing adaptation would reduce support for mitigation, which they hope will be driven by a public sense of urgency if not panic.”

It hasn’t worked out that way. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have continued to mount, temperatures have kept rising and sea level has inched inexorably upward. Now Hurricane Sandy, along with this summer’s crushing drought and plenty of other climate disasters are quite plausibly the first inklings of the heart attacks to come.

Public officials are rightly responding to the emergency in front of them at the moment, not to the underlying causes. They’re talking about storm surge barriers, sea walls and other protective measures that could cost billions, but which could save billions more in future damage.

It would be crazy not to start talking seriously about such measures, given that the outliers of coming climate disasters have already begun to happen, and places like New York City and South Florida had started planning long before Sandy or Irene showed up. So have a number of coastal cities around the world.

But the greatest barrier to cutbacks in greenhouse gases has been economic: if we stop burning cheap fossil fuels, or capture their emissions, it will make energy more expensive, at least in the short run. Politicians simply haven’t been willing to ask for that kind of sacrifice today to stave off that heart attack down the road.

If we’re now going to spend billions on adaptation, how likely is it that they’ll keep calling for emissions reductions as well? It could be that in a perverse way, Hurricane Sandy, the drought and other climate disasters could push those reductions into some indefinite future — and make the climate problem even worse than it might otherwise have been.

Will Sandy Be the Climate Change Wakeup Call We Need?

2012-11-02T15:42:16+00:00

Calling Hurricane Sandy a disaster almost underplays the enormous devastation wrought by this freakish monster of a storm. Four days after Sandy came ashore just south of Atlantic City, millions are still without power, gas stations are running out of fuel, and the death toll continues to rise.

But for those of us who worry about climate change, Sandy might not have been an unmitigated disaster. The storm wasn’t “caused” by climate change, as Climate Central and others made clear. But in at least two, and possibly three ways, global warming almost certainly made Sandy worse than it would otherwise have been.

Bayville, NY on Oct. 30, 2012. Credit: Flickr/Casual Capture

That connection suggested to many commenters that after so many years of official reluctance to take on the issue climate change — including an unsuccessful U.N. conference in 2009, the failure of Congress to approve a cap-and-trade bill in 2010 and, most recently, the almost complete silence of the presidential candidates on the climate issue (in Obama’s case, a deliberate silence that dated back to the early days of his presidency) — that Sandy would serve as a long-awaited wake-up call that will bring action at last. After two years of freakish storms, killer heat waves and terrible droughts, Americans are finally connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, so maybe political leaders will, too.

Signs of hope were bursting out all over. “Something important has happened,” super-activist Bill McKibben declared in The Daily Beast. “This is a huge wake-up call,” asserted Tom Brokaw on MSNBC, and Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post insisted that “Climate change is a national challenge. Ignoring it is not a solution.”

In fact, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided not to ignore it: two days after Sandy turned his city upside down, he formally endorsed Barack Obama for president, citing Obama’s positive (though limited) steps to limit carbon pollution.

But if we’re truly talking about a wake-up call or watershed moment or dramatic turnaround in the nation’s commitment to actually do something about the threat of climate change, I remain skeptical. I’ve been writing about climate since 1987, and I’ve seen plenty of watersheds. I remember when James Hansen testified before Congress back in 1988, saying “. . . the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

As McKibben reminds us, that consciousness-raising moment led to George Bush (the first) saying in 1988 that he would “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” In 1989, Time magazine named the endangered Earth “Planet of the Year,” in large part due to the threat of global warming. In 1992, Bush signed a global climate agreement at the “Earth Summit” in Rio.

Waves crashing on Nantasket Beach in Hull, MA during Sandy. Credit: Flickr/jeffcutler

It was a series of watershed moments, coming in rapid fire, and it led to . . . almost no action at all, ultimately, on climate change. In the two decades since, carbon emissions have continued to grow, driving the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere steadily upward. This year is on track to be the warmest on record. The 2000s were the warmest decade on record (so far). Arctic sea ice melted back more during the summer of 2012 than any time since modern recordkeeping began.

In short, I’ve seen wake-up calls before. I’ve seen the American public and our political leaders wake up, smell the climate coffee (as it were). And I’ve seen them roll over and go back to sleep again.

So while I fervently hope McKibben and the others are right — that people will finally get it, and will take serious action on climate change — I have my doubts. I do see some prospect that leaders will begin working to protect people from the consequences of climate change, by making changes to cities, power plants and other infrastructure endangered by climate-driven floods, for example. In the especially vulnerable counties of South Florida, this sort of adaptation planning has been under way for a while now.

But if we’re talking about cutting our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — well, you’ll have to forgive me, but I’m reserving judgment over whether this wake-up call is any different from the rest.

Scientists Eat Crow on Geoengineering Test. Me, Too

2012-10-23T11:30:46+00:00

Harvard’s David Keith calls it the “goofy Goldfinger scenario” – a rogue nation, or even an individual, would conduct an unsupervised geoengineering experiment — and he confidently predicted in a story I wrote last month that it would never happen.

It took about a month for him to be proven wrong. In mid-October, the Guardian reported that an American named Russ George had dumped 100 metric tons of iron sulfate into the waters off western Canada, triggering a bloom of algae. George claimed he did it with the knowledge of Canadian authorities, using equipment lent to him by NOAA (which said it didn’t know of his plans).

Some species of algae produce dangerous toxins for both sea life as well as humans. The term "red tide" is often associated with these algal blooms.
Credit: NOAA

Scientists (presumably including Keith) were outraged that such a thing could happen. It’s not that they have anything against algae, but rather that the project was a type of geoengineering — a suite of anti-climate-change strategies that are highly controversial because they have the potential for triggering significant unintended consequences.

But triggering an algae bloom is also a way to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and along with spewing particles into the stratosphere to block some of the sun’s heat, it’s one of the main techniques geoengineers talk about using if efforts to limit those emissions ultimately fail.

Before they would be prepared to take such a major step, however, responsible scientists would take baby steps first: they would do small-scale experiments, under controlled conditions, with the supervision of some sort of regulatory or funding body that could take an independent look at the potential risks.

In 2009, climate scientists met to try and figure out a system of voluntary standards to guide geoengineering research, much as molecular biologists met in 1975 to assess the potential risks of biotechnology.

Nothing much came of the 2009 conference, but at least it raised the consciousness of those who might be interested in going ahead with real-world experiments. The lack of any governing authority for geoengineering is partly why scientists decided to cancel a proposed U.K. test known as the Stratospheric Particle Experiment for Climate Engineering, or SPICE, in the spring of 2012.

Andrew Parker of the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government told the New York Times that George’s actions had apparently violated an international convention on ocean dumping and a U.N. convention on ocean fertilization for geoengineering purposes, along with a set of voluntary principles on geoengineering developed at Oxford. (George maintained that he wasn’t geoengineering at all: he was just trying to help the indigenous Haida people who live the region to re-invigorate their salmon fishery by increasing the fishes’ food supply.)

The scientists were outraged, in short, because someone went ahead and did an experiment they were too principled to do. But since there is no enforceable international agreement on geoengineering, outrage is pretty much all they’ve got.

For my part, I was outraged because I’d been so convinced by Keith and others this sort of rogue behavior was nothing to worry about. There’s not much chance of a binding treaty on geoengineering in any case, they said (and on that I agree). But the prospect of widespread finger-wagging by scientists would almost certainly be enough to stop any rogue geoengineer in his or her tracks.

Evidently not.

A Forecast for the American West: Hot and Hotter

2012-10-04T15:05:38+00:00

COMMENTARY
By Alyson Kenward

(The full version of this Op-Ed is on LATimes.com)

Over the summer and on into the fall, images of flames, smoke plumes, firefighting teams and ruined homes have been on replay, and with good reason: As of Aug. 31, this year tied the record for total acreage burned by wildfires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. More than 8.4 million acres have burned to date — an area larger than the state of Maryland up in flames.

But as intense as the wildfires have been this year, they provide just a glimpse of the future of the American West.

In a new study, my colleagues and I analyzed more than four decades of fire data from the U.S. Forest Service. We found a clear long-term trend toward more and larger fires in 11 Western states.

Click here to read the rest of Alyson’s column in the Los Angeles Times

To Say ‘Deep Water’ is a Great Read is Selling it Short

2012-09-05T17:42:55+00:00

Dan Grossman

How high and how fast will sea level rise? It’s a hugely important question: the ocean is creeping ever higher thanks to global warming, posing a growing threat to life and property all over the world. The current consensus says sea level should go up another 3 feet or so by 2100, a disastrous enough scenario that would put many millions of people at risk in the U.S. alone. But some experts suggest the rise could be as much as 16 feet, which could make cities — including New York, Shanghai and Mumbai — virtually unlivable.

Its obviously important to nail down the number, and one way scientists do that is to look to the past, to see how climate and sea level matched up during ancient episodes of warming and cooling. It’s the search for ancient shorelines that’s at the core of Deep Water, a terrific new e-book by veteran journalist Dan Grossman. The central narrative involves a research expedition across Australia led by Maureen Raymo, a scientist based at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Grossman traveled with Raymo and her crew for a month, getting to know the scientists and learning about what they do, how they do it, and why it’s so important.

What makes the book so extraordinary is not simply the writing, which is pretty great. This isn’t just a plain-text Kindle-type ebook, however (although you can get it in that form if you prefer). It’s a full-fledged multimedia production that includes video (Grossman is an accomplished videographer), slide shows, maps and more. The multimedia version is only available on the iPhone, iPad and iPod at this point, and you have to download the Tedbooks app to get it.

At $2.99, it’s more than worth it. You’ll truly understand why rising seas are such a big deal, and you’ll be hugely entertained along the way.

Extreme Weather Can’t ‘Surprise’ Insurance Companies

2012-09-04T17:10:54+00:00

COMMENTARY
By Mindy Lubber, President of Ceres

Severe weather has been clobbering insurance companies, and the headlines just keep coming. “Drought to cost insurers billions in losses,” said the Financial Times a few days ago. “Many U.S. hurricanes would cause $10b or more in losses in 2012 dollars,” the Boston Globe said about the latest hurricane forecasts. “June’s severe weather losses near $2 billion in U.S.,” said the Insurance Journal earlier this year.

This year’s extreme events follow the world’s costliest year ever for natural catastrophe losses, including $32 billion in 2011 insured losses in the United States due to extreme weather events. This is no short-term uptick: insured losses due to extreme weather have been trending upward for 30 years, as the climate has changed and populations in coastal areas and other vulnerable places have grown.

Credit: USFWS/flickr

The U.S. insurance industry continues to be “surprised” by extreme weather losses. But the truth is that weather extremes are no longer surprising. Back-to-back summers of devastating droughts, record heat waves and raging wildfires are clear evidence of this. Last year’s crazy weather triggered near record underwriting losses and numerous credit rating downgrades among U.S. property and casualty insurers.

And in the face of a changing climate, such events can be expected to increase in number, and severity. It’s time for insurance companies to recognize this new normal, and incorporate it into their business planning—for the sake of their shareholders, their industry’s survival, and the stability of the U.S. economy.

Ceres, a business sustainability leadership organization, has been researching the effects of climate change and severe weather on the insurance sector. In a report to be released next month, titled Stormy Future for U.S. Property and Casualty Insurers, we will detail our recommendations for insurance companies, investors and regulators to help strengthen the insurance sector so it can better weather the challenges ahead.

For insurance companies, using catastrophe models that can better anticipate probable effects of climate change on extreme weather events are key. And especially in vulnerable markets, insurers’ guidance on insurability should inform decisions that communities make on land-use planning, infrastructure decisions, and building codes.

Insurers can also encourage the transition to a low-carbon economy—one built to forestall the worst effects of climate change—by offering products and services that encourage clean and efficient energy, encouraging customers to adopt climate-change mitigation plans, and encouraging policymakers to act to reduce carbon pollution.

This would not be the first time insurance companies have helped change American society. By making insurance contingent on smoke detectors, insurers cut down on deaths and losses from building fires. By backing seat belt laws and including seat belt violations in rate calculations, they helped save lives on the road.

By engaging fully on climate change and energy policy—inside and outside of the boardroom – insurance companies can lead the way once again. It would be the right thing to do, both for their business, and for our future.

Reprinted with permission. This story first appeared on Forbes.com

Isaac Fades, but Odds of Hurricane Disaster Loom

2012-08-31T17:32:41+00:00

COMMENTARY
By Michael D. Lemonick

I got a rather breathless email yesterday from one of my colleagues telling me about a new bulletin from the National Hurricane Center about Tropical Storm Leslie. It said, in part: “THIS IS THE SECOND-EARLIEST FORMATION OF THE 12TH NAMED STORM ON RECORD IN THE ATLANTIC BASIN . . . ECLIPSED ONLY BY LUIS OF 1995.”

At first, I have to admit, I rolled my eyes. It felt like the kind of ridiculous statistic baseball announcers dredge up when there’s nothing worthwhile to say, but they feel they need to say something anyway (“It’s the fourth time in baseball history that a left-handed Dominican third baseman has faced a right-handed pitcher from South Carolina in the month of July . . . ”).

Hurricane Kirk is a strong Category 2 as of Friday morning with maximum sustained winds of 105 mph. Tropical Storm Leslie continues to strengthen over the Atlantic Ocean, maximum sustained winds 65 mph.
Credit: National Hurricane Center/NOAA.

There was something to say on Thursday, of course, when Hurricane Isaac still dominated the headlines on. But as of Friday, Isaac wasn’t even on the National Hurricane Center’s official map, a day later.

But my reaction was dumb, on two counts. First, Isaac may have degraded into a tropical depression, but it’s bringing drenching and potentially dangerous rains to the Midwest. That may help alleviate the ongoing drought in some places, but as Gerry Bell, lead hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center reminded me in a phone call, “Inland rainfall is the leading cause of death from these storms.”

The other major gap in my reasoning, which I think I share with most Americans, is that I dismiss Leslie, which should turn into a hurricane by Saturday, and Kirk, which already a hurricane, because they’re unlikely to hit land.

What it really says, however, is that we’re seeing just the kind of hurricane season forecasters have been expecting, with 12-17 named storms by the time the season ends on November 30. “There’s a lot of activity,” Bell said. “We’re low on major hurricanes, but we’re really in the peak of the season now.”

And while the National Hurricane Center’s awkward formulation (“second earliest 12th named storm”) is perfectly accurate, scientist-blogger Brian McNoldy’s description is a lot easier to follow. This is, he writes “the second most active Atlantic hurricane season to date on record.”

Now that gets my attention. Not even the best forecasters, armed with the best computer models, can say when storms Nos. 13, 15, or 17 might form, to say nothing of whether they’ll stay safely at sea or smash into land. Once they do form, experts like Bell are pretty good at saying where they’ll go, although forecasters are still pretty bad at saying how intense a given storm will become even a day or two in advance.

What that means is that anyone who’s breathing a sigh of relief that Isaac didn’t turn out to be a second Katrina, and that Leslie and Kirk are threatening some transatlantic shipping lanes but not much else, may be jumping the gun. It could be that there won’t be any more hurricanes after Leslie, though that’s unlikely. It could be that all the rest will flail around the Atlantic for a while, then die.

But it could well be that a Category 4 or 5 storm is right around the corner, and that it could slam into a major population center before Halloween, or even before Columbus Day. It’s all a game of odds — and as Bell reminded me, the odds of hurricane disasters shot upward 1995, when the Atlantic entered an unusually active phase. Based on history, that phase should last from 25 to 40 years or so, which means we’re still very much in it.

So if you’re someone like me, who doesn’t think about hurricanes all that much unless one is about to come ashore on the U.S. mainland, and who tends to downplay any statistic that begins with “the second earliest,” it might be time to reconsider your attitude. That’s what I’m doing.

Hold Your Rejoicing About Those Falling CO2 Emissions

2012-08-17T19:49:46+00:00

COMMENTARY
By Michael D. Lemonick

Remember global warming? You know, that worldwide disaster we were all so worried about way back in 2011? It wasn’t an unreasonable fear, of course: the world has been pumping greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide, or CO2) into the atmosphere like there was no tomorrow. Greenhouse gases trap heat. Ergo, said both the theory and the evidence, global temperatures are heading upward, forcing ice to melt, sea level to rise, and extreme weather to come along more often.

But all of that is so last year. The Associated Press is reporting a “surprise turnaround” in carbon-dioxide emissions. Based on a document from the federal Energy Information Agency, the AP points that CO2 emissions have fallen to their lowest level in 20 years — and it’s not because of any new government regulations, but rather because natural gas has replaced coal in many power plants. Gas emits much less CO2 than coal, and thanks to fracking, gas has become extraordinarily cheap and plentiful. Problem solved! Or at least as the headline more responsibly puts it, “some experts optimistic on global warming.”

Natural gas pipeline.

Really? These experts might want to think again. It’s true that natural gas emits about half as much CO2 as coal in producing a comparable amount of energy, but half as much isn’t zero, and zero, or as close to it as is humanly possible, is where the world needs to get in a big hurry.

The reason: a large fraction of the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere is going to stay there for thousands of years. Even if we were to cut off emissions completely right this minute (an obviously impossible and absurd notion) atmospheric CO2 levels would drop excruciatingly slowly, and they’d be trapping extra heat all the while. The only way to avoid permanent and dramatic changes to the climate, argued NASA scientist James Hansen in 2008, would be to limit carbon concentrations to 350 parts per million — or, since we’re already up to about 395 parts per million, to bring them down quickly to that level. (For comparison, the level before we began burning fossil fuels in earnest in the early 1800’s was about 270-290 part per million).

If that’s the case, then natural gas is hardly an answer. As scientists Ken Calderia and Nathan Myhrvold showed in a paper earlier this year, gas can ultimately cut emissions, but during the time you’re building the plants — a process that itself takes substantial energy — you’ve added so much more CO2 to the air that, as Myhrvold told Climate Central, “It’s like living on a credit card. It’s easy to get into a situation where it will take years and years to pay back.” It’s not just the CO2, either: drilling for natural gas releases substantial amounts of methane, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Besides, the boom in cheap natural gas isn’t going to last forever. As the AP story noted, “. . . changes in the marketplace — a boom in the economy, a fall in coal prices, a rise in natural gas — could stall or even reverse the shift. For example, U.S. emissions fell in 2008 and 2009, then rose in 2010 before falling again last year.”

Here’s another sour note: emissions may be on the decline for the moment in the U.S., but they’re still rising worldwide, so the atmosphere’s CO2 burden, with all those hundreds or thousands of years of heating that implies, is still getting larger.

And here’s yet another: the natural gas boom may be depressing the market for truly renewable forms of energy like wind and solar — the kind that put out zero carbon emissions whatever. It’s quite true, as University of Colorado environmental policy expert Roger Pielke, Jr., said in the AP story, that “if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources.” But you can clearly also displace even cleaner sources.

To sum up: emissions have dropped in the U.S., thanks to a form of energy that’s ultimately not much cleaner than coal, and which has stalled conversion to truly clean energy. Meanwhile, worldwide emissions are still growing, putting CO2 into the atmosphere as though it were some sort of global Roach Motel where molecules can check in, but they can’t check out.

This may make some experts optimistic. It doesn’t do a lot for me.

Romm’s Book ‘Language Intelligence’ Insightful, Important

2012-08-13T16:01:43+00:00

First there was intelligence, then came emotional intelligence. Now Joe Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and well-known ClimateProgress.org blogger, introduces us to the concept of language intelligence in his thoughtful new book Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln and Lady Gaga. Romm defines language intelligence as “the ability to convince people of something by moving them both intellectually and emotionally, at both a conscious and unconscious level.” For those of us working to explain the science and impacts of climate change to the general public, the book is a reference manual for how to be a more effective communicator.

But it’s far more than just a handy how-to guide. At its heart, Language Intelligence is a fascinating history of rhetoric, what Dante called “the sweetest of all the other sciences.” As Romm details, rhetoric was evident in Homer’s 8th century classics The Iliad and The Odyssey and dates back even further — to the Five Books of Moses.

Genesis by itself is a complete rhetoric handbook, containing all the figures of speech, as we will see. The very first story of Adam and Eve reveals the dangerous power of speech. The serpent, “more subtle than any other wild creature,” beguiles Eve with deceptive language and false promises into eating from the tree of knowledge, leading to banishment from Paradise. Such are the bitter fruits of lack of language intelligence.

The figures of speech, as Romm illustrates, include: metaphors (Abraham Lincoln’s “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” is a masterful example), hyperbole (which Aristotle said is used by angry men), and chiasmus (Mae West’s famous line, “It’s not the men in my life, it’s the life in my men”).

With chapter headings like “The First Rule: Short Words Win” and “If You Don’t Repeat, You Can’t Compete,” Romm walks readers through the basics of good communication by busting myths and offering useful advice. For example:

The big myth about rhetoric is that rhetoric equals big words. If I were to wish but one point to stick with you here, it would be that short words are the best words. Short words win. Short words sell. In an era of snappy sound-bites and sexy slogans, the pitch must be pithy or the channel will be changed. “There is no more important element in the technique of rhetoric than the continual employment of the best possible word,” wrote a young Winston Churchill.

Given his day job, Romm continually connects back to the difficult task of communicating about climate change. “Those who deny the reality of climate science have made use of the best rhetorical techniques,” Romm said. “Those seeking to inform the public about the very real dangers of a warming climate will need to learn the lessons of the best communicators if they are to overcome the most well-funded disinformation campaign in history.” There’s plenty here to help scientists looking to become better communicators.

This insightful and important little book — it’s a concise 213 pages — comes at a time when, despite having more ways to communicate than ever, trust in what is being communicated stands at an all-time low. If rhetoric is king, then trust is God. And yes, that’s a metaphor.

---
Kindle page on Amazon

Lost in Watergate’s Wake: Nixon’s Green Legacy

2012-08-08T17:43:06+00:00

The date will never resonate like July 4, 1776, or December 7, 1941, or 9/11, but Aug. 8, 1974 -- exactly 38 years ago today -- was a monumentally important day for those of us old enough to remember it. It was on a Thursday evening that Richard Nixon announced he was stepping down as President of the United States — the first president in U.S. history to resign from office, and so far, the only one.

I was about to enter my junior year of college, and for my friends and me, it was a day to celebrate. We pretty much hated Nixon. He had failed to end the Vietnam War with the so-called “secret plan” he’d promised as a candidate back in 1968. In fact, he escalated it by bombing Cambodia, a ploy that led to the tragic Kent State shootings. He kept an enemies list of people he thought were out to get him, and he masterminded and covered up a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, a sleazy bit of thuggery that culminated in his disgrace and ultimate resignation.

I despised Nixon so much back then that even now it’s hard for me to get it into my head that he was a hero in at least one important way: he was a champion of protecting the environment, like no president before him since Teddy Roosevelt, and like no president since. The list of his green accomplishments — things he actually initiated, and laws he approved with his signature — is truly impressive. They include (deep breath, now):

— The National Environmental Policy Act (1969), which among other things required that all federal agencies produce environmental impact statements on the possible negative effects of any and all regulations. It also created the President’s Council on Environmental Quality.

— The Environmental Protection Agency (1970). Self-explanatory. Amazing.

— The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, 1970). Proposed by Nixon “...for better protection of life and property from natural hazards...for a better understanding of the total environment...[and] for exploration and development leading to the intelligent use of our marine resources...” That's what he wanted, and that's what the agency does.

— The Clean Air Act (1970). Before the act, America’s skies were filthy. Afterward, they weren’t exactly pristine, but they were dramatically better, and later amendments cleaned the air up even more.

— Earth Week (1971). OK, something of a gimmick, but still, Nixon endorsed it to commemorate the first anniversary of Earth Day. He may not have sported Birkenstocks, but in some ways the man was practically a tree-hugger.

— The Clean Water Act (1972). If this is beginning to sound like the green legislation hall of fame, it’s not just you.

— The Endangered Species Act (1973): Even if this was all Nixon had achieved, he would rank among one of our greenest presidents.

His opponents claimed, naturally, that all of these seemingly noble gestures were politically motivated. Nixon didn’t care about he environment: he knew lots of Americans did care, and he wanted to divert attention from the disaster in Vietnam.

There’s probably a grain of truth in it, but so what? Try to imagine a political leader in either party advocating for such a bold pro-environment agenda today, let along getting even a fraction of Nixon-level laws passed.

I certainly can’t. For all his faults, and there were plenty, Richard Nixon did more for the environment than most of the bona fide environmentalists I know. And for that reason, I can’t quite celebrate Nixon Resignation Day the way I would have imagined back in 1974.

Sally Ride: ‘Rare Person Who Made Us All Better’

2012-07-24T16:14:57+00:00

Sally Ride
May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012

Like many girls growing up in the 80’s, for me, Sally Ride was a rock star. She was young – only 32 when she became the first American woman in space – and beautiful. Cool and smart during interviews, Sally had this ability, this grace really, to make questions about whether she would wear a bra in space or whether she cried on the job, just seem silly. The New York Times obituary recounts a NASA news conference, where Dr. Ride said: “It’s too bad this is such a big deal. It’s too bad our society isn’t further along.” Sally was further along . . . and she brought us all with her.

Credit: NASA

I was lucky enough to meet Sally and work with her wonderful and talented team at Sally Ride Science. It was then that I came to understand that she was a true Renaissance woman. A Stanford-trained physics whiz who also received a bachelor’s degree in English; an astronaut who nearly opted to become a professional athlete. During high school, Sally was the 18th-ranked girls junior tennis player in the U.S.; at Stanford she was the team's No. 1 women’s singles player and was nationally ranked. Billie Jean King wanted her to quit college and go pro.

Sally Ride could have done anything, but she chose to devote her life to science and to inspire young people to pursue their passion. Sally certainly inspired me to follow my dream of being a scientist. She made me better. In fact, she was one of those rare people who made us all better.

(Editor's Note: Climate Central and Sally Ride collaborated on a book -- What You Need to Know: 20 Questions and Answers and About Climate Change -- in 2009)

Download the free PDF version of the book

400 ppm: A Milestone that Means Everything, and Nothing

2012-06-05T10:29:59+00:00

COMMENTARY
By Michael D. Lemonick

I’m not big on taking note of milestones. They’re artificial, and usually meaningless, but people get all worked up about them anyway. I don’t like to stay up late on New Year’s Eve, for example, because Dec. 31 is a purely arbitrary date. Nothing real actually begins the next day, but we all pretend otherwise. I have similar feelings about the first day of spring, the temperature reaching 100° as opposed to 99° and all sorts of other magic-sounding dates and numbers that don’t have any real significance.

But since no law says I have to be consistent, I’m going to take note of a milestone that happened some time in the past couple of months, and which was reported last week by NOAA. For the first time in recorded history, and almost certainly for much longer than that, the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide, or CO₂, has nipped above 400 parts per million in at least one part of the world. Monitoring stations in Alaska, northern Europe, and Asia have all noted readings above that level during this past spring.

In one sense, this isn’t all that important. There’s no meaningful difference between 399 ppm and 400, and the current world average is more like 393. Even in the Arctic, scientists know the CO₂ level will drop back below 400 this summer, as trees in the Northern Hemisphere suck carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere (you can see the annual ups and downs as trees start growing in the spring and go into hibernation in the fall). We won’t get to a world average of 400 for several years yet.

Climate scientists generally agree with all that, but suggest that the 400 ppm milestone is important anyway, for symbolic reasons. “It's just a reminder to everybody that we haven't fixed this and we're still in trouble,” Jim Butler at NOAA’s Earth System Research Lab told the Associated Press.

I don’t know if the reminder will do much good, given the seeming indifference with which policymakers have responded to earlier CO₂milestones. I think reaching 400 parts per million anywhere in the world is crucially important for an entirely different reason: however much CO₂is in the atmosphere today is the minimum level we’re going to have to live with for the indefinite future. Once carbon dioxide is swirling around in the stratosphere above us, it will stay there for hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s as though you gained the most weight in your life, and knew you’d never weigh even a single pound less, ever.

CO₂ does eventually get pulled back out of the atmosphere by natural processes, but that happens very slowly. Climate scientists like to compare the atmosphere to a bathtub half-full of water, with a very slow drain and a slowly trickling faucet. If the drain and the trickle are balanced, the water level never changes — just as the trickle of natural CO₂ into the atmosphere and the drainage into trees, carbonate rocks and other places have been in balance for at least 2,000 years, and probably more. Atmospheric CO₂ hovered at around 270-290 parts per million that whole time, and the climate stayed more or less stable.

Recent monthly mean CO2 measured at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Credit: NOAA.

Since the wholesale burning of fossil fuels began with the Industrial Revolution, however, CO₂levels have been climbing. The faucet has been opened wider, but the drain is still very slow. And even if we manage to cut emissions significantly — something that’s not looking likely anytime soon — the faucet will still open wider than it was in pre-industrial times. CO₂levels will continue to climb, just not as fast.

So once we get to 400 (or 425 or 450 or 500 or whatever), that’s where we’ll be for the foreseeable future. The elevated temperatures caused by this crucial heat-trapping gas will be with us indefinitely as well. The world’s glaciers and ice caps will continue to melt — just think of the difference between putting a small block of ice in a hot oven for 10 seconds and putting it in there for an hour. The oceans will continue to warm. As a result of both the melting and warming, sea level will continue to rise. Scientists expect the oceans to be perhaps 3 feet higher by 2100, but it won’t stop then (which means, by the way, that 2100 is another meaningless milestone).

And all of that’s going to be true even if we cut back drastically on emissions. If we don’t, then every new CO₂milestone — 500 ppm, 800, 964, whatever number you choose — will be the new the level of climate-changing pollution the planet will have to deal with at the very minimum from that time onward.

Maybe that’s another reason for me to ignore milestones from now on. They’re either meaningless, or highly depressing. Or, as in this case, both at once.