Category Archives: Peer Reviewed Article Review

Hothouse Earth

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This is the Hothouse Earth paper, which supposedly got media coverage last week that I completely missed despite scanning the media daily for articles on exactly this sort of topic. It argues that one or more tipping points leading to catastrophic feedback loops are looking increasingly likely if we exceed the 2 degrees C. So yes, we really need to get serious about not exceeding the 2 degrees C. But don’t worry, solutions exist! We need only take simple steps such as “decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.”

Roman emperors were assassinated during droughts

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This academic paper puts it pretty simply:

lower precipitation increases the probability that Roman troops, who relied on local food supplies, starve. This pushes soldiers to mutiny, hence weakening the emperor’s support, and increasing the probability he is assassinated.

The modern lesson might be that if ecological change starts to hurt your society, it might be better (for the ruler) to keep the military well funded and let everyone else suffer.

Eco-cities in Japan and China

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Here’s a paper comparing and contrasting two eco-city developments in Japan and China.

Ecological urbanism in East Asia: A comparative assessment of two eco-cities in Japan and China

The growth of projects translating the concept of eco-city into practices has accelerated during the last fifteen years, making the eco-city a global phenomenon. Asia in particular has witnessed notable developments, characterized by strong governmental intervention and national initiatives to create model eco-cities. In Japan, the central government launched an “Eco-Model Cities” program in 2008 and has designated twenty-three model cities. In China, hundreds of municipalities have pursued plans to become an eco- or low-carbon city following the government’s demonstration projects. Across East Asia, the eco-city is promoted as an innovative urban policy capable of advancing the agendas of sustainable urbanization and the realignment of the post-industrial urban economy.

This paper compares the policies and strategies of developing eco-cities in Japan and China using Kitakyushu and Tianjin Eco-city as case studies. It examines these cities’ common and contrasting approaches to ecological urbanism, their respective technological and urban design strategies, the relationship between eco-city building and local economic development, and the roles played by different stakeholders in this effort. The research focuses on their Key Performance Indicator systems and the spatial qualities they anticipate, which reflect fundamentally different ideas about what societal role an eco-city should best play. The comparative method sheds light on debates around important aspects of planning and managing an eco-city––namely, between new town and retrofit development, between top-down directive and bottom-up force, and between the eco-city as technology and as culture. This paper thus offers critical insight into the changing notions of urbanity within Asian society.

adjusting productivity/GDP for ecosystem services

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Here’s a new paper on a method of adjusting productivity/GDP (they seem to use the terms interchangeably, which confuses me) for ecosystem services and natural capital depletion.

Environmentally Adjusted Multifactor Productivity: Methodology and Empirical Results for OECD and G20 Countries

This paper extends the analytical framework for measuring multifactor productivity in order\ to account for environmental services. A growth accounting approach is used to decompose a pollution-adjusted measure of output growth into the contributions of labour, produced capital and natural capital. These indicators allow the sources of economic growth, and its long run sustainability, to be better assessed. Results presented here cover OECD and G20 countries for the 1990–2013 period, and account for the extraction of subsoil natural assets and emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases. The main findings suggest that growth in OECD countries has been generated almost exclusively through productivity gains, while BRIICS countries have drawn largely on increased utilisation of factor inputs to generate additional growth. Regarding natural capital, in countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Chile, reliance on subsoil assets extraction has contributed to a significant share of income growth. Results also point to a shift towards more environmentally friendly production processes in many countries. In fact, most OECD countries have decreased their emissions over the last two decades, and these pollution abatement efforts result in an upward adjustment of their GDP growth rates, allowing for a more accurate assessment of their economic performance.

It’s a little hard to tease out (from the abstract, since I haven’t read the paper) whether this means we are turning the corner and becoming more sustainable as a planet, or simply becoming more unsustainable at a slower rate than the past. I suspect it is the latter – so while it might be good news, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are on a sustainable path.

Red Queens and Black Queens

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It sounds like a fantasy novel, but the Red Queen hypothesis is about species competing and co-evolving with one another over long periods of time. It is named after the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, who said “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” In other words, species have to constantly evolve and adapt, or they go extinct. 

The Black Queen hypothesis is hard for me to understand, but it refers to

the queen of spades in the game Hearts, where the usual strategy is to avoid taking this card. Gene loss can provide a selective advantage by conserving an organism’s limiting resources, provided the gene’s function is dispensable. Many vital genetic functions are leaky, thereby unavoidably producing public goods that are available to the entire community. Such leaky functions are thus dispensable for individuals, provided they are not lost entirely from the community. The BQH predicts that the loss of a costly, leaky function is selectively favored at the individual level and will proceed until the production of public goods is just sufficient to support the equilibrium community; at that point, the benefit of any further loss would be offset by the cost. Evolution in accordance with the BQH thus generates “beneficiaries” of reduced genomic content that are dependent on leaky “helpers,” and it may explain the observed nonuniversality of prototrophy, stress resistance, and other cellular functions in the microbial world.

In other words, organisms can sort of help their rivals, and there can be some survival advantage to this over long periods of evolutionary time. I’m not sure I quite get it, but there it is.

considering local government policy in water risk

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This paper is about incorporating local government and utility policies/actions in measures of water risk, which in the past have tended to focus on physical measurements. This makes sense because there are some very water scarce places that have managed their limited resources well, and there are some moderately water scarce places where political and bureaucratic mismanagement of resources have led to crises. This probably makes some sense because when the lack of water is starkly obvious (if your country is a desert for example), it is impossible to ignore whereas when the problem is only going to crop up under extreme conditions, local politicians and less competent bureaucrats can ignore it the vast majority of time and nobody will raise the alarm. Better data might help make these crises more predictable and preventable, rather than seeming to sneak up out of nowhere.

Mapping Public Water Management by Harmonizing and Sharing Corporate Water Risk Information

by Colin Strong, Paul Reig, Julian Köbel and Cindy Noe – March 2018

In response to water crises across the globe, data on biophysical conditions associated with water risk have increasingly been collected and understood. However, a complete assessment of water risk also requires an understanding of public water management. Currently there is a lack of global comparable data on public water management, leading to incomplete assessments of risk and suboptimal risk mitigation activities. To fill in that gap in data, this Technical Note proposes the creation of a global comparable geodatabase of public water management indicators to spur tangible improvements in water management. The geodatabase will be populated by crowdsourcing data through the risk assessments of multinational companies that are incentivized to share anonymized public water management as an innovative risk reduction practice.

Antarctic ice sheet melt accelerating

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The rate of melting in Antarctica is accelerating, according to a new study in Nature.

…it lost 2,720 ± 1,390 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017, which corresponds to an increase in mean sea level of 7.6 ± 3.9 millimetres (errors are one standard deviation). Over this period, ocean-driven melting has caused rates of ice loss from West Antarctica to increase from 53 ± 29 billion to 159 ± 26 billion tonnes per year; ice-shelf collapse has increased the rate of ice loss from the Antarctic Peninsula from 7 ± 13 billion to 33 ± 16 billion tonnes per year.

hurricanes slowing down

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Hurricanes appear to be slowing down. This might sound like a good thing, but no it means they could be dropping more rain in any one place, like Harvey did on Houston. In Nature:

 As the Earth’s atmosphere warms, the atmospheric circulation changes. These changes vary by region and time of year, but there is evidence that anthropogenic warming causes a general weakening of summertime tropical circulation1–8. Because tropical cyclones are carried along within their ambient environmental wind, there is a plausible a priori expectation that the translation speed of tropical cyclones has slowed with warming. In addition to circulation changes, anthropogenic warming causes increases in atmospheric water-vapour capacity, which are generally expected to increase precipitation rates9. Rain rates near the centres of tropical cyclones are also expected to increase with increasing global temperatures10–12. The amount of tropical-cyclone-related rainfall that any given local area will experience is proportional to the rain rates and inversely proportional to the translation speeds of tropical cyclones. Here I show that tropical-cyclone translation speed has decreased globally by 10 per cent over the period 1949–2016, which is very likely to have compounded, and possibly dominated, any increases in local rainfall totals that may have occurred as a result of increased tropical-cyclone rain rates. The magnitude of the slowdown varies substantially by region and by latitude, but is generally consistent with expected changes in atmospheric circulation forced by anthropogenic emissions. Of particular importance is the slowdown of 30 per cent and 20 per cent over land areas affected by western North Pacific and North Atlantic tropical cyclones, respectively, and the slowdown of 19 per cent over land areas in the Australian region. The unprecedented rainfall totals associated with the ‘stall’ of Hurricane Harvey13–15 over Texas in 2017 provide a notable example of the relationship between regional rainfall amounts and tropical-cyclone translation speed. Any systematic past or future change in the translation speed of tropical cyclones, particularly over land, is therefore highly relevant when considering potential changes in local rainfall totals.

stranded fossil fuel assets

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An article from Cambridge (University, not Analytica) in Nature Climate Change estimates potential losses if renewables were to lead to a sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels.

Our analysis suggests that part of the SFFA would occur as a result of an already ongoing technological trajectory, irrespective of whether or not new climate policies are adopted; the loss would be amplified if new climate policies to reach the 2 °C target of the Paris Agreement are adopted and/or if low-cost producers (some OPEC countries) maintain their level of production (‘sell out’) despite declining demand; the magnitude of the loss from SFFA may amount to a discounted global wealth loss of US$1–4 trillion; and there are clear distributional impacts, with winners (for example, net importers such as China or the EU) and losers (for example, Russia, the United States or Canada, which could see their fossil fuel industries nearly shut down), although the two effects would largely offset each other at the level of aggregate global GDP.

So coal subsidies might be “making America Great Again”, but not for long. And they might not even have the desired effect according to this article, which argues they would primarily benefit nuclear. And solar energy, it turns out, is a growth industry creating jobs in many Republican districts.

 

climate change is going to cause some economic damage

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A letter in Nature says climate change is going to cause economic damage, and meeting the UN’s emissions targets would reduce that damage. Here’s the abstract, and the article itself is open access.

 International climate change agreements typically specify global warming thresholds as policy targets1, but the relative economic benefits of achieving these temperature targets remain poorly understood2,3. Uncertainties include the spatial pattern of temperature change, how global and regional economic output will respond to these changes in temperature, and the willingness of societies to trade present for future consumption. Here we combine historical evidence4 with national-level climate5 and socioeconomic6 projections to quantify the economic damages associated with the United Nations (UN) targets of 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming, and those associated with current UN national-level mitigation commitments (which together approach 3 °C warming7). We find that by the end of this century, there is a more than 75% chance that limiting warming to 1.5 °C would reduce economic damages relative to 2 °C, and a more than 60% chance that the accumulated global benefits will exceed US$20 trillion under a 3% discount rate (2010 US dollars). We also estimate that 71% of countries—representing 90% of the global population—have a more than 75% chance of experiencing reduced economic damages at 1.5 °C, with poorer countries benefiting most. Our results could understate the benefits of limiting warming to 1.5 °C if unprecedented extreme outcomes, such as large-scale sea level rise8, occur for warming of 2 °C but not for warming of 1.5 °C. Inclusion of other unquantified sources of uncertainty, such as uncertainty in secular growth rates beyond that contained in existing socioeconomic scenarios, could also result in less precise impact estimates. We find considerably greater reductions in global economic output beyond 2 °C. Relative to a world that did not warm beyond 2000–2010 levels, we project 15%–25% reductions in per capita output by 2100 for the 2.5–3 °C of global warming implied by current national commitments7, and reductions of more than 30% for 4 °C warming. Our results therefore suggest that achieving the 1.5 °C target is likely to reduce aggregate damages and lessen global inequality, and that failing to meet the 2 °C target is likely to increase economic damages substantially.

My head gets just a little twisted around thinking of reduced damages. This means the economy, and presumably our grandchildren’s quality of life, will be worse than it could have been if we started making an effort and investment now. But this doesn’t tell us if they will be absolutely better or worse off in a “future baseline” scenario compared to now, just that they will be worse off relative to that future baseline if we don’t take action than if we do. I think the various (very eye catching) graphs in this paper probably contain the answers to these questions, but I didn’t get it after an admittedly short few minutes staring at them, and I admit I didn’t read every word in the paper.

The other thing here is that we are taking a given climate scenario (1.5 or 3 degrees C warming for example), and talking about the benefits of those two future scenarios against each other. What I don’t see is the cost to the current generation if we choose to make this sacrifice, or even if it is a sacrifice at all. What investment would we have to make to achieve 1.5 vs. 3 degrees, and are there alternative investments we could make that could have a bigger payoff. I am not arguing against climate action, I am just questioning how this paper is communicating about costs and benefits in the present and in the future.