Tag Archives: climate change

the trial of the century

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Peter Singer is arguing for the importance of the lawsuit brought by children against the United States government for failing to address climate change.

The plaintiffs claim that their government’s active contribution to climate change has violated their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property. When the government sought to prevent the case from being heard, the federal district court of Oregon issued a historic ruling that “the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.”

When Juliana v. United States is appealed to the US Supreme Court, as seems inevitable, the question may no longer be whether the preservation of the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights requires “a climate system capable of sustaining human life”; it undeniably does. Instead, the Court will have to decide whether it is willing to heed the scientific evidence that the actions of the US government are indeed jeopardizing the survival of human life on our planet. If it is, even the most conservative justices will find it difficult to escape the conclusion that the government is in violation of the US Constitution.

October 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • I read more gloomy expert opinions on the stability and resilience of the global financial system.
  • A new depressing IPCC report came out. Basically, implementing the Paris agreement is too little, too late, and we are not even implementing it. There is at least some movement towards a carbon tax in the U.S. – a hopeful development, except that oil companies are in favor of it which makes it suspicious. There is a carbon tax initiative on the ballot in Washington State this November that the oil companies appear to be terrified of, so comparing the two could be instructive, and the industry strategy may be to get a weaker law at the federal level as protection against a patchwork of tough laws at the state and local levels.

Most hopeful stories:

  • There is no evidence that kids in U.S. private schools do any better than kids in U.S. public schools, once you control for family income. (Okay – I admit I put this in the hopeful column because I have kids in public school.)
  • Regenerative agriculture is an idea to sequester carbon by restoring soil and  protecting biodiversity on a global scale.
  • Applying nitrogen fixing bacteria to plants that do not naturally have them may be a viable way to reduce nitrogen fertilizer use and water pollution.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • New tech roundup: Artificial spider silk is an alternative to carbon fiber. Certain types of science, like drug and DNA experiments, can be largely automated. A “quantum internet” could mean essentially unbreakable encryption.
  • Modern monetary theory suggests governments might be able to print (okay, “create”) and spend a lot more money without serious repercussions. What I find odd about these discussions is they focus almost entirely on inflation and currency exchange values, while barely acknowledging that money has some relationship actual physical constraints. To me, it has always seemed that one function of the financial system is to start flashing warning lights and make us face the realities of how much we can do before we are all actually starving and freezing in the dark. It could be that we are in the midst of a long, slow slide in our ability to improve our physical quality of life, but instead of that manifesting itself as a long slow slide, it comes as a series of random shocks where one gets a little harder to recover from.
  • I read some interesting ideas on fair and unfair inequality. Conservative politicians encourage people not to make a distinction between alleviating poverty and the idea of making everybody equal. These are not the same thing at all because living just above the poverty line is no picnic and is not the same thing as being average. There is a strong moral case to be made that nobody “deserves” to live in poverty even if they have made some mistakes. And simply “creating jobs” in high-poverty areas sounds like a nice conservative alternative to handouts, except that there isn’t much evidence that it works.

climate change threatens barley yields

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A new study says climate change is likely to threaten barley yields, leading to high beer prices later in the century. I’m hoping this is wrong and we can grow hops and barley in the formerly frozen tundra of Canada and Siberia. Of course the bigger picture is about grain yields overall, and that is not just about average temperature but about extreme heat and drought.

Decreases in global beer supply due to extreme drought and heat

Beer is the most popular alcoholic beverage in the world by volume consumed, and yields of its main ingredient, barley, decline sharply in periods of extreme drought and heat. Although the frequency and severity of drought and heat extremes increase substantially in range of future climate scenarios by five Earth System Models, the vulnerability of beer supply to such extremes has never been assessed. We couple a process-based crop model (decision support system for agrotechnology transfer) and a global economic model (Global Trade Analysis Project model) to evaluate the effects of concurrent drought and heat extremes projected under a range of future climate scenarios. We find that these extreme events may cause substantial decreases in barley yields worldwide. Average yield losses range from 3% to 17% depending on the severity of the conditions. Decreases in the global supply of barley lead to proportionally larger decreases in barley used to make beer and ultimately result in dramatic regional decreases in beer consumption (for example, −32% in Argentina) and increases in beer prices (for example, +193% in Ireland). Although not the most concerning impact of future climate change, climate-related weather extremes may threaten the availability and economic accessibility of beer.

IPCC terminology

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I find some of the IPCC terminology interesting. Alternatives analysis and communication of uncertainty are professional interests of mine. I am afraid I am not all that good at them, but when I see the state of the art in scientific communication from the experts sometimes I feel a little better.

Here is a footnote in the Summary for Policy Makers on the terminology they use to try to communicate uncertainty.

A level of confidence is expressed using five qualifiers: very low, low, medium, high and very high, and typeset in italics, for example, medium confidence. The following terms have been used to indicate the assessed likelihood of an outcome or a result: virtually certain 99–100% probability, very likely 90–100%, likely 66 100%, about as likely as not 33–66%, unlikely 0–33%, very unlikely 0–10%, exceptionally unlikely 0–1%. Additional terms (extremely likely 95–100%, more likely than not >50–100%, more unlikely than likely 0–<50%, extremely unlikely 0–5%) may also be used when appropriate. Assessed likelihood is typeset in italics, for example, very likely.

Here are some definitions of scenarios and pathways in Chapter 1 of Global Warming of 1.5 °C.

A ‘scenario’ is an internally consistent, plausible, and integrated description of a possible future of the human–environment system, including a narrative with qualitative trends and quantitative projections (IPCC, 2000). Climate change scenarios provide a framework for developing and integrating emissions, climate change and climate impact projections, including an assessment of their inherent uncertainties. The long-term and multi–faceted nature of climate change requires climate scenarios to describe how assumptions about inherently uncertain socio-economic trends in the 21st century could influence future energy and land use, resulting in emissions, and climate change as well as human vulnerability and exposure to climate change. Such driving forces include population, GDP, technological innovation, governance, and lifestyles. Climate change scenarios are used for analysing and contrasting climate policy choices.

The notion of a ‘pathway’ can have multiple meanings in the climate literature. It is often used to describe the temporal evolution of a set of scenario features, such as GHG emissions and socioeconomic development. As such, it can describe individual scenario components or sometimes be used interchangeably with the word ‘scenario’. For example, the RCPs describe GHG concentration trajectories (van Vuuren et al., 2011) and the SSPs are a set of narratives of societal futures augmented by quantitative projections of socio-economic determinants such as population, GDP, and urbanization (Kriegler et al., 2012; O’Neill et al., 2014). Socio-economic driving forces consistent with any of the SSPs can be combined with a set of climate policy assumptions (Kriegler et al., 2014) that together would lead to emissions and concentration outcomes consistent with the RCPs (Riahi et al., 2017). This is at the core of the scenario framework for climate change research that aims to facilitate creating scenarios integrating emissions and development pathways dimensions (Ebi et al., 2014; van Vuuren et al., 2014).

the new IPCC report

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Here’s the new IPCC report, Global Warming of 1.5 °C. I guess the idea is to show that this amount of warming, which most nations of the world have tentatively agreed to target, is still pretty bad. And the world is not even remotely on the path toward limiting warming to this level.

The report estimates the world has already warmed by about 1.0 degree C on average due to emissions that have already happened. If we stopped emissions today, the world would continue to warm, but warming would peak somewhere between 1.0 and 1.5 degrees C. I think this is an important concept to grasp – the effects that are beginning to be felt now are not the result of emissions happening now, but of past emissions including emissions decades ago. They would continue and get worse even if we stopped emitting today, and not only are we not lowering emissions, we are continuing and even accelerating them. So the problem is potentially one of runaway, exponentially growing consequences and we are only at the very beginning of the curve.

I find the report difficult to distill into key messages. Here are a couple paragraphs on impacts (starting on p. 1-29 if you are following along at home):

 Impacts of climate change are due to multiple environmental drivers besides rising temperatures, such as rising atmospheric CO2, shifting rainfall patterns, rising sea levels, increasing ocean acidification, and extreme events, such as floods, droughts, and heat waves (IPCC, 2014e). For example, changes in rainfall affect the hydrological cycle and water availability (Schewe et al., 2014). Several impacts depend on atmospheric composition, for example, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels leading to changes in plant productivity (Forkel et al., 2016), but also to ocean acidification (Hoegh Guldberg et al., 2007). Other impacts are driven by changes in ocean heat content, for example, the destabilization of coastal ice-sheets and sea-level rise (Bindoff et al., 2007; Chen et al., 2017), whereas impacts due to heat waves depend directly on ambient air or ocean temperature (Matthews et al., 2017). Impacts can be direct, for example, coral bleaching due to ocean warming, and indirect, for example, reduced tourism due to coral bleaching. Indirect impacts can also arise from mitigation efforts such as changed agricultural management (Section 3.6.2) or remedial measures such as solar radiation modification (Section 4.3.8, Cross-Chapter Box 10 in Chapter 4).

Impacts may also be triggered by combinations of factors, including ‘impact cascades’ (Cramer et al., 2014) through secondary consequences of changed systems. Changes in agricultural water availability caused by upstream changes in glacier volume are a typical example. Recent studies also identify compound events (e.g., droughts and heat waves), that is, when impacts are induced by the combination of several climate events (AghaKouchak et al., 2014; Leonard et al., 2014; Martius et al., 2016; Zscheischler and Seneviratne, 2017).

The rest of the report goes into various scenarios and pathways for achieving the 1.5 degrees C limit.

The Summary for Policy Makers has some attempts to convey these concepts in a more graphical way.

The exponential climate action roadmap

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This report from the “Global Climate Action Summit” outlines a plan to actually meet the Paris agreement.

The Paris Agreement’s goal to reduce the risk of dangerous
climate change can be achieved if greenhouse gas emissions
peak by 2020, halve by 2030 and then halve again by 2040
and 2050. This is now technologically feasible and economically
attractive but the world is not on this path.

They identify actions in energy, industry, buildings, transport, food, agricultural, and forestry, as well as carbon capture and storage technology.

Here’s one more paragraph that caught my eye:

If current diffusion rates of renewable energy technology continue into the 2020s, the sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels before 2030 will create “stranded assets” – worthless pipelines, coal mines and oil wells – which could lead to losses on the scale of trillions of dollars by 2035. China and parts of Europe importing fossil fuels stand to benefit most from the bursting carbon bubble, while the US, Canada, Russia and others stand to lose an estimated $4 trillion if climate action falters now and so requiring stronger policies later to avoid catastrophes

August 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • In certain provinces with insurgent activity, the Chinese government is reportedly combining surveillance and social media technologies to score people and send those with low scores to re-education camps, from which it is unclear if anyone returns.
  • Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • The U.S. government is apparently very worried about a severe cyber attack. Also, a talented 11-year-old can hack a voting machine.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

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.”

Simultaneous Policy

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Simultaneous Policy is an idea where multiple legislatures around the world agree to a single policy on a fairly narrow issue (like climate change or arms reductions). It’s supposed to solve the prisoner’s dilemma problem. The policy doesn’t go into effect until all or a certain number of nations agree to it. I think it’s a good idea, but idealistic because people often perceive problems as zero sum when they are not, and politicians either have the same misconceptions or cynically exploit the misconceptions of voters. And in the U.S. of course, politicians are captive to industrial interests that profit from policies that result in a loss to everyone else, while using cynical propaganda to convince voters of the opposite.

Here’s a blog post with a little more detail on how it is supposed to work:

The Simultaneous Policy (SIMPOL) will consist of a series of multi-issue global problem-solving policy packages, each of which is to be implemented by all or sufficient nations simultaneously, on the same date, so that no nation loses out. Citizens who join the campaign can contribute to the design of those policies and to getting them implemented. But how?

By joining the campaign, citizens agree to ‘give strong voting preference in all future national elections to politicians or parties that have signed a pledge to implement Simpol simultaneously alongside other governments, to the probable exclusion of those who choose not to sign’. This pledge (the ‘Pledge’) commits a politician, party or government to implement SIMPOL’s policies alongside other governments, if and when sufficient other governments have also signed on.

In this simple way, politicians who sign enhance their electoral chances, while those who refuse risk losing our votes to politicians who signed instead. Thus, in tightly contested electoral areas, failing to sign could cost a politician their seat.

 

June 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • Explicit taxes to fund wars were the norm in the U.S. right up to the Vietnam war.
  • In technology news, Google and Airbus are considering teaming to build a space catapult. The Hyperloop might be a real thing between Chicago’s downtown and airport.
  • Just under 0.1% of migrants crossing the U.S. border are members of criminal gang such as MS-13. About half of border crossers are from Mexico while the other half are mostly from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Some are fleeing violence or repression, while others are simply looking for economic opportunity.