Tag Archives: climate change

July 2022 in Review

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I have been traveling and unable to overcome my own security features while outside the US. Ironically, during the first time in years I had some significant downtime for reading, thinking, and posting. Not to worry, I thumb-typed out a few posts and am cutting and pasting them now, so the posts should keep rolling in for awhile.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: One way global warming is suppressing crop yields is by damaging pollen.

Most hopeful story: Kernza is a perennial grain with some promise, although yields would have to increase a lot for it to be a viable alternative to annual grains like wheat, corn and rice.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: You can see lightning as much as 100-200 miles away if it is high enough, but the sound from thunder only travels about 15 miles. So if you hear thunder, lightning is close enough to be dangerous and you should take shelter. If you only see lightning far away, you may be able to safely stay outside. Just keep listening.

anti-climate science propaganda techniques

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This article in BBC is about propaganda used by the fossil fuel industry in the 1990s to convince the public to doubt the emerging consensus among climate scientists. Basically, the technique was to find the tiny minority of legitimate scientists with dissenting views, and then heavily publicize those views. Reporters like dissenting views because they are interesting, and when they are being bombarded from all sides by an extremely well-funded campaign, they will tend to present those views as having equal weight to the overwhelming majority view. So the public is not exactly hearing pure lies (although there are certainly some of those, such as statements that there was “no evidence” of human contributions to global warming), but 50% of what they are hearing represents the consensus of 99% of scientists and 50% represents the views of the dissenting 1%.

This is difficult to counter, because scientists are trained to communicate the uncertainty of their work. Corporations behave amorally to maximize their profits, which is interesting because they are comprised of people who generally have some moral scruples. People will behave to maximize their own interests to some extent, but I don’t believe that is the only factor. They will also rationalize their behavior, or they will often lack information about the contribution of their individual role to the bigger picture, which may be an amoral or immoral result.

There are a couple good quotes from Al Gore in the article, including saying climate science propaganda is a crime on the level of World War II war crimes. I would agree with this – the companies that did (and are certainly doing) things like this chose to put the lives and livelihoods of billions of future humans at risk for the sake of maximizing their own wealth in the short term.

climate change and pollen

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It makes intuitive sense to me that heat would reduce crop yields, just by stressing many plants as they try to conserve water and limit evaporation. I hadn’t considered the way heat might affect pollen production and pollinators, but this is also an issue.

But one point is becoming alarmingly clear to scientists: heat is a pollen killer.

Even with adequate water, heat can damage pollen and prevent fertilisation in canola and many other crops, including corn, peanuts, and rice. For this reason, many farmers aim for crops to bloom before the temperature rises…

In fact, heat hinders not only tube growth but other stages of pollen development as well. The result: a pollen grain may never form, or may burst, fail to produce a tube, or produce a tube that explodes. 

BBC

It sounds like research is needed just to hold the line on the crop yields we have now, let alone achieve the increases we need to meet projected population and consumption growth. The more I think about climate change and the broad range of issues it is going to cause, the more I think food may be the most critical issue.

linking climate change to inflation?

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This book review in the Guardian tries to link climate change to inflation. It talks about the costs of storms, fires, and insurance, and impacts of heat on worker productivity. I’m not convinced it is exactly on the mark. Cleaning up from storms can actually stimulate the economy, if they have only local impacts and don’t happen too often. One area’s cost of cleanup creates business and jobs for another area of the economy. The larger economy should be able to absorb these costs if it is healthy. Maybe this is the issue – are the impacts of storms, fires, and floods become geographically widespread and frequent enough that they are taking up a significant amount of our economy’s productive capacity that could be better spent elsewhere? Maybe that is the case, but this article doesn’t address it. I can certainly imagine this being the case if and when major population centers (and economic drivers of our economy) start to be impacted on a regular basis by a combination of severe storms and sea level rise. A major earthquake or volcano could have similar impacts, and while it would have nothing to do with climate change directly, it would happen on top of climate change and we need to be ready for the known risks let alone the unknown ones.

The article doesn’t talk much about food, but along with impacts on coastal cities, a tightening of the food supply relative to population seems like the most obvious and immediate impact of climate change on people. While climate change didn’t cause the Russia-Ukraine war, removing food exports from those two countries from the system has taught us something about how tight the food supply is. Climate change could add up to a similar tightening over a period of time, and remove that slack that we currently have in the system. And then shocks can and will happen on top of the long term trend. It really does not seem like the world is ready.

Ticks – they suck!

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Yes, I know that was quite possibly the worst pun ever. But they really are disgusting, even for those of us who basically like bugs.

Particularly disgusting are types that can form such large clusters that they can bleed a large mammal to death, like a cow or even a moose. They cause many more cases of disease in the U.S. than mosquitoes. The lone star tick can cause a person to develop an allergy to red meat, which is just bizarre. We’ve become kind of desensitized to Lyme disease, but it can be quite dangerous – on a personal note, a cousin of mine who lives in western Pennsylvania was hospitalized with a serious heart condition in the summer of 2020, and it turned out to be Lyme disease – quickly and correctly diagnosed and treated by the way, and he is now fine. I guess that is one up side of it being so common and widespread – even during the height of Covid-19 in 2020 when someone came into an emergency room with Covid-like symptoms, it was correctly tested for, diagnosed, and treated.

My cousin thinks he acquired Lyme disease in his yard, and according to Vox, this is a more common way to acquire it than hiking in the woods. So you can’t avoid it by just staying out of the woods.

The Vox article says scientists are pretty sure habitat fragmentation plays a role – deer and mice love lots of fragments and edge habitat, and meanwhile their predators do not, and people generally do not want the predators among them.

And finally, the article says the jury is out on how climate change is affecting ticks, but their ranges are generally expanding and milder winters are probably playing a role.

Ticks have made nature less fun, and that is what sucks most of all, if you ask me.

food crisis moves off the business page

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I’ve been thinking that when the food shortage headlines move off the (proverbial at this point) business pages and on to the (equally proverbial) front page, the situation may be coming to a head. Well, here is an Associated Press article on the subject (link is to the Philadelphia Inquirer but you can probably find the article elsewhere).

The Treasury Department announced that several global development banks are “working swiftly to bring to bear their financing, policy engagement, technical assistance” to prevent starvation prompted by the war, rising food costs and climate damage to crops.

Tens of billions will be spent on supporting farmers, addressing the fertilizer supply crisis, and developing land for food production, among other issues. The Asian Development Bank will contribute funds to feeding Afghanistan and Sri Lanka and the African Development Bank will use $1.5 billion to assist 20 million African farmers, according to Treasury…

As part of the effort to address the crisis, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will convene meetings in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. over the next two days focusing on food insecurity.

Philadelphia Inquirer

So the issue has not just moved from the business pages to news pages, it has moved from the Treasury Department to the State Department. You could say this situation has developed among a perfect storm of pandemic, climate change-driven droughts and storms, and now an unexpected war. But we live in a world where apparently supply was tight enough that the food system was not ready to absorb these shocks. Now the question becomes are we approaching physical/environmental limits for how much food the world can support, or can we boost production by opening up more land and dumping more fertilizer on it? And even if the latter is true, what is the lag time to make that happen compared to the time scale of the current crisis? And even if we solve these short term issues, are we preparing for the risks in the future? Is the current situation truly something so extreme we could not reasonably have prepared for it, or is it a magnitude of risk we should be expecting in an compromised biosphere and we need to be preparing for next time?

food and commodities

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Articles about the “commodities market” are a bit brain twisting if you’re not in that biz. For example:

When you buy or sell a financial commodity product by a future on the exchange like the London Metal Exchange, you just pay a fee, an initiation margin call, and then your broker buys on your behalf the full position. If the market moves against you, you pay a bit more margin, and if the market goes in your favor, you get a bit more money from your broker. As the market was starting to go up, the Big Shot position was underwater and the brokers were demanding more money from this position. When the whole market is caught in that situation, we get a short squeeze, which forces everyone who was betting on the downside to buy back their positions because they are facing billions of dollars of margin calls. It got to a point where the market went up 250 percent in about thirty-six hours, with margin calls in the billions. The exchange had no option but to shut down trading. This is a very unusual situation; it only happens once every few decades that a major commodity market has to shut down.

What if a similar situation were to happen in the oil, wheat, or gas market? What would be the consequences for the global economy? Are the commodity traders and the commodity exchanges “too big to fail”? Their failure will bring chaos to the global economy not through the credit channel but through the real economy, perhaps through shortages or crippling high prices.

Phenomenal World (which I never heard of, but this is a transcript of an interview with a Bloomberg reporter)

So this is how the first warnings of a serious global food crisis could come out. So watch the digital equivalent of the business pages.

country-specific warming trends and projections

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Berkeley Earth has country-specific warming trends to date and projections to 2100. The accelerated warming predicted from here on out is startling, particularly if emissions continue to increase. I figure we can use air conditioning, but the biggest issues are going to be loss of places where food can be grown, and massive migration pressure. It seems too late to stop this, but making it less bad than it could be is more urgent than ever.

climate migration modeling

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Here is one new article on U.S. climate migration modeling, but I wasn’t able to access the conclusions. Going back to this 2020 article, which at least lets you stare at the pictures, major coastal cities like greater Boston, greater New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia, D.C., Jacksonville, Miami, and of course New Orleans are going to be in serious trouble by 2100. Population simulations show a lot of people just migrating inland a county or two, so maybe that is the form the evolution of our cities will take if sea level rise is relatively slow and gradual – protection of a few iconic/historical coastal areas perhaps, coupled with intensifying suburban sprawl in surrounding counties within the metro area? This sounds relatively undramatic, although bland and uninteresting and wasteful of both land and energy. Land use policies, such as zoning and green belts, could be overhauled now in anticipation, or we can just let this happen willy nilly.

It is not clear to me if these articles consider immigration, but I imagine there will be immigration pressure and we could also think about how to handle that in a smart way – which luckily our political system is just awesome at!

where to escape climate change in the U.S.

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I have been thinking about the Great Lakes states, but Vermont and New Hampshire seem to be popular according to this Wired article. The article focuses on anecdotal accounts of people leaving western states following wildfires, and not picking Texas because it is “too hot”. I don’t know Vermont and New Hampshire well, but the Appalachian areas I am familiar with from Virginia to Pennsylvania are subject to pretty severe flooding in intense storms. So you can’t necessarily avoid all risk. But moving somewhere not too close to the coast, with reasonable water resources, farther north or at a higher elevation seems like a good idea. Or just live wherever you want, but rent and let somebody else take on the risk. One might also want to avoid major fault lines and volcanoes, another strike against the U.S. west coast.