A Scientist Offers a Positive Vision for Emissions Reduction

At the most recent meeting of the American Meteorological Society, the distinguished Warren Washington presented a paper by a team of scientists called Climate Change Projections for the Twenty-First Century and Climate Change Commitment in the CCSM3, which is about projecting our future climate with general circulation (computer) models.

The news is not good, unsurprisingly, but what's interesting is that to his fellow scientists, Washington stressed the alarming fact that emissions currently are outpacing even the business-as-usual model, which is already on a course that appears disastrous to climate scientists. Here's the crucial graph:

Emissions and mitigation 

In ultra-dry scientific speak, here's how this crucial fact — which is barely visible above — is expressed:

Note the small dots in Figure 1a above the red curve after the year 2000 show, the 2005 – 2007 actual CO2 emissions [Raupach et al., 2007]. The non-mitigation scenario data is less than actual emissions.

To his fellow scientists, as I recall, Washington not only highlighted this fact, but said it more plainly. Here's my paraphrase:

Our models are underestimating emissions, and already, given a conventional climate sensitive about 2.7C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2, we face a perilously hot future.

To wit:

ClimateanomaliesI

In ScienceNews, Washington put it this way:

"This research indicates that we can no longer avoid significant
warming during this century. But if the world were to implement this level of
emission cuts [70%], we could stabilize the threat of climate change and
avoid catastrophe."

Or if we don't reduce emissions dramatically and soon, we can have a catastrophe.

Once again, John Lennon's words come to mind…

…the world is at your command…

Why Can’t Agnostics Get Any Respect?

Most people lump atheists and agnostics together, which is just plain dumb, as simple-minded as lumping together Christians and Muslims, because they both believe in one God.

Knowing there is no God and not knowing if there is a God are two completely different beliefs.

Why is that so difficult for so many people to comprehend?

At least we have Matt Taibbi to speak up for agnosticism.

Via Andrew Sullivan:

I’m always on the lookout for religion’s latest counter-arguments, the
new rhetorical approaches that God People are constantly fine-tuning
for use in pimping the righteousness of faith (and for demonstrating
the moral dissoluteness of agnostics like myself). There isn’t an
inherently irresolvable metaphysical challenge that comes close to
wasting as much of the world’s time and energy as this particular one.
It’s the intellectual equivalent of the eternal R&D quest for a
baldness cure: you just never stop being surprised at how many
different ways men can find to fail at growing hair…

As for the actual argument, it’s the same old stuff religious
apologists have been croaking out since the days of Bertrand Russell —
namely that because science is inadequate to explain the mysteries of
existence, faith must be necessary. Life would be meaningless without
religion, therefore we must have religion.

But this sort of thinking is exactly what most agnostics find
ridiculous about religion and religious people, who seem incapable of
looking at the world unless it’s through the prism of some kind of
belief system. They seem to think that if one doesn’t believe in God,
one must believe in something else, because to live without answers
would be intolerable. And maybe that’s true of the humorless Richard
Dawkins, who does seem actually to have tried to turn atheism into a
kind of religion unto itself. But there are plenty of other people who
are simply comfortable not knowing the answers. It always seemed weird
to me that this quality of not needing an explanation and just being
cool with what few answers we have  inspires such verbose indignation
in people like Eagleton and Fish. They seem determined to prove that
the quality of not believing in heaven and hell and burning bushes and
saints is a rigid dogma all unto itself, as though it required a
concerted intellectual effort to disbelieve in a God who thinks gays
(Leviticus 20:13) or people who work on Sunday (Exodus 35:2) should be
put to death. They’ll tie themselves into knots arguing this, and
they’ll probably never stop. It’s really strange.

But no less than Graham Greene failed to see the distinction, even as he admired the effort (from The Lawless Roads):

For one can respect an atheist as one cannot respect a deist: once accept a God and reason should carry you further, but to accept nothing at all — that requires some stubbornness, some courage.

Seems to me that by that standard, agnosticism requires considerably more guts than atheism. 

Blue Sky

John Lennon probably put it best (in one of his disbelieving moods)

Above us, only sky…

Sky Blue, by question of lust.

Landscape with Arson

Off to visit the Sespe, which is still badly scared from the epic Day Fire of four years back…which brings to mind a memorable new poem from Jennifer Grotz at the New England Review, via Poetry Daily:

Landscape with Arson

Have you ever watched a cigarette released from a driver's fingers
swim through the night air and disintegrate in tiny embers?
Invisible by day, fire's little shards, its quiet dissemination.

That's how, one hot afternoon, no one noticed when
something desperate made the boy devise the strategy
to siphon gas from the motorcycle with a discarded straw,

spitting mouthfuls into a fast food cup until there was enough
to set the apartment complex on fire.
It happened in a neighborhood at the edge of town

where the wind sifted a constant precipitation of dust
like desiccated snow and the newly-poured streets
looked like frosting spread across the desert field.

Ducks had just found the man-made pond.
At dusk, they waddled ashore
to explore the construction site like the boy.

He started with the door. Stood mesmerized
as the fire took on new colors. He fed it litter
collected from the field. It hissed and turned green,

it splintered pink, it bloomed aureoles of blue.
But there was hardly time to admire it before
remorse overtook him and he fled.

Before the howl of sirens. He was
gone before—he started with the door—whatever
he wanted to let out.

Something can stop being true in the time it takes
a cigarette to burn to its filter. It was your crime
but it's me who goes back to the scene. Now it's only me

who wants to burn something for you, but there's nothing left—how
do you set fire to the past? Only an impulse to shake free—like cellophane
peeled from a pack—something that clings.

Sometimes I conjure a fire for you in my mind,
the gnats swarming furiously above the water, up and down,
can you see it? How they mimic flame, hovering

at the pond's edge. Lately I find myself there all the time.

Jennifer Grotz

New England Review
Volume 30, Number 1 / 2009

Geo-Engineering: Five Experts Debate

From Seed magazine, an excellent discussion of the pros and cons of geo-engineering the climate to avoid a potential disaster, by five recognized experts.

Here's "the prompt," as the kids say:

In June the National Academies’ climate panel will convene to examine
whether geo-engineering fixes are technically and economically
feasible—and whether they can be carried out without unwanted
environmental side effects. As pre-Copenhagen process limps along,
struggling to meet scientifically defined targets, how would you advise President Obama on geo-engineering? Is it too risky to consider? Or too risky to ignore?

And here's the answer that makes the most sense to me, from Ken Caldeira at Stanford:

The term “geo-engineering” has referred to a mixed bag of proposals,
ranging from whitening roofs to whitening skies, from engineered crops
to fertilized oceans, so little can be said of “geo-engineering
proposals” in general. But there is one category of proposal that
deserves special attention, and that is proposals that can cool the
Earth quickly in the face of a climate emergency.

In every single greenhouse gas emissions scenario considered by the
IPCC, the Earth keeps heating throughout this century — even in the
most optimistic scenarios in which we make a rapid transition toward
renewable energy sources. And, of course, actual emissions exceed even
the most pessimistic of the IPCC scenarios.

If the heating of our planet becomes intolerable in this century,
direct intervention in the climate system would be the only way to
start the Earth cooling soon…It is critical that we research our climate emergency backup system
before we need to deploy it. Therefore, it is critical that we
investigate options with the potential to initiate global cooling
within years or decades. We need to know, before a climate crisis
occurs, whether such a system could reduce risk or would merely make
things worse.

Last December, at a panel at the AGU called Geo-Engineering Through Solar Radiation Management, I heard David Mitchell of the Desert Research Institute make an argument for serious research into the possibilities. Yes, his work on cirrus clouds could benefit from more research dollars, but he said that it would take in the range of ten years to assess the science, at a relatively modest cost, much much less than what we are spending now on observing global warming. Sounds about time to start to me.

Ralph Gets the Old “Fuck Ye” from Elizabeth Yet Again

Life in NYC, from the great Overheard in New York:

Hispanic guy, noting hot chick passerby: Hey, baby.
Hot chick: (rolls eyes)
Hispanic guy: (takes off shirt and puts it on the ground for her to walk over)
Hot chick, stopping: I'll give you some credit for that one…but fuck off. (continues walking)

SciGuy and “No Warming Since l998” Debunked in GRL

For science reporters, it has to be tempting to throw a curve ball at the climate consensus. Especially in red states, it's what a lot of readers want to hear.

Could this be what led Eric Berger, the SciGuy for the Houston Chronicle, to claim that these are "good times to be a climate skeptic?"

He begins, as skeptics usually do, by saying that the globe has not warmed in ten years; to wit:

The planet has not shown substantial warming for a decade now.

But according to David Easterling, of the National Climate Data Center, and Michael Wehner, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and their paper in the most recent GRL, called Is the Climate Warming or Cooling?, this statement is flat wrong.

First sentence:

Anthropogenic climate change is one of the most contentious scientific
issues of our time. Not surprisingly the issue has generated numerous
blogs and websites with a wide range of views on the subject. According
to a number of these sources the climate is no longer warming, in fact,
some claim the planet has been “cooling” since 1998 [e.g., Investor's Business Daily, 2008].

The critical graph:

2009gl037810-op01
The authors explain:

It is true that if we fit a linear trend line to the annual global land-ocean surface air temperature [Smith et al., 2005] shown in Figure 1
for the period 1998 to 2008 there is no real trend, even though global
temperatures remain well above the long-term average. The unusually
strong 1997–1998 El Niño contributed to unusual warmth in the global
temperature for 1998 at the start of this period resulting in only a
small, statistically insignificant positive trend. However, if we fit a
trend line to the same annual global land-ocean temperatures for the
1977–1985 period or the 1981–1989 period we also get no trend, even
though these periods are embedded in the 1975–2008 period showing a
substantial overall warming. Furthermore, if we drop 1998 and fit the
trend to the period 1999–2008 we indeed get a strong, statistically
significant positive trend. It is easy to “cherry pick” a period to
reinforce a point of view…

The authors use this as a jumping-off point, to consider the larger issue statistically (which in no way reinforces the skeptic claim). But I want to stick with the skeptics' claim, and cite their conclusion:

Claims that global warming is not occurring that are derived from a
cooling observed over such short time periods ignore this natural
variability and are misleading.

So Berger repeats a claim that is not just wrong, but "misleading."

It's bad enough for a reporter to be wrong. To be misleading is even worse, because it raises the question of motive. And one suspects Berger knows better. After all, the scientist Berger quotes in the column on the topic of Arctic ice points to the most obvious reason for its recovery this year…La Nina.

Not global cooling.

[And that's not even mentioning the negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
Ecinfigtwo
Caption: Time series of shifts in sign of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO),
1925 to 2008. Values are averaged over the months of May through
September.  Red bars indicate positive (warm) years; blue bars negative
(cool) years.  Note that 2008 was the most negative since 1956. From NOAA Fisheries.]

You're better than that, Sciguy…

End of the “Cold Road”: 18,000 Year-Old Glacier Vanishes

From the Miami Herald:

CHACALTAYA, Bolivia — — If
anyone needs a reminder of the on-the-ground impacts of global climate
change, come to the Andes mountains in Bolivia. At 17,388 feet above
sea level, Chacaltaya, an 18,000 year-old glacier that delighted
thousands of visitors for decades, is gone, completely melted away as
of some sad, undetermined moment early this year.

''Chacaltaya
has disappeared. It no longer exists,'' said Dr. Edson Ramirez, head of
an international team of scientists that has studied the glacier since
1991.

Chacaltaya (the name in Aymara means ''cold road'') began
melting in the mid-1980s. Ramirez, the assistant director of the
Institute of Hydraulics and Hydrology at the Universidad Mayor de San
Andres in nearby La Paz, documented its disappearance in March.

Here's a pic from Carsten Drossel, who adds that "Chacaltaya used to be the world's highest ski resort, but the glacier
almost completely vanished due to global warming so skiing is no longer
possible."

Cheers! 

Chacaltayaglacier

The Upside of the Economic Downslide

Less traffic. According to the WSJ:

Rush-hour congestion — defined as moving slower than free-flowing
traffic — in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan markets fell 29% in
2008 versus 2007, said Rick Schuman, a vice president at Inrix, a
Washington company that measures traffic patterns. It fell an
additional 7% in this year's first quarter.
…
The decline in miles driven began when gasoline prices crept above
$3 a gallon in November 2007. By the time prices began to retreat from
their $4-a-gallon high in mid-2008, the number of unemployed Americans
began to rise.

No drop of such significance has been previously recorded. With the
exceptions of a few short-lived dips during previous recessions,
Americans have driven more every year since national record-keeping
began.

The impact of the 1.9% decrease in miles driven this year is
magnified by the nature of congestion. The capacity of many major U.S.
roads is at a constant tipping point, Mr. Schuman said. When capacity
is reached, the addition or subtraction of a relatively small number of
vehicles can have an outsize effect on traffic flow. That is especially
true at the nation's bottlenecks — when traffic moves at less than
half the speed of free-flowing traffic — the number and severity of
which decreased by about one-third from 2007 to 2008, Mr. Schuman said.

Gas consumption in California is down:

Gasoline consumption in California began falling in April 2006, and for
11 straight calendar quarters dropped below gas use in the year-earlier
period even though the state added 790,000 new licensed drivers.
First-quarter gasoline use hasn't yet been released by the California
State Board of Equalization, which on Thursday said Californians
consumed 1.21 billion gallons of gasoline in January, down 22 million
gallons, or 1.8%, from the previous January.

More land available for preservation groups to buy, in places such as the Hudson Valley:

Real estate in the Hudson Valley has turned into
a buyer's market. Open space is at bargain-basement prices, and new
construction has stalled.

For land preservation groups, this is an unprecedented window of opportunity.

"Now
is the time to buy, before the next wave of development pressure
occurs," said Steve Rosenberg, executive director of the Scenic Hudson
Land Trust.

And in Florida, the rise of the "un-developers":

Two men have big plans for the Georgetown property, 160 acres on
the southwest side of the Tampa peninsula. But they are not planning to
build.

[Greg] Chelius is state director for the Trust for Public Land. {Alex] Size is from
the nonprofit's St. Petersburg office. Because of the steep decline in
property values here, they believe they have a chance to help local
government purchase and preserve this stretch of waterfront. A few
months ago, it was slated to be covered with luxury condominiums,
"mansion" town houses and single-family homes.

Instead, Chelius and Size spoke about the native plants that could be
restored — the sabal palmetto palm, the seagrape trees, the three
native species of mangrove. With the vegetation would come more native
animals, more birds.

"We're sort of like the un-developers right now," Chelius said, smiling.

As you might expect, greenhouse gas emissions are down:

A report issued Monday
by the Washington-based Environmental Integrity Project says that
because of the recent economic slowdown and milder-than-usual weather,
carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants dropped 3.1 percent in
2008, a departure from the recent trends in power plant carbon dioxide
emissions, which have risen 0.9 percent since 2003, and 4.5 percent
since 1998, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency.

And, most astonishing, the possibility that unemployment might actually be health-enhancing: 

The health of a population tends to improve slightly when the
economy goes south. While some causes of death, such as suicide,
increase during a recession, many others decrease. Among them: car
crashes, industrial accidents, heart attacks and, in some cities,
infant deaths.

"I was very surprised at first," said Christopher
Ruhm, a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro. In studies over the past 10 years, Ruhm has consistently
found death rates decline during recessions and rise when the economy
expands. If unemployment rises 1 percent, he estimates the death rate
will fall by about half a percent.

"I tracked things like unemployment and mortality and found that they were almost a mirror image of each other," Ruhm said.

Other researchers have found evidence of improved health during
economic downturns in Cuba, Germany, Japan and Spain. Think of it as a
silver lining — and perhaps a measure of how much our unhealthy
lifestyles and workaholic tendencies can get the best of us during boom
times.

It's been true for me; lost weight, a lowered blood pressure, better outlook. Believe it or don't.