“If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW,” says the Telegraph’s James Delingpole.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss “repetitive, false data of higher temperatures.”

The National Review’s Chris Horner salivates, “The blue-dress moment may have arrived.”

“The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century,” blares Michelle Malkin.

The Australia Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims the emails are “proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in moderrn [sic] science.”

So, do these emails and documents represent proof of a “conspiracy” and “scandal”? At this point it seems highly unlikely, and the more that people look at the illegally-obtained emails and documents, the less likely it will become. Here’s why.

First, there has been much ado made about some emails that supposedly talk about “tricks” and procedures to “hide the decline”, as well as other words used that indicate that the CRU scientists (and their various correspondents) were lying about their data (something that RealClimate discusses). And it’s much ado about nothing (with apologies to Shakespeare). I work in electrical engineering where I use words and phrases that, taken out of context, could be misinterpreted as nefarious by people who are ignorant of the context or who have an axe to grind. For example, I regularly talk about “fiddling with” or “twiddling” the data, “faking out” something, “messing around with” testing, and so on. In the first case, I’m analyzing the data to see if I can make it make sense or if I can extract the signal from the noise. In the second case, I’m often forced to force a piece of electronics into a specific mode manually so I can test it and verify some other function, or I use the phrase to provide artificial test data for calibration and/or verification that my electronics are working correctly. And in the third case, it usually involves trying to deduce whether a problem is caused by the electronic board I;m testing or by the equipment that is doing the testing.

Second, it might be unpolitical to say that you’ll be happy when someone died, or that Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts are pricks and assholes, but that doesn’t make the statements a scandal. I personally was happy when former Senator Jesse Helms died, and I will probably enjoy a drink of expensive scotch when Marc Morano, James Inhofe, and Steve Milloy kick the bucket. And I’ve got no problem calling someone like Joe D’Aleo a liar or Steve Milloy an oxygen thief. If that makes me a bad person, well, I’m OK with that. I expect that most people hold enough contempt for some of their enemies to relish it when they die. So it’s not political and it’s not nice or decent, but it’s also not scandalous. It’s still human, and scientists are just as human as anyone else.

Third and probably most importantly, no matter how much the deniers scream, these emails aren’t likely to reveal any evidence of scientific malfeasance. And even if they do, there’s an entire globe of researchers whose independent research has bolstered the case that climate disruption is real and that it’s predominantly caused by human civilization. It will take more than even a couple of thousand emails to knock the massive, reinforced scientific foundation that underlies anthropogenic climate disruption.

And let’s not forget – the emails and documents were obtained illegally. If there is truly damning information (such as a critical scientist or three overtly saying stuff along the lines of “I fudged my data and nobody caught me. You lost the bet – pay up.”), then the illegality of the release will fade somewhat in the face of other data. But if not, this hack will be a major problem for not only the hackers who released it but also for all the people who are republishing the emails. Hacking is illegal, but in some states and countries, releasing private email correspondence is considered breach of privacy and is thus also a crime.

Finally, let’s point out that some of the people here screaming the loudest from their soapboxes are hypocrites (such as Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey). If the hackers had got into military computers and released private communications, they’d be screaming for the hackers’ blood and demanding that any site republishing the emails be brought up on federal charges. But here they’re screaming for the victim’s blood. If hacking and leaking emails is wrong, then it’s wrong. Claiming that it’s wrong when a leak targets your friends but OK when it targets your enemy makes you a hypocrite and a political hack worthy of nothing but disdain.

There’s a chance that the hack will end the career of a scientists or two, probably for political reasons. But the supposedly damning emails the conservatives and deniers are touting are nothing of the sort. And given how strong the science is, it can survive this latest round of denier dirty tricks.

For anyone interested, here’s a link to a Memeorandum page where there’s lots of links about this topic.

• Independent statisticians reject recent global cooling claims in blind analysis
• Melting glaciers releasing pollutants from decades ago
• IEA: climate treaty necessary to keep energy prices low
• Floating cities as a response to sea level rise
• American Physical Society rejects changes to climate change statement

Climate disruption deniers have been claiming for years now that the global temperature has been cooling down, even though the temperature data clearly shows that it isn’t. Scientists and statisticians have pointed out that, mathematically speaking, the recent reduced warming trend is well within the noise, or put another way, it’s weather, not climate.

A new report by the Associated Press reveals what many of us knew already – the denier’s claims don’t hold water, statistically speaking. The report is intriguing because the AP provided their data to four independent statisticians without telling them what it was, and all four found that the slower warming of the past decade was statistically insignificant with respect to the actual data.

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

“If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect,” said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.

Furthermore, the data that the AP sent to the statistician came from two different sources – the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), run by NOAA, and the satellite data preferred by climate disruption deniers that is generated by scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In both cases, the statisticians found no statistically significant trends over the last ten years.

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

Saying there’s a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers.

Identifying a downward trend is a case of “people coming at the data with preconceived notions,” said Peterson, author of the book “Why Did They Do That? An Introduction to Forensic Decision Analysis.” (emphasis mine)

The AP interviewed Don Easterbrook, who claimed that “We started the cooling trend after 1998. You’re going to get a different line depending on which year you choose.” According to one of the statisticians, the fact that you have to choose 1998 as your starting point in order to observe a (statistically insignificant) cooling trend is part of the problem.

Grego produced three charts to show how choosing a starting date can alter perceptions. Using the skeptics’ satellite data beginning in 1998, there is a “mild downward trend,” he said. But doing that is “deceptive.”

The trend disappears if the analysis starts in 1997. And it trends upward if you begin in 1999, he said.

This is what’s referred to in statistics as “endpoint sensitivity,” and it’s the main reason that climate disruption deniers like Easterbrook can appear and sound so reasonable when they’re actually misusing or misunderstanding the data.

———-

Melting glaciers releasing pollutants from decades ago

A study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology has revealed a new and troubling aspect to climate disruption – as glaciers melt, they are releasing persistent organic pollutants like DDT, PCBs, other pesticides, and synthetic musks (chemicals that mask body odor).

The scientists studied the annual sediment layers in a high alpine lake in Switzerland and found that there the annual flux of pollutants varied consistently across all the studied pollutants – the fluxes started low in the 1950s, peaked in the 1960s and 70s, dropped off again in the 1980s, and then rose to a new peak in the late 1990s. But in the case of all the pollutants except for musks, the production of the pollutants ceased by 1986 at the latest, and the musks have been in constant production globally since the late 1980s. The image at right illustrates these peaks for the various pollutants the scientists studied.

According to the study, the first peak corresponds closely to when the production of the various pollutants peaked, either in Switzerland or in continental Europe. That peak likely is a result of airborne delivery of the pollutant, either by way of dust or precipitation depositing the pollution in the lake and surrounding land directly. But since there has been no production (or constant production) of the pollutants in decades, it’s extremely unlikely that dust or rain/snow is responsible for the second peak.

In addition, the authors compare the results from the high alpine, glacial melt-fed lake to several other lower altitude lakes. The comparison shows that the low altitude lakes do not show the same spike in pollutants in the late 1990s that the alpine lake does, but they do show similar dust/precipitation driven spikes in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

As a result, the authors’ hypothesized that glacial ice had been accumulating pollutants since the 1960s and 70s and then started releasing those pollutants into the lake as the pollution-laden ice melted. And given the strength of their data, they’re almost certainly correct.

The ramifications of this are significant. Other studies have found recent increases in pollutants around the world even though the production of those pollutants stopped decades ago. Pesticides have been discovered in alpine lakes in the Italian Alps and the Canadian Rockies, and Antarctic penguins have been found to have old DDT in their bodies. If this result holds for other glacially-fed lakes around the world (and there’s no reason to believe that the results won’t hold), then the dangerous pollutants that environmentalists thought had largely been phased out will return and could cause similar ecological damage as they caused decades ago (DDT-thinned eggshells, fishing limitations due to PCBs, etc.). And all as a result of glacier melt that has been caused or enhanced by climate disruption-driven warming. And the results of the study point out that the pollutants present in the studied lake are not likely to be everything that the glacier holds:

The burden of pollutants in Lake Oberaar sediment due to glacier melting is already in the same range as the earlier accumulation from direct atmospheric input. The undiminished increase of the fluxes of many organohalogens into the sediment of Lake Oberaar does not yet prefigure an exhaust of the glacial inventory of these contaminants.

In other words, the environmental toll of these pollutants isn’t over yet by a long shot.

———-

IEA: climate treaty necessary to keep energy prices low

There are many reasons to address climate disruption, ranging from saving species to reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil to reducing the chance of catastrophic drought. The economy is usually not considered to be one of the reasons, especially by those who have a vested interest in maintaining their own profits at the expense of the environment and global climate. However, there are those who say that addressing climate change is critical to maintaining a healthy future economy. According to a new Reuters article, we can now add to that small but growing list the International Energy Administration (IEA).

Reuters interviewed Fatih Birol, author of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, and he said that the world needed to work towards a carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration of no higher than 450 ppm in order to keep energy costs from skyrocketing by 2030. According to Birol’s estimates, Europe alone would see energy prices increase by 300% over the average of what Europe paid over the last 30 years, from $160 billion per year to $500 billion.

Birol’s also estimates that oil prices will reach $100 per barrel by 2015 and $190 per barrel by 2030. Given that there is evidence that the high oil prices of 2008 were part of what caused the global recession, this should make the U.S. and other oil dependent countries nervous. And the global oversupply of natural gas that is keeping prices low in the U.S. this year won’t last – Birol estimates that the demand for natural gas by 2030 will far outstrip supply.

The Guardian is reporting that an anonymous IEA whistleblower is claiming that US pressure has been applied to redefine the point at which peak oil occurs. If this is true and can be verified, then peak oil is probably much closer than previously expected and Birol’s estimates are very likely optimistic. Similarly, Reuters doesn’t discuss whether Birol has any coal estimates or not, but the USGS has pointed out that the U.S. could be approaching “peak coal” as well, after which the price of energy would skyrocket.

Diversifying energy out of carbon-based fossil fuels makes sense from an environmental perspsective, from a climate disruption perspective, from a green jobs perspective, and from an economic perspective. All that remains is for the world’s governments to accept that it makes sense from a political perspective as well.

———-

Floating cities as a response to sea level rise

Some ideas are just too cool and deserve mention just because they’re cool. According to the NYTimes blog Green Inc., the Dutch are designing floating cities to replace or augment land-based cities as the global sea level rises over the next few centuries. The floating cities would be connected to each other and to the mainland via floating highways and rail lines. According to the article, the designers plan to use the ocean to help moderate the cities’ temperatures in much the same way as ground source heat pump does – pump cold water up from the depths beneath the city in order to cool it efficiently.

In case you’re not convinced that concrete can be made to float, there are floating bridges across Lake Washington in Seattle – the glacially-carved lake is far too deep to drive pilings into the lake bed to support the bridge, so it floats instead.

The first floating proof-of-concept residences in a Rotterdam residential neighborhood are expected to be available in 2010.

———-

American Physical Society rejects changes to climate change statement

Earlier this year, a small group of American Physical Society (APS) members requested that the APS change it’s official statement on climate change. This statement reads:

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

A committee was appointed by the Council earlier this year to determine if the latest science justified any changes to the statement. According to the official APS press release, the committee recommended that no changes be made, and on November 8, the Council of the American Physical Society “overwhelmingly” rejected the proposed changes to the 2007 statement on climate change.

Appointed by APS President Cherry Murray and chaired by MIT Physicist Daniel Kleppner, the committee examined the statement during the past four months. Dr. Kleppner’s committee reached its conclusion based upon a serious review of existing compilations of scientific research. APS members were also given an opportunity to advise the Council on the matter. On Nov. 8, the Council voted, accepting the committee’s recommendation to reject the proposed statement and refer the original statement to POPA for review.

The APS has over 47,000 members, of which only 206 appear to have signed the petition to the APS Council. That’s about 0.4% of the APS membership. According to the 2009 “Six Americas” study by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communications, fully 18% of Americans are either doubtful or dismissive of climate disruption. If those numbers applied to the 47,000 members of the APS, we could expect almost 8500 signatories to the APS petition.

There are three possible interpretations of this difference:

1. Physicists may be less willing to sign online petitions for whatever reason(s).
2. Physicists may actually be more knowledgeable of the science and mathematics than the average American (or less easily swayed by denial industry-manufactured FUD) and thus they accept the overwhelming scientific data to date.
3. Both 1 & 2

My best guess is that it’s probably option #3. But even so, I doubt that reticence to sign petitions accounts for a 45x difference from physicists to the general population.

Image credits:
Geophysical Research Letters
Environmental Science & Technology
Delft University, via Green Inc

In the introduction to Last Chance – Preserving Life on Earth, author Larry J. Schweiger, the CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, comes right out and says that he’s not trying to change minds with this book. Instead, it’s his hope that the book will motivate millions of people to transform their concerns over global warming into activism.

There are three sections to the book that can be summarized as follows. First, the latest science says that disruptions due to climate change will be worse and happen faster than the best estimates of even a couple of years ago. Second, there are a few global ecosystems that are more sensitive than even average, and there are people who don’t want you to know that and who actively work to keep you ignorant of the facts. And third, there are a few things we can do to help ourselves and the Earth.

People who are familiar with the state of climate science will not read much new in the first section of Last Chance. It briefly recounts key moments in the history of climate science – the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and it’s four Assessment Reports, the discovery of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) by Scripps Scientist Charles Keeling, the concern over climate “tipping points.” As a result of global warming, Schweiger points out that we are likely facing an irrecoverable loss in Arctic sea ice, the potential for massive methane hydrate releases, and the loss of millions of acres of forests to insects like the pine beetle and to massive drought-induced forest fires. Furthermore, Schweiger points out that the increasing global temperatures are causing massive losses in Greenland ice and, as a result, raising the global sea level.

And Schweiger supports all his claims with references to peer-reviewed papers, sections of the NASA, NOAA, and EPA websites, and media reports.

In recounting the devastation that has already happened, and thus is representative of what will likely happen in the future, Schweiger focuses on invasive species in Lake Erie and the political machinations that polar bear supporters have endured in the process of trying to get the bears listed as an Endangered Species. And he calls out to the outdoorsmen in all of us with his descriptions of changes in the life cycles of horseshoe crab, sea turtles, and pronghorn antelope, all of which are seriously threatened by global warming.

But he doesn’t stop there. Schweiger fingers journalists and the mainstream news media as being complicit in the world’s unwillingness to address global warming. He believes that advertising dollars and short-term-profit hungry media companies are making editorial decisions about what stories to run based on perceptions of whether the ensuing controversy is worth the loss of advertising revenue. In addition, Schweiger suggests that newsroom cuts to experienced journalists and expensive investigative reporters are coupling with a loss of “public interest” reporting to essentially dumb down media just as global warming is heating up to a level that calls out for experienced communicators.

Schweiger wraps up his book with a detailed call to action. Support electric cars powered over a smart grid from renewable sources of electricity. Make your homes and workplaces as energy efficient as possible. And support those politicians who act on these issues with money and your vote. Schweiger also condemns industrial farming as being destructive to the topsoil and recommends that people support local, small and mid-size farms that farm using sustainable agricultural practices that keep soil nutritious and alive. And finally, he calls for the reader to educate themselves and those around them – family, friends, coworkers, media sources, even political representatives – about the real dangers of global warming.

Last Chance isn’t a catastrophe tale, even though Schweiger makes it clear that catastrophe will very likely be in our future if we don’t address global warming. Instead, it’s a call to action for those readers who recognize how much global warming will change their lives and the lives of their descendants for many generations to come. And Schweiger provides recommended action plans to ease implementing the various recommendations that he makes throughout Last Chance.

All in all, Last Chance is a good book for those readers who are already convinced of the seriousness of global warming, want to have their understanding reinforced, and who want to take more action but don’t know how. But it’s not a book to convince anyone to do something they weren’t already inclined to do.

One of the challenges that the authors had was the fact that few available previous studies didn’t show correlation between the amount of CO₂ in the air and the global climate prior to the start of ice core data. The authors hypothesized that this was a problem with the other datasets and developed a set of tests to check their hypothesis.

First they found two sites in the Pacific where they concluded – based on prior published studies – that the effects on marine sediments would be relatively unchanged over the last 20 million years due to specific geologic and oceanographic factors (limited upwelling, geologic stability, low biological productivity, et al). And they measured three different proxies from marine fossils that enabled them to estimate pH, sea surface temperature, and the amount of CO₂ in the water.

Then they compared their results to the ice core data in order to estimate the accuracy of their measurements. What they found was that their reconstruction of the amount of CO₂ in the air independently reproduced the ice core measurements to within the known error in the ice core measurements themselves. The importance of this fact was mentioned specifically in the paper:

[F]ew pCO₂ proxies have replicated the ice core data of the past 0.8 Ma. (NOTE: “pCO₂” is defined as the partial pressure of CO₂ and is thus a measurement of the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere. “Ma” is a shorthand unit for “millions of years ago.”)

As a result of this new reconstruction, the authors claim that “[r]esults for the Miocene and Late Pliocene support a close coupling between pCO₂ and climate.”

In addition, the paper finds that a climatic optimum from 14-16 million years ago have the highest estimated CO₂ concentrations in the paper’s data, and that during the optimum is the only period in the entire 20 million year dataset that has higher CO₂ concentrations than the present.

The authors don’t claim to have answered everything, and like all good scientists, they point out that they haven’t proven causation, only shown very high correlation. Attribution studies to determine whether CO₂ was a cause, an effect, or both will require more research.

Even so, the paper has a number of important conclusions. First, the data supports “the hypothesis that greenhouse gas forcing was an important modulator of climate over [the past 20 million years] via direct and indirect effects.” Second, the new reconstruction has sufficient resolution to define rough thresholds of CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere for different degrees of ice sheet size and stability, and thus sea level. Specifically, the last time that there was this much CO₂ in the air, there was little to no sea ice in the Arctic, Greenland had little to no ice, there was essentially no ice on West Antarctica, and even East Antarctica was mostly ice-free. And finally, the reconstruction may indicate that the global climate is highly sensitive to the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

At the climate optimum described in the study, “global surface temperatures were on average 3 to 6°C warmer than present.” If this study’s results are corroborated, then this paleoclimate reconstruction will be yet another study supporting the widespread understanding that climate is very sensitive to CO₂ concentrations. In addition, the study will stand out as another example of “climate disruption is worse than we figured” as it points to the near complete melting of both Greenland and both sides of Antarctica. That would raise sea level by nearly 70 meters (~230 feet).

Other studies have shown that it takes hundreds to thousands of years for that much ice to melt, but if it starts this century, there may not be much humanity can do about it but move inland.

Thanks to lead author Dr. Tripati for a review copy of her paper. For the supplemental online information, click here.

Image Credits:
Powerline
W Berner/University of Bern, via NewScientist.com

Here are two very different, but simultaneously very effective, examples of climate messaging. First, the negative.

And now the positive.

Which works (better) for you, and why?

What’s worse is you’ve got a pediatrician appointment today for both of your kids – their asthma is acting up and the drugs aren’t working as well as they should be. Furthermore, your son is still recovering from a case of malaria he picked up, probably from a mosquito bite he got during the pee wee football game by the reservoir a couple of months ago. At least the rains will damp down on your environmental allergies some today. Better rain, even flooding, than the dust storm that blew through the area a couple of weeks ago. That caused several major pileups and fouled up ventilation so bad that some of the buildings downtown are still closed..

As you pull together breakfast for the family, there’s no milk because it’s too expensive. Most of the local dairies were forced to close down over the last few years as the drought reduced the cows’ milk production. The few diaries that survived can charge almost as much as they want to since the supply is far lower than the demand. The same is true of eggs and cheese, although beef has been cheaper recently as dairy cows are slaughtered for their meat in a last-ditch effort to pay off drought-driven debts.

You take the kids to their appointments and find out that your son’s malaria isn’t quite gone yet – it’s apparently a strain that’s become resistant to the more common, and cheaper, anti-malarial drugs. The next course of drugs is not only more expensive, but also has more side effects that will make it harder for your son to be effective in school. Both kids’ asthma is doing OK, but the pediatrician points out for the third time that you might want to consider moving out of the suburbs and into a rural area with cleaner air. Unfortunately, because of your spouse’s job, that’s just not possible. And with the chronic conditions you and the kids have, you need the company’s good health insurance.

After dropping off the kids at school, you head to the grocery store. The produce section is half the size that it was just a few years ago, and all the produce you do see is expensive – almost all of it was shipped in from out of state. Over the last three months there have been two e. coli recalls of produce from out-of-state farms where the water got polluted, and there have been dozens of others over the last few years. You’ve tried to grow a garden yourself to supplement the meager grocery store selection, but growth issues and the drought has forced your town to go on strict water restrictions. It doesn’t help that the garden plants always seem to be out-competed by the invasive weeds in your yard. The bindweed and thistle have grown largely immune to the commercially avaialble herbicides.

There have been several large dry lightning-sparked wildfires recently that tore through mountain communities. As a result, the insurance companies gave up on insuring homes in the mountains. The regional wildfire fighting coordination office had to give up on fighting fires – there is just too much fuel and temperatures have been too high for safe fire suppression, and when the city’s conserving every drop of water for human consumption, using city water to fight wildfires just was not possible. As a result, your neighbors were driven out of their beloved mountains down to the suburbs where they could be safe and get homeowners insurance.

Your neighbors’ daughter is in the U.S. Air Force, piloting an armed drone patrolling the Mexican border as air cover for the Border Patrol. There’s been a massive influx of immigrants and refugees from Central and South America recently, and even though the Border Patrol is now three times the size it was in the early 2000’s, there’s still not enough agents to police the border without military help. She’s worried that she’ll be deployed soon to southern Europe as back-up for our allies’ efforts at keeping the EU from being overwhelmed by Turks, Arabs, and Africans pouring northward. There have been a few brushfire wars recently, but most of Africa and parts of the Middle East are looking more and more like a powder keg just waiting for the right spark. As a result of the worsening national security situation, taxes have skyrocketed to pay for the large military required to maintain all the active deployments. Worse yet, there’s a chance that your neighbors’ daughter might be deployed to guard the Venezuelan oil fields that the previous President “annexed” in support of U.S national security interests and that the Venezuelans are resisting as an invasion and occupation.

After dinner, you let the kids stay up late for the first time in months – the flooding dumped enough water into the reservoirs and local streams that the power plants have enough water to operate all day instead of shutting down or operating on a rolling blackout schedule. You wish now you hadn’t voted to approve the nuclear plant (or elected the public utilities commissioners who approved the increase in your electricity rates to pay for it), since it’s no better than the coal plants – they all need so much water for cooling that just hasn’t been there the last few years. Well, until today’s flooding, anyway. So you let the kids enjoy the special treat.

———-

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, one of the largest peer-reviewed studies of climate science performed to date, a scenario similar to that described above is 90% likely. More recent scientific data suggests that the IPCC’s conclusions about the severity of climate disruption were overly conservative. As a result, both the IPCC’s projections for climatic upheavals later this century and their 90% confidence in those projections are very likely under-estimates of the severity of the problem.

Knowing all of this, how much would you spend on an insurance policy that lowers the chances that the overly conservative scenario described above happens? How much is your quality of life, your family’s health, your friend’s well being, your lower tax rate, worth to you? 1% of your annual income? 5%? 10%? More? Or nothing at all?

In 2008, the average American spent approximately 16% of their salary on health, home, car, and life insurance premiums¹. That’s a huge amount of money. The reason people pay that much is because they want to be insured against the likelihood of something horrible and expensive occurring. And the more likely something is, combined with how expensive it it is, the more we pay in insurance.

The table below illustrates the difference^{2, 3}:

The table clearly shows that Americans pay the most overall money for our health insurance, but given how high the risk of needing the insurance is (estimated at 100% in a given year), the risk value metric is actually pretty good.

What the table doesn’t show, however, is that we have homeowners or renters insurance not because of the average claim, but because the small chance of a severe financial loss is still risky. The table below illustrates this point:

Remember, insurance premiums cost the average American 16% of their annual salary in order to insure against future financial losses that could be, but usually aren’t, extraordinarily high. So the question is how much should the world be willing to pay in order to insure against future financial losses?

As was mentioned above, the likelihood of substantial risk is at least 90%, with more recent studies than the 2007 IPCC report saying that the risk is actually higher. The next question has to be “how much is the future financial risk” of doing nothing?

A University of Oregon analysis estimated 4% as the bare minimum cost of doing nothing. An International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) study estimated that the benefit:cost ratio of addressing climate change was at least 8:1. Recent worst-case estimates (discussed below) say that the annual GWP cost of addressing climate disruption is approximately 3%, so the IIED study says that the cost of doing nothing could be as much as 24% of GWP. This number is similar to that calculated by the Stern Review (which, not coincidentally, is what the IIED used as their baseline) back in 2006. The lowest estimates of the cost of doing nothing are in the range of 1-2% of GWP, and a few scientists have suggested that the upper range of the cost could literally be the end of human civilization.

As for the cost of mitigation, aka climate insurance, a recently released study by the E3 Network calculated how much money the world would have to spend in order to return the carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the Earth’s air to a recent estimate of a “safe” level – 350 parts per million (ppm). The study reviewed the available literature and found that the worst case estimate was 3.0% of global gross domestic product (aka gross world product, GWP), and the E3N models estimated the estimate put the cost at approximately 2.5% of GWP.

The table below compares the insurance paid by Americans to three projected climate costs vs. risks.

Notice that Americans pay more in premiums than they get in benefits (ie claims), so the risk divided by the expense is less than 1. The difference represents insurance company profits, and clearly Americans are willing to pay for the comfort that insurance gives them. The table also shows that the risk of significant damage due to climate disruption divided by the global expense of addressing climate disruption varies from 0.33 to 100, and in five out of the six cases shown above, the future financial risk that is effectively insured equals or significantly exceeds the cost of insurance.

To put this all into perspective, the GDP of the U.S economy in 2008 was about $14.4 trillion. 16% of that (the money spent on average for insurance) is a little less than $2.6 trillion. According to the World Bank, the GWP was just over $60 trillion in 2008. The percentage of the global economy that is likely at risk is 24%, or $14.4 trillion. And the economists are estimating that the cost of insuring against losses that could equal the size of the entire U.S. economy will be no more than 3% of GWP, or $1.8 trillion.

In other words, for less money that the U.S. spends on insuring itself, the entire globe could be insured against climate disruption. Then imagine taking your four favorite cities in the world – and then erasing one.

And for another dose of reality, the United States is presently arguing over spending money to insure the U.S. against climate disruption to the tune of 0.25% to 3.5% of GDP (ACES analysis by the CBO). 0.25% to 3.5% of U.S. GDP in 2008 would be between $36 and $500 billion ($0.5 trillion)⁴. That’s well below what the U.S. already pays for insurance and is several hundred billion dollars less than the financial bailouts.

Ultimately, the analysis of what the U.S. already pays to voluntarily insure itself against future losses illustrates that insuring the global economy against future financial losses makes economic sense. After all, Americans already pay more to insure against smaller future losses that have a smaller chance of occurring than does climate disruption.

If the U.S. is willing to insure itself against future financial losses due to damage to home, vehicle, and health, then there’s no good reason why the U.S. and the world should be unwilling to insure themselves against future financial losses due to climate disruption.

———-

¹ According to the national car insurance comparison site CarInsurance.com, the national average annual premium for car insurance was $1,600 in 2008. According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the national average premium for homeowners insurance was around $800, although it varies widely from state to state. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the annual cost of health care per person in the U.S. is nearly $5,300. Life insurance premiums vary so widely that it’s difficult to come up with a solid number, but $300 per year is a reasonable estimate. The total from this estimate is $8,000.

Average salary was derived from 2008 Census Bureau data.

² Derived from the Federal Highway Administration and the National Highway Transportation Safety Board, and the Insurance Industry Institute. Percentage is defined by the number of collisions divided by the total number of private, commercial, and publicly-owned vehicles on the road. Average Insurance claim is the total for all claim types (injury, collision, comprehensive, and property damage) divided by the number of accidents.

³ “Risk value” is a term defined for this analysis only. While the insurance industry undoubtedly has its own metrics, this metric is my own and may or may not be equivalent to an official industry metric.

⁴ This “cost” is not an accurate accounting of the actual costs to the economy. This money would be circulating in the economy still, but would not be going to the interests that it goes to presently, especially oil and coal companies and coal-burning utilities. Instead, the money would be directed toward energy and carbon-efficient companies. As a result, the argument in Congress is clearly not one of economics, but rather a battle between entrenched, old-energy interests protecting their profits and influence and up-and-coming, new energy interests hoping to gain profits and influence.

In fact, this entire analysis illustrates that the reasons behind opposing insuring the world against losses due to climate disruption are neither scientific nor economic. Instead, the reasons are ideology, profit, and political power.

We have a carbon dioxide problem that is seriously destabilizing multiple, interdependent systems. The carbon dioxide is the result of harvesting ancient plant matter to burn the hydrogen it contains. The carbon contained in the ancient plant matter doesn’t burn, so it remains after the hydrogen combustion and combines with oxygen in the atmosphere. In essence, the carbon is a waste product, i.e. trash.

We have mountains of trash. We flush gallons of water down the toilet with a small amount of urine and turn potable water into waste. We define ourselves by what we own, which must be manufactured and produces waste in the process. And much of what we own is disposable, turned into waste in short order and replaced with something that’s creation generated waste.

Waste is everywhere, but that is the way of the life. I generate carbon waste by breathing. Plants pollute their environment with oxygen. And together we get along nicely, because i happen to require plant waste as an input for living and plants happen to require my waste. Look around anywhere, it’s happening from the micro to the macro. One thing’s shit is another thing’s staff of life. It’s the way of the universe, or God’s plan, or whatever you choose to call it. I call it elegance.

That’s not what happens with most of our waste, and that’s the fundamental problem. The loops aren’t closed. In the grand scheme of things we had better start working on closing them, because they’ll close with us or without us. If they close themselves it is likely to be without us, or at least the vast majority of us.

On a more practical level, i think of a man i used to know who lived through WWII in Central Europe and spent time in a Soviet P.O.W. camp; he became very successful and money was not much of an object. Yet at the end of every meal he could be found nibbling the last bits of fat and gristle from a bone, not just the bone from his plate but every bone at the table. Though he was as wasteful as the rest of us in many other ways, he knew the want of of an empty stomach and he was determined to avoid it.

We’re in the unenviable position of needing to imagine what our wants will be if we continue to waste so profligately. Take a long walk somewhere beautiful. Watch your children.  Think about your next meal. That’s what’s at stake. If we refuse to conserve what we were given, our children and grandchildren will make their home in our trash. There is no way around the fact that if we put something into the environment that does not constitute the input of another life process, then we will eat it, drink it or breathe it.

I used to marvel at a meal of pork in Korea. It started with people segregating their kitchen scraps and depositing them in a drum outside the apartment building. Pig farmers gathered the drums and in the end i’d tuck into a meal of my own kitchen waste. We need many more of that sort of closed-loop answer, though they won’t all be so simple. Complex solutions will be required to address our present circumstances, but they’ll all boil down to waste not want not.

You don’t have to believe in global warming to realize that today’s waste will be tomorrow’s want. You do need the desire to conserve what you’ve been blessed with so that you may pass it on to your descendants. (Call it generating long-term wealth if you like.) It’s about our values. And frankly, if our values put politics and accumulating material wealth above the health and well being of our children then we really don’t deserve what we have, but we do deserve what we’ll get.

• Tipping points will be difficult to identify
• U.S. Chamber of Commerce President complains about environmentalists
• Barrels instead of bottles
• Ocean acidification to turn parts of the Arctic Ocean corrosive by 2018
• El Niño and its relationship to ocean heat content

Is the Earth’s climate approaching a critical transition, aka a “tipping point,” beyond which major and largely unpredictable climate changes are guaranteed to occur? At this point, scientists do not know the answer to that question. A study published in the journal Nature aims to explain the mathematics of critical transitions beyond just the Earth’s climate and in the process, determine if there are early-warning signals that indicate when a complex system is about to undergo a critical transition.

According to the paper, every complex system, whether it be climate, asthma attacks and epileptic seizures, or systemic crashes in financial markets, exhibits the same basic precursor signs of a tipping point, at least mathematically speaking. All complex systems exhibit one or more of the following early-warning signs: they can take longer to recover from small perturbations and become less random over time (”critical slowing” in the paper), they can bounce dramatically between the old and new states (”flickering”) before finally settling in the new state, or they can develop patterns that gradually change before suddenly disappearing into a new state (”spatial patterns”).

With regard to climate, reconstructions have identified the hallmarks of “critical slowing” in multiple climate transitions:

In a recent analysis, a significant increase in autocorrelation was found in each of eight examples of abrupt climate change analyzed.

And the authors reference one other paper which suggests that recent climate variability is an example of “flickering” that signals a transition to a significantly colder global climate.

The problem, however, is that not all critical transitions show each early-warning sign – some transitions might show more than one while others show one this time and another next time. The result is clearly state in the paper:

[D]etection of the patterns in real data is challenging and may lead to false positive results as well as false negatives.

In other words, not all fast transitions are “critical transitions,” not all critical transitions will be detected, and sometimes a critical transition will not occur even though there were signs of one approaching.

In essence, the science of critical transitions is still very young, and as such, projections of tipping points should be very carefully analyzed, whether they be toward a new glacial period or a sudden melt of all the Arctic sea ice.

For news of a few politicians expecting a “social tipping point” on climate disruption soon, please read this piece by my colleague Wendy Redal.

Thanks to Ubertramp for pointing this paper out to me and to Dr. Scheffer for providing a review copy of the paper.

———-

U.S. Chamber of Commerce President complains about environmentalists

Over the last several weeks, three utilities, Nike, and now Apple have resigned from or otherwise reduced their participation in the United States Chamber of Commerce (USCOC), a business lobbying group that represents millions of U.S. businesses. As a result, the USCOC President and CEO, Tom Donohue, held an hour-long press conference to defend the USCOC’s decision to oppose EPA regulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs).

According to the Greenwire report on the event (linked above), Donahue claimed that an “orchestrated pressure campaign” by environmentalists was responsible for the recent defections. However, National Resources Defense Council climate campaign director Peter Altman disagrees. From the article:

“It’s nice of Donohue to give the environmental movement credit for being able to convince Fortune 500 companies what group they should be a part of,” Altman said. “But it’s a red herring. These companies are making the decision on their own.”

Furthermore, San Francisco venture capitalist Nancy Floyd was quoted as saying “This issue (climate change regulation and/or legislation) has really divided the business community. The divide is not really along traditional players versus technology players; it is across the board.”

To date, the USCOC has not changed its position with respect to EPA regulation of GHGs or chosen to get behind either the Waxman-Markey ACES act or the new Kerry-Boxer draft legislation in the Senate. However, two Silicon Valley business organizations ran an advertisement in the San Jose Mercury News and the Congress Daily saying, in part:

As our European and Asian competitors move forward to build the next generation of clean energy technology, the U.S. Chamber seems mired in false debates over settled science and a 20th Century approach to energy. It’s time for the “voice of business” to move forward, embrace a market-based cap on carbon pollution, and help lead a new century of American prosperity. (emphasis original)

The two Silicon Valley organizations are the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) and Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network (JVSV). A brief scan of the membership of SVLG turns up a veritable who’s who of tech companies, as well as some banking, health, and energy companies: Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, AT&T, Bank of America, Chevron Energy Solutions, Citibank, Dell, eBay, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, Lockheed Martin, McAfee, Microsoft, NASDAQ, Netflix, Oracle, Palm, Roche, Seagate, Sun Industries, Symantec, and Yahoo!. And those are just the ones that most people would recognize – the list is even more impressive for someone who works in technology like I do – nearly all of the major U.S. electronics manufacturing companies have a presence in the SVLG.

Perhaps even more impressive, however, is that the JVSV signed on. The Directors include the mayor of San Jose, a product manager for Google, the Chancellor of the University of California – Santa Cruz, a senior VP at Bank of America, the CEO of Cypress Envirosystems, a California State Senator, to name just a few. The private companies who invest in JVSV are just as impressive as those involved in the SVLG: Cisco, National Semiconductor, Mitsubishi, PG&E, the San Jose Chamber of Commerce, and McKinsey & Company.

The JVSV represents business, labor, universities, city and state government, and non-profits, all of whom are involved in charting the future of the most visionary, profitable, and productive companies and region in the entire country. And they just told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that they were “dinosaurs.”

Perhaps this advertisement points will convince the USCOC to change its approach to climate legislation and regulation – or perhaps the USCOC will become irrelevant as the companies with vision abandon it and the USCOC’s positions become equivalent to those of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.

———-

Barrels instead of bottles

According to the NYTimes Green Inc. blog, a number of wineries are foregoing bottles and are instead shipping their wine in barrels. As a result, the wineries are saving money on reduced packaging and are dramatically lowering their carbon footprint due to shipping and bottle manufacturing.

As a beneficial side effect, the wine lasts longer in barrels than it does in bottles.

This is hardly the first time that companies have pushed for reduced packaging – Wal*Mart was one of the first, but it’s hardly the only company working this angle. Still, anything that makes wine cheaper to drink for myself and my family is all good for me – even if that means I have to buy nearly a case at a time.

———-

Ocean acidification to turn parts of the Arctic Ocean corrosive by 2018

Scientists researching ocean acidification in the Svalbard Archipelago north of Norway have made a surprising and awful discovery – the Arctic ocean is acidifying so fast that 10% it will become corrosive within the next 10 years and the entire Arctic will become corrosive by 2100. The Guardian newspaper reported last week on a presentation by French oceanographer Jean-Pierre Gattuso that revealed the terrible news. From the article:

“This is extremely worrying. We knew that the seas were getting more acidic and this would disrupt the ability of shellfish – like mussels – to grow their shells. But now we realise the situation is much worse. The water will become so acidic it will actually dissolve the shells of living shellfish.”

According to the article, the problem is that shellfish form the base of a massive food chain for herring, salmon, and several species of whales. In addition, walruses and seals subsist on shellfish and fish, and polar bears and other top predators feed on the seals and walruses, as well as on fish. So if the bottom of the food chain is disrupted by corrosive seawater, then the entire ecology of the Arctic could be disrupted. And the only way to prevent this is to dramatically and immediately cut carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.

If you enjoy salmon or king crab legs, or even if you just enjoy the show Deadliest Catch, you might want to consider enjoying them sooner – there may not be a “later.”

———-

El Niño and its relationship to ocean heat content

Back in October, 2008, I pointed out in comments to another Carboholic that La Niña years were cold because the ocean absorbed heat from the atmosphere and that El Niño years were hot because the ocean emitted stored heat back into the atmosphere. This comes from the physics of thermodynamics, specifically the fact that energy moves from hot areas to cold areas, and not the other way around.

I recently came across this same basic information presented in a different form by the Climate Prediction Center’s El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion page and the weekly ENSO updates contained therein:

The basin-wide equatorial upper ocean (0-300 m) heat content is greatest prior to and during the early stages of a Pacific warm (El Niño) episode (compare top 2 panels) and least prior to and during the early stages of a cold (La Niña) episode. (emphasis original), from page 9

In other words, the ocean heat content is lowest at the start of La Niña because after that, the La Niña is absorbing heat from the atmosphere and cooling it. Similarly, the ocean heat content is highest at the start of El Niño because after it starts, El Niño is emitting heat from the ocean back into the atmosphere and heating it.

Image credits:
AFP: Antara News Agency
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
DeLoach Vineyards
Russ Hopcroft, via Australian Antarctic Division
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, Climate Prediction Center

The fate of the earth could end up determined by which tipping point is reached first: a physical shift that ushers in abrupt climate change with catastrophic consequences, or a social one, in which public attitudes rapidly coalesce around a mandate to address climate change. Or, neither could materialize, at least not imminently.

Al Gore believes the U.S. is on the brink of a political tipping point on the climate issue. Speaking to the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference in Madison, Wisc., last Friday, the former vice president said, “The potential for change can build up without noticeable effect until it reaches a critical mass. I think that we are very close to that tipping point.”

So what is a tipping point, actually? The term seems to be everywhere. It’s among the latest pop-sociology phrases to dominate public consciousness, along with “going viral.” That’s in large part due to the success of Malcolm Gladwell’s book by the same name, a volume that “presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does,” according to Gladwell’s website.

Change, this theory holds, often starts in small increments before reaching critical mass. The so-called tipping point is reached “when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire,” says Gladwell, utilizing an epidemiological model. Past the tipping point, the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.

Crossing such a threshold in terms of the public’s commitment to address climate change is essential to solving the problem, Gore suggested. “Fortunately, political will is a renewable resource,” he quipped to the several hundred journalists and other guests attending SEJ.

Gore optimistic for real change in Copenhagen

In his keynote address [full audio text on SEJ's website] at the opening plenary, Gore expressed optimism that Congress would pass meaningful climate legislation before the opening of the UN climate summit Copenhagen in December. “There is much more bipartisan dialogue behind the scenes in the Senate than is publicly visible” right now, said Gore. He expects a Senate bill “will look like the House bill.” Though the compromise carbon reduction bill was not what he would have written, Gore said, it has put the wheels in motion.

“What is essential is that we put a price on carbon.”

If the U.S. can pass legislation before Copenhagen, it could build rapid momentum in the global community, Gore said, drawing comparisons with what happened in Montreal on ozone in 1987.

“When the evidence was indisputable, the political community joined ranks,” led by the U.S. Though the treaty was initially criticized as too weak, the signing “began a process of change that picked up momentum,” said Gore. “I believe the Copenhagen treaty is likely to serve that same purpose.”

NOAA Administrator also thinks social tipping point near

Following Gore’s speech, a panel moderated by New York Times environment reporter Andrew Revkin
continued the discussion on the “Countdown to Copenhagen.” Jane Lubchenco, Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and Administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, picked up on Gore’s reference to tipping points.

“We’ve seen major 180-degree shifts in people’s attitudes toward things that for a long time to many seemed impossible: attitudes toward smoking, attitudes toward drunk driving, civil rights, women’s suffrage, are a few examples,” Lubchenco said. “I believe there’s very good evidence that you can be making significant progress toward meaningful change without that progress being obvious. And then you hit the tipping point and things can change very rapidly.”

We’re not there yet, though, Lubchenco said. The problem with climate change is that “there are multiple tipping points” that must be reached within complex social systems. “We have reached the point at which a majority of citizens say… ‘Okay, I get it.’ But we haven’t yet reached the next tipping point which is agreement on how to address the problem.”

Lubchenco left her academic post at Oregon State University to join the political sphere when her hopes were spurred by last year’s shift in power.  “This administration represents an opportunity to get to those tipping points, to make very meaningful changes that will benefit the world.”

Only time will tell

If tipping point theorists are right – and the earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous physical thresholds– there is no time for the public to dally in achieving such agreement. Plenty of scientific evidence exists that demonstrates non-linear behavior within climate systems. A report issued by the UN and World Bank in February 2009 warns that the planet may quickly be approaching the tipping point for abrupt climate changes that could usher in outcomes like the collapse of the coral biome in the Caribbean basin and extensive rainforest loss in the Amazon.

NASA climate scientist James E. Hansen wrote in the London Observer last February that “the climate is nearing tipping points,” citing a larger expanse of dark ocean water as Arctic sea ice melts, and the increasing release of methane by melting tundra as two phenomena that could rapidly shift climate change.

Other scientists, also concerned about human warming of the planet, question the use of the “tipping point” concept, since so little about climate can be specifically predicted. Revkin explored the debate among scientists earlier this year in the New York Times.

Tipping points in human attitudes and behavior may be just as unpredictable. The H1N1 flu virus comes to mind. No one knows for sure if, or when, a major flu outbreak will occur, or how devastating it will be, or how effective the new vaccine will be in protecting against it. The public is definitely aware of the issue. The next step is to weigh the perceived risks and act accordingly. If I thought there was a small but significant risk of a massive, lethal flu outbreak — based on the best science available at the time – I’d get in line for the shot.

We’ll see whether the world community is ready to tip toward action in Copenhagen in less than two months.

Sydneysiders awoke to red dust on the 23rd. It was the biggest dust storm to hit Sydney since 1942. A second storm covered Sydney on Saturday, millions of tons of dust have been dumped on Eastern Australia. Australia is a dry nation; in July Melbourne was named the driest city in Australia. Recall that last year Melbourne suffered catastrophic fires?

What does a million tons of dust look like?
Image courtesy of NASA.

Scientists at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales have shown that the Indian Ocean plays a big role in the climate patterns of Australia. This climate pattern is called the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). The landmark study by Dr Caroline Ummenhofer and Professor Matthew England, explains why La Nina events in the Pacific Ocean, which usually bring rain, have failed in recent years to break the drought. In its negative phase, the IOD is characterized by cool water to the west of Australia and warm water to the north, leading to winds that bring warm moist, rain-bearing air to the continent. In the positive phase, water temperatures are reversed and less moisture travels to Australia. The study was accepted for publication in the journal, Geophysical Review Letters.

Where did the red dust start its journey? I offer you pictures from the sacred red center of Australia.

Uluru

Kings Canyon

Kata Juta

Red soil

(Opera House picture by REUTERS/Tim Wimborne)

• Climate disruption will disrupt volcanism too
• EPA Office of Inspector General finds standard gases not so standard after all
• Driest years in Pacific Northwest drier than expected
• Northeast Passage opened this year for commercial shipping
• 12% of the merchant marine fleet is idled
• Recycling used plastic into fuel
• US Chamber of Commerce and car dealer industry group fight California emissions waiver
• Slowing population growth more effective than renewables at slowing GHG emissions

Nature News reported last week that vulcanologists have concluded that climate disruption will increase the number of volcanic eruptions. According to the article, the reason is that climate disruption is expected to reduce the amount of ice present atop volcanoes and thus reduce the amount of material keeping volcanoes from erupting.

But there is definitely some evidence that less ice means more dramatic eruptions. “As thick ice is getting thinner, there may be an increase in the explosivity of eruptions,” says Hugh Tuffen from Lancaster University, UK.

As strange as this sounds, it’s well grounded in geologic sciences. For example, a paper published in 1999 found that there was a correlation between the eruptions of Pavlof Volcano on the Alaska Peninsula and the season (see the image above). Specifically, as a result of weather patterns in the region, the ocean gets slightly thicker in November, and the added weight is believed to be compressing the magma chamber that feeds Pavlof. As a result, small periodic eruptions at Pavlof tend to happen in November. And another paper in 2004 found that volcanoes tend to erupt globally during changes in the earth’s crust as a result of the water cycle – seasonal variations in ground and seawater. This paper studied a much larger number of volcanoes and found that volcanoes in different regions of the world respond to different changes, but the bulk of volcanic eruptions seemed to show some seasonal variation.

Other studies have found that there was an increase in volcanism as a direct result of climate change. This paper from 1999 found that there was a strong correlation (the chance of the correlation occurring by chance was less than 0.2%) between interglacial periods (like we’re in now) and increased volcanic activity in eastern California as a result of a number of possible factors, one of which is increased geologic stresses due to the weight of ice and glacial lakes.

What this means is that, as the Nature News article says, we can expect that disruption of the climate will in turn drive disruptions in how volcanoes erupt. Unfortunately, there’s very little data at this point about how climate will affect volcanism, and no modeling at all – the latest climate models all model how the climate responds to volcanism, but none of them presently model how volcanism will respond to the climate.

“The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] hasn’t addressed these kinds of hazard,” [Bill McGuire from the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre at University College London] says. “You have a better chance of coping with any kind of hazard if you know it’s happening,” he adds. “Climate change is not just the atmosphere and hydrosphere; it’s the geosphere as well.”

———-

EPA Office of the Inspector General finds standard gases not so standard after all

Organizations that do pollutant monitoring rely on standard gases to ensure that their equipment functions properly. Each standard gas represents a specific amount of pollutant in a given volume of gas, measured in parts per million (ppm), parts per billion (ppb), or some other convenient measurement for the pollutant in question. The standard gas is then injected into monitoring equipment in order to calibrate the equipment to a known amount of pollutant. From that known amount, the equipment can then track how much pollutant is present in the test environment, either more or less than the calibrated level(s). But this process only works if the standard gases have very close to the amount of the pollutant that the gas is supposed to have.

For example, if a calibration gas used by a utility was certified to contain 100 parts per million (ppm) of SO₂, but only contained 96 ppm, the system operator would unknowingly calibrate the CEMS to read 96 ppm as 100 ppm. This would result in the CEMS overestimating emissions.

Last week, the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General found that approximately 11% of the standard gases for blends of SO₂, CO₂, and nitrous oxide (NO) they had purchased and had independently tested were different from the stated amount of gas by 3% or more when the acceptable range was within 2% of the stated amount. And in an example of the seemingly universal rule of “you get what you pay for,” all the failures were from vendors selling inexpensive standard gases, while all of the expensive gases were acceptable.

This is a severe problem because of the sheer number of things that standard gases are used for. The OIG report points out that accurate measurements are vital for the over $5.1 billion SO₂ trading market that has been responsible for a dramatic reduction in acid rain. Accuracy of measurements is similarly important for the $350 million NO_X trading market. And as for CO₂, the World Bank estimated that the global carbon market was $64 billion in 2007. And metropolitan areas are monitored by the EPA for air quality and are fined or forced to make changes to local utilities or transportation as a result of those air quality measurements – if the measurements are incorrect, then the EPA could be giving some cities a passing grade who actually fail air quality, or failing cities that should actually pass.

The OIG’s recommendation, which the EPA office responsible for standard gases agreed with, was for the EPA to implement a quality control process, something that the EPA does not currently have in place.

———-

Driest years in Pacific Northwest drier than expected

Climate models are always being improved with new understanding of how climate works (especially in two key areas, cloud and aerosol dynamics). But regional climate modeling is particularly difficult for two reasons: climate models are so processor intensive that they cannot yet model the Earth with high horizontal and vertical resolution, and scientists do not know all the regional changes that drive regional climate away from the global average. Put simply, scientists don’t know everything and can’t model in enough detail for accurate regional climate predictions.

Enter a new paper by two U.S. Forest Service scientists who have studied annual streamflow in the Pacific Northwest. They set out to determine if the annual streamflow (the amount of water flowing out of a watershed in a year) of the driest years was different than the annual streamflow of the average year or the wettest years. They used a statistical technique called “linear quantile regression” to detect any difference from the average change detected in other studies by use of another statistical technique known as “least-square regression.”

The scientists found that there was a greater reduction in annual streamflow in the driest years than the mean trend had detected. Climate models had previously predicted that there would be little overall change in the annual streamflow because the same amount of water would flow through watersheds, but at different times of the year. Instead, this study discovered that, while this was true for average and wet years, dry years were significantly dryer (in a statistical sense) as a result of changes in climate since 1949.

As a result, the authors expect that changes in water management throughout the Pacific Northwest may be necessary. The design of water storage reservoirs may need to change in order to hold multiple years worth of water. Reduced annual streamflow will have a significant impact on aquatic life living in streams that run much lower during dry years than they have in the past, and reduced streamflow will serve as a positive feedback with increased air temperature to increase the stream temperatures and possibly cause even greater reductions in fish populations. And while overall drying across multiple years already stresses forests, individual dry years can kill off large swaths of forest, lead to more forest fires, and slow the growth of surviving trees.

One of the more interesting points the authors made was that the dry years appear to be tightly correlated with El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variation from year-to-year and with a yearly trend, but the correlation was significantly weaker when they included the cooling trend in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. While the authors take pains to point out that this doesn’t conclusively say that the PDO isn’t affecting dry year annual streamflow, they do “favor” a model that doesn’t include the PDO as a driver of the annual streamflow. And they call for more analyses to better identify the causes of the observed dry year changes.

More sophisticated analyses considering other indices, temporal lags, and temporal autocorrelation of indices would likely elucidate more information and provide greater certainty, but this rough analysis presents interesting insights.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Thanks to the paper’s primary author, Dr. Luce, for providing a review copy of his paper.

———-

Northeast Passage opened this year for commercial shipping

Historically, Russia’s Arctic coast has been too iced-in for commercial vessels, most of which are designed for hauling their cargo in ice-free waters. But this year, according to a NYTimes article, two German vessels, the Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight, steamed north from South Korea and transited the Northeast Passage, also known as the Northern Sea Route. This route was largely ice free this year, and the two ice-hardened specialty cargo vessels took advantage of the clear waters to cut thousands of miles off the southern route via the Suez Canal. According to the article, while the Beluga vessels were escorted by at least one nuclear powered Russian icebreaker the entire time, the icebreakers were not needed this year.

For the moment, the article points out that the Northeast Passage isn’t expected to be open regularly enough for large just-in-time (JIT) shippers like Maersk to use – schedule accuracy is more important to JIT shippers than fuel savings. But if the Arctic sea ice continues to thin and open up the shipping channel during late August and early September, then specialty shippers like Beluga could start making use of the shorter route in order to get their cargo to its destination cheaper and faster.

———-

12% of the merchant marine fleet is idled

According to an investigative report in the UK’s Daily Mail, there is a massive fleet of idled shipping vessels anchored off the coast of Singapore and southern Malaysia. These ships, and others taken out of service around the world, represent 12% of the the entire global merchant marine fleet, sitting idle. And yet shipyards are continuing to build enough new cargo vessels to increase the total number of vessels by 12% next year.

But according to the report, there are no new ship orders for after 2011, and shipping experts expect that the number of vessels idled by the recession will rise to 25% of the merchant marine fleet in the next two years.

Does this mean that the government’s claims that the recession is over are false? Maybe. I’ve read some discussion that the recent small recovery is a result of companies having to rebuild some inventory after having finally sold off the inventory they had stockpiled before the start of the recession. But that’s a one-time event, and restocking inventory isn’t going to do much for the economy as a whole. What all these ships represent is a lack of advance purchases, either due to a general unavailability of credit or due to companies not expecting enough growth to justify re-expanding their global supply line. In either case, it’s not good news for the global economy in general. Remember – 90% of all goods are shipped on vessels like this, so a 12% reduction shipping merchant marine shipping capacity could mean as much as an 11% reduction in overall international trade – in the last year.

However, this reduction in shipping is good news for global carbon emissions and reduced marine pollution. Oceanic shipping is estimated to produce between 3 and 5% of the world’s carbon emissions, so a 12% reduction in vessels will mean a reduction of between 0.3 and 0.6% of total carbon emissions this year. That represents a reduction in total emissions of at least 100 million metric tons off CO₂. That savings represents more than Romania’s entire national emissions (98 million metric tons in 2006).

And, fortunately or not, depending on your particular perspective, the longer the economy stays depressed, the slower carbon emissions will rebound to previous levels, giving human civilization an opportunity to clean up its energy production technologies some in the interim.

———-

Recycling used plastic into fuel

Nearly all plastic is made from either natural gas or petroleum feedstock. Most plastic is recyclable in some way, either by turning one bottle into another, or by turning bottles into clothing or by turning packing material into park benches. But this is simply reshaping the plastic. Now a company in Maryland has figured out how to turn plastic back into a fuel feedstock that can be blended with diesel or gasoline.

According to Green Inc article, the cost is about $10 per barrel, and the Maryland plant is large enough to convert one ton of plastic into between three and five barrels of oil. However, Environ estimates that nearly 50 million tons of plastic waste are created every year, so a plant that can only convert 6,000 tons per year is a drop in the proverbial bucket. Converting all of that waste back into fuel would take about 10,000 similarly sized conversion plants. Or a bunch of much larger plants. And the process itself is energy intensive – each barrel of fuel represents enough electricity to power 2-3 residences for a day.

So this isn’t a solution to the global plastic problem. And it certainly doesn’t help the U.S.’ oil addiction. But if it can be scaled up, then maybe it’s a step in the right direction. After all, there are more environmental problems than just climate disruption – clean water, air pollution, hazardous waste, and yes, even plastics.

———-

US Chamber of Commerce and car dealer industry group fight California emissions waiver

According to the NYTimes Wheels blog last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Automobile Dealers Association have asked the EPA to review a waiver it granted to the state of California in June. The waiver allows California to regulate vehicle emissions CO₂ independently and more tightly than national standards. A spokesman for the NADA, Sheldon Gilbert, was quoted in the Wheels blog as saying “That’s a fair description” when asked if the filing was a precursor to a court case.

Clearly, the EPA believes that it’s in accordance with the Clean Air Act, as does the California Air Resources Board, and the Center for Auto Safety’s Safe Climate Campaign. However, the president of Clean Air Watch, Frank O’Donnell, believes that this is just the beginning of carbon emissions lawsuits. He’s probably correct, even though there have been a few lawsuits already relating to climate. But with the courts now involved, it’s fair to say that Arctic communities will be suing energy companies, developing nations will be suing developed nations, and it’s all going to get a lot uglier before things improve. And at least one major insurer/reinsurer believes that a wave of litigation is inevitable.

———-

Slowing population growth more effective than renewables at slowing GHG emissions

There are few taboo subjects when it comes to climate disruption. Environmentalists and activists regularly discuss pollution, energy consumption, the benefits of eating local and seasonal, drinking reclaimed water, even composting human waste. But one thing that is generally considered off-limits is population growth. Given that human reproduction is considered a taboo subject by a large percentage of cultures and religions, this is perhaps unsurprising. But no discussion of humanity’s impact on climate could possibly be complete without occasionally discussing how the mere existence of more people creates climate pressure, taboo subject or not.

A new study by the London School of Economics and commissioned by the British group Optimum Population Trust (OPT) found that reducing the number of people on the planet via voluntary family planning and contraception was pretty cost effective. According to the study, it’s cheaper than all current CO₂ reduction technologies except for geothermal and sugar cane-derived ethanol (see the table above).

However, this conclusion has met with significant criticism from groups opposed to family planning, contraception, and the like. The San Francisco Chronicle’s blog The Mommy Files has a post on this study, and they point out that a British anti-abortion group has attacked the study as concluding “that fewer children and more abortions means a better environment.” As the Mommy Files points out, the OPT actual study says nothing about more abortions creating a better environment. Instead, the study has the following things to say about abortion:

A Washington Post article on the same study also pointed out that there was an Oregon State University (OSU) study that came to basically the same conclusions, but went a different direction. Instead of estimating the monetary savings/cost of reducing CO₂, the OSU study estimated now much CO₂ a baby born in a given country would add to the atmosphere:

In the United States, each baby results in 1,644 tons of carbon dioxide, five times more than a baby in China and 91 times more than an infant in Bangladesh, according to the Oregon State study. That is because Americans live relatively long, and live in a country whose long car commutes, coal-burning power plants and cathedral ceilings give it some of the highest per-capita emissions in the world.

Just because the estimated costs are lower for reducing CO₂ emissions via family planning doesn’t mean that this will be enough to keep cumulative emissions from exceeding what many scientists consider “acceptable.” Recent science suggests that global warming should be kept “acceptable” (< 2 °C global temperature rise) if total cumulative emissions are kept below an additional 1,000 billion tons of CO₂ over what we’ve already emitted. The OPT study found that the cumulative emissions savings from 2010 to 2050 was 34 billion metric tons. In 2050, the difference between the worst case and the best case IPCC emissions scenario is about 500 billion tons of CO₂, with the best case staying below the 1,000 billion tons of CO₂ limit and the worst-case exceeding it by 250%. The 34 billion tons saved via population reductions from family planning represents only 6.8% of that difference, and actual emissions are worse than the IPCC wost-case scenario.

Reducing population will help solve so many problems beyond climate disruption that it’s difficult to argue against it from anything other than religious grounds. But as cheap as it could be, it won’t be enough. We’ll still need increased energy efficiency and more renewable energy and maybe nuclear power and to shut down coal plants wherever possible and to quickly transition away from petroleum-powered transportation.

Solving climate disruption isn’t multiple choice, it’s “all of the above”
Image credits:
Birkhäuser
EPA OIG
NYTimes
Daily Mail/Richard Jones/Sinopix
Optimum Population Trust

There are a couple of problems with proxies, however. The first problem is that scientists have to develop an appropriate and accurate calibration method to convert the width of a tree ring to an average annual or summer temperature. The second problem is that a given proxy may well be influenced by other factors beyond temperature, and so calibrating the proxy becomes a difficult and potentially error-prone process. For example, tree rings are a proxy for both temperature and moisture, and so any climatologist who wants to extract just the temperature information needs to discover a way to independently estimate the effect of moisture changes on the tree ring before the effect of temperature on the tree ring can be accurately determined.

A new study published September 17^th as a letter in the journal Nature describes a new method to compensate for proxy changes due to elevation in the Greenland ice sheet (GIS) during the Holocene (the present geologic epoch, starting about 12,000 years ago).

This basic problem is that the oxygen isotope used as a temperature proxy in ice cores, ¹⁸O, varies with regional temperature, the body of water from which the snow originated, the path the water vapor traveled from its source to where it falls as snow, what season the snow was deposited in, how close the ice core is to the pole, and even the altitude at which the snow fell. A great deal of science has been done to understand how ¹⁸O changes with all of those factors, but sometimes errors creep in anyway. In this case, a previously un-corrected error in ice core ¹⁸O data from the GIS had confounded understanding the response of the GIS to warming during the Holocene.

The main problem is that the GIS used to be a lot thicker than it is today. At the start of the Holocene, the Earth was transitioning from an ice age to an interglacial, and as a result the Earth was quickly warming and sea levels were rising as a result of melting ice caps. And during that period, the GIS shrank and thinned, effectively lowering the elevation of the GIS at the same time. What this means is that there was some unknown amount of error in the ¹⁸O isotope signature in the ice cores, and that error was causing all sorts of problems. The image below, specifically part “b,” illustrates how the ¹⁸O varied significantly from one part of the GIS to another (part “a” shows where the cores were drilled, and part “c” will become important in a minute).

The authors set out to find sites that they could use to correct the ¹⁸O elevation effects in the GIS. They found two (Agassiz and Renland) that they could justify as being understood well enough to correct the other four sites in the GIS cores. And when they calibrated the ¹⁸O for those two cores for their known elevation and distance from the North Pole, they got the image above, part “c.” They’re not exactly the same, but they were close enough to use as calibration sources for the other four ice cores.

When the authors calibrated the other four ice core locations, they discovered that there had been significant elevation changes as the GIS thinned during the transition to the Holocene. In addition, the authors compared their new corrected proxy information to an elevation proxy, specifically the total gas content held in the ice. They compared the estimated elevation changes at two sites (GRIP and Camp Century) using the two different methods and discovered that they were qualitatively and quantitatively similar.

The authors also compared their data against models of the GIS and found that the ice sheet models did not accurately estimate the changes in elevation. In general, the models underestimated the change in GIS elevation, and thus the rate and amount of ice melt. So in addition to correcting a significant bias in the ¹⁸O temperature proxy record, the author also found that the GIS is more sensitive to temperature changes than expected.

It is therefore entirely possible that a future temperature increase of a few degrees Celsius in Greenland will result in GIS mass loss and contribution to sea level change [that is] larger than previously projected.

Thanks to Ubertramp who was kind enough to help me obtain a copy of the paper.

Image Credit
Nature

Within days, a journey that represents both a huge commercial boon and a dark milestone on the route to environmental catastrophe is expected to be completed for the first time. No commercial vessel has ever successfully travelled the North-east Passage, a fabled Arctic Sea route that links the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific far more directly than the usual southerly cargo route. Explorers throughout history have tried, and failed; some have died in the attempt.

But early next week the German-owned vessels, Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight, are scheduled to dock in the Dutch port of Rotterdam. It is the culmination of a two-month voyage from South Korea across the perilous waters of the Arctic, where an unprecedented ice-melt has at last made the previously impassable course a viable possibility.

This is a pretty big deal, as reporter Tony Patterson notes. For one thing, it means that there is now a potentially viable commercial route at least part of the year along the Russian northern border. For another, it means that Russia’s centuries-old dream of a warm water port might soon come to fruition. But it comes at a cost, of course:

The new route could transform Russia’s economic fortunes. Throughout history, the country’s search for a warm-water port that would provide sea routes open year-round has dominated the geopolitics of the region. But the economic advantages are balanced by the disastrous environmental news that the transit represents.

“This is further proof that climate change is happening now,” said Melanie Duchin, Arctic Expedition leader on board the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, who added that the development put greater pressure on world leaders to agree a major emissions cut at their Copenhagen meeting in December. “This is not a cause for celebration but cause for immediate action,” she said.

Well, obviously. Whether that will occur is another question, however–The Independent in fact noted last week that not many minds are being changed in spite of the increase in the scientific evidence for human causes of global warming:

A significant proportion of the population have become more sceptical about climate change and the link with man-made emissions of greenhouse gases despite the fact that the scientific evidence has become stronger.

A survey of public opinion has found that 29 per cent of people believe claims that human activities are changing the climate are exaggerated compared with 15 per cent of respondents to a similar survey carried out in 2003.

About one in five people are uncertain about whether climate change is really happening, about the same proportion who had the same view in 2003, according to the survey carried out by Cardiff University researchers.

And this is in a fairly scientfically literate country as compared with the US.

More generally, we can now look forward to more intense Law of the Sea negotiations (which the US, having STILL failed to ratify the treaty after some thirty-odd years despite having signed it in 1994, is not a party to–even Bush tried to get ratification). And, of course, to the eventual (and perhaps sooner rather than later) opening of the Northwest passage to commercial traffic as well. The Law of the Sea treaty is relevant here because it represents the framework under which countries will negotiate who has rights to what–Canada, for example, is claiming the several Northwest Passages as internal waters, much to the irritation of other countries, and the US and Canada are in open dispute over these claims. While most of the Northeast Passage runs through waters claimed only by Russia, there’s that bit at the western end where Russia and Norway currently have conflicting claims. And, of course, oil and other resource companies must be salivating at the thought of viable commercial transport in the region, as well as generally less severe extraction conditions. The various disputes over conflicting coastal claims, it should be noted, relate more to seabed resource extraction than to navigation. Whether these routes will become major commercial routes remains to be seen. The weather is still crap most of the year, and at present the winter ice remains impassable. But the icecap continues to get thinner.

Still, there’s a psychological boundary being crossed here as much as a physical boundary, and it’s being felt keenly here and elsewhere in Europe, in countries that are generally much further North than is most of the US. Perhaps no nation has been as identified over the centuries with polar exploration–particularly the search for the Northwest Passage–as Britain. The names of polar explorers are engraved in the nations’s consciousness, particularly the tragic ones, and there have been quite a few of those. Patterson gives a brief capsule of the search for the Northeast passage:

Finding a North-east Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific was the goal of mariners and governments in 16th-century Europe because the route would have shortened the voyage to the newly discovered spice islands of the East Indies by some 2,000 miles – the equivalent of a year’s sailing.

However, most expeditions ended in disaster. The first attempt by the British navigator Richard Chancellor took place in 1553 but was brought to an abrupt halt in the winter of the same year when his ships became trapped in the ice. Chancellor abandoned ship and marched across the ice to Moscow where he was entertained at the court of Ivan the Terrible.

His fellow explorer Sir Hugh Willoughby stayed with his crew aboard ship and was discovered frozen to death two years later.

Another attempt in 1597 by the Dutch explorer William Barents ended with his ship being trapped and crushed in the ice. Barents and his crew were forced to spend the winter in a makeshift driftwood hut living on polar bear meat. Barents, after whom the polar Barents sea is named, did not survive either.

The search for the Northwest Passage was, if anything, even more intense. The British Admiralty for several centuries believed the Northwest Passage was a key strategic goal. And even when the obvious difficulties of such a passage became apparent should a route have been found, the British retained a strong connection to the concept. More broadly, polar exploration became a British obsession. Scott in particular became a 20th century defining myth for the British, but there were earlier ones–particularly Franklin, who perished in his attempt to find the Northwest Passage in the mid 19th century, and who, like Scott, also had a powerful and connected wife who found a fine career in the myth-making business for the rest of her life. The disclosure that Franklin’s expedition had resorted to cannibalism (although for an alternative explanation of the failure of Franklin’s expedition, see here) met with outright hostility from the British establishment, which then proceeded to ignore the claim for the next century. It was only after the passage was finally made by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (who also beat Scott to the South Pole) that interest flagged–but the myth-making continued.

Northern Europe, perhaps because it’s much further north than the US (except for Alaska) takes global warming more seriously, perhaps, in part because it’s seeing the impact earlier. Check out your map and follow a line due east from New York–you’re in Madrid. If you head due west from London or Berlin, you’re in Saskatoon. If you head due west from Helsinki (and St. Petersburg), you’re in the middle of Hudson’s Bay, or , a bit further west, Anchorage. So we now have longer growing seasons here in Britain, for example, and less severe winters. I remember my first trip to Stockholm in the late 1980s, and Stockholm itself had just gone through a winter without snow. And it’s the Europeans who continue to lead the charge in attempting to mitigate the impacts of, and reduce the causes of, man-made climate change.

The global warming deniers remain out there in abundance. But the evidence continues to mount that the phenomenon is real, and is accelerating, testing the limits of our capacity for denial. When these ships arrive in Rotterdam this week, it will be one more piece of accumulating data. But it will also represent a different kind of passage–from a landscape of comforting (if increasingly archaic) myths to one where the landscape, changing as it does, becomes newer and a bit more hazardous every year.

The above Norwegian stamps, depicting threee polar expolration vessels, were issued in 1972. The Gjoa, on the bottom, was the first ship to accomplish the Northwest Passage, under Roald Amundsen during the years 1903-1906. For decades thereafter it sat and rotted at the western end of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park before being returned to Norway in 1972.

• EPA Office of the Inspector General recommends EPA enforce Clean Water Act
• Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote
• New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion
• Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes
• First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational
• Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Last week, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the EPA’s internal monitoring organization, the Office of the Inspector General, found that the EPA’s current approach to controlling excess nutrient deposition into the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi River was not working.

The OIG report described an EPA process that, after 10 years of recommending a set of procedures to the Mississippi drainage states, had resulted in the following:

the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico had become the second largest on record and the second largest dead zone in the world.

Further, the report found that, “[i]n the 11 years since EPA issued its strategy, half the States still had no numeric nutrient standards at the end of 2008.”

The states involved have claimed that the costs of creating their own numerical nutrient limits are onerous, and while the states could adopt the EPA standards, “many States viewed EPA’s criteria as overly protective.” And given that the largest sources of nutrients are agricultural states, the OIG report claimed that the political ramifications and costs to agribusiness were likely significant.

In 2001, the EPA published rules in the Federal Register which said that the EPA would force all states in the Mississippi River watershed would be forced to adhere to EPA standards if the states didn’t come up with their own standards by 2004. The OIG report found that “about one-third of the States did not have a nutrient criteria development plan or were not in the administrative phase of adopting standards.” Further, the report found that “States knew that EPA would not use its promulgation powers so the States were not pressured to accelerate progress” and that “EPA had not established measures to hold itself accountable for achieving the goals of its 1998 strategy” by a 2007 audit.

As a result of the findings of the report, the OIG recommended first and foremost that the EPA determine what waterways needed numeric nutritional standards to protect clean water downstream and that the nutritional standards be set according to the authority granted the EPA by the Clean Water Act. The EPA disagreed with these primary recommendations, claiming that:

“a strategic approach to leverage resources and existing authorities” for “waters of regional, local and multi-State value” is the best way to establish effective standards.

In response, the OIG report said “[h]istorically, EPA has said it would use its authority to set standards as a motivator and then failed to set standards…. These States have not yet set nutrient standards for themselves; consequently, it is EPA’s responsibility to act.”

———-

Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote

According to a new article in the Center for Public Integrity’s “The Climate Change Lobby” series, there are now 1150 companies and organizations registered to lobby Congress on climate disruption legislation. This represented an increase of 31% in the total number of organizations lobbying Congress on this single issue.

The article guessed that at least $27 million was spent lobbying Congress leading up to the House vote on the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES).

———-

New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion

What do you think erodes land faster – glaciers, rivers, or human farming? According to new data from various glaciated regions around the world, this is a trick question. Specifically, a paper recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience shows that all three erode land at approximately the same rate.

Previously, glaciers were believed to erode landscape at a rate faster than rivers. New information presented in the paper shows that this is not the case. In fact, the rate of erosion appears to change in proportion with the stability of the land that the river or glacier is eroding – in highly tectonically active areas like the Himalayas, glaciers and rivers both erode the land faster than in tectonically stable areas like Australia or the Oregon coast. In addition, erosion from glaciers and rivers appears to roughly match the rate of tectonic change – areas that are uplifting at a rate of 10 mm per year tend to see glacial and river erosion cut through the terrain at roughly the same rate.

There are a couple of other interesting observations described in the paper as well. For example, glacial erosion appears to increase as glaciers are retreating. The paper describes a number of possible mechanisms for this (namely increased flow of meltwater washing away sediment from the base of the glacier and glacial acceleration scraping off more terrain).

the time-dependent variability in glacial erosion rates we are seeing instead suggests that the erosional impact of glaciers is far greater during periods of warming at the end of a glacial cycle than when averaged over a full glaciation (~10⁵ – 10⁶ yrs). Several studies have recently documented a synchronous increase in retreat, ice loss and acceleration of many of the outlet glaciers in Greenland and Patagonia. Such synchronous ice loss and flow suggests that, contrary to previous conclusions, sediment yields and thus calculated erosion rates are more rapid during glacial retreat…

This suggests that glacial melt as a result of climate disruption will cause a significant amount of additional erosion to those areas that are presently deglaciating, namely Greenland, Alaska, Patagonia, and similar regions of the world.

In addition, the authors point out that lowland erosion from agriculture is approximately the same as the fastest glacial and river erosion, and much faster than river erosion in the tectonically stable lowlands would normally be.

[I]f we compare these erosion rates with rates from overland flow associated with conventional agricultural practices, as compiled previously, we see that farming erodes lowland agricultural fields at rates comparable to glaciers and rivers in the most tectonically active mountain belts (Fig. 3). In other words, the relatively recent advent of farming practices has accelerated erosion of many lowland basins at rates on a par with alpine erosion, rates that far exceed long-term rates not only of uplift but also of weathering and soil formation.

The image below is the aforementioned Figure 3.

Thanks to lead author Dr. Koppes for a copy of her paper for my review.

———-

Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes

According to an Associate Press article, wind farms can be mistaken by Doppler radar as tornadoes. Specifically, the spinning blades at the top of a 200 foot tower look like the rapidly rotating winds of a powerful thunderstorm or a tornado. And in places like Texas, where there are lots of both wind turbines and tornadoes, turbines have generated erroneous tornado warnings.

As with all plans, the law of unintended consequences reigns supreme.

———-

First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational

The BBC reports that the first tethered deep water wind turbine is now operational in the North Sea off the coast of Norway. The Carboholic first covered the Hywind deep water wind project back in June, when it had been installed but was still undergoing testing. But now the turbine is adding 2.3 MW to the Norwegian electric grid when it’s windy out 10 km in the North Sea.

According to the BBC article, part of the reason that the turbine was placed in the North Sea was because of the severity of winter storms. The idea was to test how well the turbine withstood potentially damaging winds and seas over a two year test period. In the video that accompanies the BBC article, Hywind asset manager Sjur Bratland estimates that it’ll be at least another 10 years until deep water floating wind turbine technologies are advanced enough to deploy widely. According to the BBC article, part of that would be the development of turbines that are smaller, lower to the water surface, and that produce more electricity per turbine, up to 6 MW.

———-

Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Two new articles in Reuters last week pointed to a known but little publicized problem with hybrid vehicles and wind turbines – the large scale use of rare earth metals in the motors, batteries, and generators used in hybrid vehicles and turbines.

The first article points out that the Prius uses 1 kg of the rare earth metal neodymium, 10-15 kg of lanthanum, and trace amounts of terbium and dysprosium. These are used in the electric motor as a lightweight alternative to iron magnets and in the high capacity nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries. The problem is that the largest source of these elements is China, and the Chinese government is limiting exports specifically to ensure a supply of the rare earth metals to Chinese industry. As a result, Toyota and wind turbine manufacturers are looking to rare earth deposits in Canada, Vietnam, and a previously worked mine in California.

The second article is about the California mine. The mine used to be the largest source of rare earth metals in the world until Chinese mine production drove the price down so far that mining in California stopped being economical. According to the article, the mine not only has the largest known deposit of rare earth metals in the world, the ore has very little uranium or thorium, two elements that make extracting the rare earth metals more expensive. And with the development of a new extraction technology, the mining company expects to be able to start extracting 1,000 tons of refined rare earth metals from the mine per day by 2012. Just in time for the mine to fill in the expected gap left by Chinese export restrictions.

Given that the U.S. could possibly be trading a dependency on Middle East oil for a dependency on Chinese rare earth metals, a domestic source of elements critical to renewable energy would be a good thing to have.

Image credits:
Science Education Resource Center
Nature Geoscience
REUTERS/David Becker

The Alarmed (18%) are fully convinced of the reality and seriousness of climate change and are already taking individual, consumer, and political action to address it. The Concerned (33%) – the largest of the six Americas – are also convinced that global warming is happening and a serious problem, but have not yet engaged the issue personally. Three other Americas – the Cautious (19%), the Disengaged (12%) and the Doubtful (11%) – represent different stages of understanding and acceptance of the problem, and none are actively involved. The final America – the Dismissive (7%) – are very sure it is not happening and are actively involved as opponents of a national effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The survey made a number of interesting findings:

• Large majorities of all six groups are skeptical of humanity’s ability to address climate disruption (Figure 13).
• The Dismissive are as certain that climate disruption isn’t even happening as the Alarmed are certain that climate disruption is happening. (Figure 5).
• Both the Alarmed and the Dismissive are very confident that they know what’s really going on with climate (Figure 7).
• Four of the six groups (Alarmed, Concerned, Caution, and Disengaged) all at least “somewhat support” carbon dioxide (CO₂) regulations (Figure 19).
• Only the Dismissive group actually opposes increased fuel efficiency standards, and even then just barely (Figure 20).
• All six groups at least “somewhat support” rebates for solar power installation and/or fuel efficient vehicles (Figure 21).
• There is limited support for carbon capitalism, aka cap and trade, across all groups (Figure 22).
• While the Alarmed and Concerned are largely Democrats, and the Doubtful and Dismissive are largely Republicans, iindependents are split nearly equally across all six groups (Figure 29).
• All the groups are neutral to trusting of scientists as good sources of information about climate disruption, and all the groups are neutral to distrustful of the media as good sources of information (Figures 35 and 36 respectively).
• Catholics trend slightly toward being Alarmed, Protestants trend slightly toward being Doubtful, Mormons toward being Dismissive, Jews toward being Alarmed, “other Christians” toward being Dismissive, and all other religious groups (non-religious, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and non-Christians) toward being Alarmed (Table 23).
• The Dismissive have the highest number of self-identified “evangelical” or “born-again” Christians of any group (Figure 33).
• The Dismissive listen to the radio the most, get the most information from the Web, read newspapers the least, and watch the least television of all the six groups (Table 27).
• The Dismissive listen to the least “apolitical” news and have the most politically-biased news consumption of all the gruops. The Concerned (not the Alarmed) are the group that trend opposite of the Dismissive. Furthermore, the Dismissive are the most polarized in their news habits – all of the other five groups consume more varied news (NPR, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox) than the Dismissive, which get their news almost exclusively from a few sources (Fox, for example). The Alarmed consume the widest variety of news sources (Table 28).

There is, however, a potentially significant problem – the demographic information runs contrary to most prior studies I’ve read about. An ABC News poll found that people under 30 overwhelmingly wanted to address climate disruption (80%) – this new study shows that only 28% of the Alarmed and only 22% of the Concerned are under 34, for a combined total of only about 49.1% of everyone under 34. The difference could be partly related to the two different study age ranges, namely “under 30″ vs. “18-34,” but a 30% difference is still pretty big.

The problem could also be that the poll is skewed toward older people – people 18-24 are underrepresented by 4%, 25-74 are overrepresented by 3.5 to 7%, and people 75 and up are 1% underrepresented (source: Census Bureau estimates for 2008). It’s not clear from the methodology notes if this skew was corrected or not.

If the study is accurate, however, it points to some opportunities and some problems. The poll suggests that the majority of people will accept some regulation of CO₂, but not cap-and-trade. The poll also suggests that increasing vehicle fuel economy and offering rebates for fuel efficient vehicles and solar power are acceptable to a significant majority of Americans. If this is accurate, then these could provide a kernel of public support upon which Congress can build real legislation to address climate disruption and energy security.

In response, the ACCCE issued a bland statement that didn’t even mention Duke by name. It says, in part:

ACCCE is a broad and diverse coalition, composed of more than 40 members, who are working to advance the public policy dialogue on critical issues relating to energy, environmental, and economic policies. From time to time, individual coalition members may have different perspectives with regard to important policy positions.

Coming on the heels of letters forged by Bonner & Associates on the ACCCE’s behalf, a few websites have suggested that Duke’s departure was related to those letters. S&R put this question to Duke Energy spokesman Tom Williams, who said that the letters were not the cause. Instead, the official Williams claimed that it became clear that a number of other ACCCE members had no intention to support addressing climate change. Williams also said that he had himself observed this in some of the steering committee meetings that he attended.

Williams went out of his way to point out that not all of the remaining ACCCE members were against making progress in addressing climate change, only that, as the official talking points claim, certain “influential member companies who will not support passing climate change legislation in 2009 or 2010.”

Duke Energy remains part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business group that recently called for a “Scopes trial” hearing on the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change and that climate change is a threat to human health. When asked about Duke’s membership in the Chamber, Williams responded that the Chamber was “not a single-issue organization.”

According to Williams, Duke supports climate change legislation before Congress and is asking the Department of Energy for some funding to assist in commercialization of carbon capture technology on the scale of an large coal plant. Duke is currently constructing a large integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) coal plant in Indiana, and it’s this plant for which Duke is applying for federal financial assistance. According to Williams, Duke has also asked Indiana utilities regulators to allow Duke to pass some of the research and development costs for carbon sequestration on to Duke’s customers.

According to Duke’s official talking points, “coal must continue to be part of our nation’s power generation mix,” even though carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies are, according to Williams, “clearly not” commercial yet.

Duke will now have to work on developing those technologies without the cover of the ACCCE.

Other relevant links around the Web:

The Sierra Club’s response to Duke’s withdrawal from ACCCE.
The Wonk Room at ThinkProgress discusses other companies who might have similar conflicts to Duke’s
DeSmogBlog’s Kevin Grandia at HuffPo
Alcoa quietly abandoned ACCCE sometime in the not too distant past
Pete Altman at the NRDC

• U.S. Chamber of Commerce files for EPA climate disruption trial
• GRACE satellites show water use in India is unsustainable
• Biofuel crops may become next invasive species
• Is GM’s 230 MPG Volt claim real?
• Tubular Rail aims to invert train and rail
• July global ocean temperature sets two records

Earlier this week, the LATimes reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (hereafter “the Chamber”) has petitioned the EPA to hold a trial-like hearing on the science of climate disruption. According to the article, officials for the Chamber want to make it “‘the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.’”

EPA officials interviewed for the LATimes article are dismissive of the Chamber’s petition, referring to it in the article as “frivolous” and a “waste of time.” However, given that the Chamber has threatened to take the EPA to federal court to force them to hold this trial-like hearing, it’s unlikely that the Chamber considers their petition “frivolous.”

A ClimateWire article in the NYTimes clarifies the Chamber’s point and points out that the EPA’s public process has already been extensive:

EPA has hosted two public hearings and received more than 300,000 public comments on the matter already.

“They don’t have the science to support the endangerment finding,” Bill Kovacs, the chamber’s vice president for environment, regulatory and government affairs, said in an interview. “We can’t just take their word for it.”

This indicates that the Chamber’s chief complaint isn’t so much as that the science underlying anthropogenic climate disruption is wrong, but rather that the science supporting the EPA’s finding that climate disruption endangers human health is wrong. This same point was reported by the Wall Street Journal’s climate blog here.

The response from around the web has been rapid and fierce. Skeptic and denier sites claim that the EPA is cowardly for rejecting the proposed hearing and that, if the Obama Administration were really for change, they’d order the EPA to hold the hearing. Not all such sites think this style of hearing on the strengths or weaknesses of scientific hypotheses and theory is a good idea, however.

The Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) is one of the many sites supporting the EPA’s position. They point out that the Chamber is making their appeal after the official public comment period on the endangerment finding has closed. During the official comment period, over 300,000 public comments were made on the proposed endangerment finding and two large and well attended public hearings were held, one in Seattle and the other in Arlington, Virginia. The CAC proposes that the main goal of the Chamber isn’t to actually “win,” but rather to delay the EPA’s action as long as possible, an opinion that Pete Altman, climate campaign director for the NRDC, shares at the NRDC’s Switchboard blog.

Ultimately, though, one of the most interesting points in all of this is the fact that the Chamber has equated their position with that of William Jennings Bryan, the once famed anti-evolutionist lawyer for the prosecution. While Bryan won trial and the conviction was overturned on a technicality, the Scopes trial represented the beginning of the end for creationism in the United States, whether due to the cynical reporting of H.L. Menken or the death of Bryan shortly after the conclusion of the trial. It took several more decades before anti-evolution laws were ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court, but it did happen.

On the other hand, perhaps the Chamber is hoping simply for the same kind of delay that the Scopes trial was able to produce – several more years or decades of no effective action against climate disruption. Or perhaps the Chamber is playing to a particular audience, namely the same people who look at the Scopes trial as a win for creationism or, in its more recent incarnation, intelligent design.

UPDATE: The Wonk Room has obtained a copy of the Chamber’s petition.

The petition, acquired by the Wonk Room, claims that scientific research demonstrates global warming has stopped, the oceans aren’t acidifying or warming, sea level isn’t rising, extreme weather events aren’t increasing, tropical diseases aren’t spreading, wildfires aren’t increasing — but even if the planet were getting warmer, then U.S. citizens will be healthier, air pollution will decrease, and U.S. agriculture will benefit.

———-

GRACE satellites show water use in India is unsustainable

According to a new study reported in the BBC, the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite has detected a significant reduction in the amount of groundwater in India. According to the BBC, the study finds the reason for the falling groundwater level is overuse for irrigation. According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory press release, the total loss from 2002 to 2008 was 108 cubic miles.

GRACE detected this change by monitoring the gravity of the Earth as it orbits. How much gravity affects one of the two paired satellites varies depending on how much mass is below the satellite. By very accurately monitoring the distance between the two satellites, scientists can detect the force of gravity and create a gravity map of the Earth. By monitoring changes in the Earth’s gravity over time, scientists can detect what parts of the Earth are gaining or losing mass. In the case of India, GRACE detected a loss in mass over land even though records showed that monsoon rains were relatively constant during the study period.

Since GRACE was launched in 2002, it has made a number of other important observations, two of which are critically important. The first was confirmation that Greenland is losing ice mass. Specifically, a paper confirmed that Greenland lost approximately 240 cubic kilometers of ice per year between April 2002 and November 2005. This was compared to 225 cubic km per year based on satellite radar.

The second observation was that, from 2002 to 2005, the Antarctica ice sheet lost approximately 150 cubic km of ice per year. Prior to GRACE, scientists didn’t know whether Antarctica was overall gaining or losing mass – there was widespread agreement that West Antarctica was losing mass, but no agreement over whether East Antarctica was gaining mass fast enough to compensate for the loss in the West – or if the East was also losing mass. What GRACE discovered was that the East was maintaining it’s overall mass while the West was losing mass.

So long as the two satellites continue operation, we can reasonably expect that more discoveries like the three mentioned above will continue to be made.

———-

Biofuel crops may become next invasive species

According to a ClimateWire story, scientists are becoming concerned about the potential for biofuel crops to become invasive weeds. The problem, as the article points out, is that the best cellulosic biofuel crops are going to need very little water, little to no fertilizer, and produce high yields. You know, like kudzu in the South or bindweed here along the front range.

Hey, here’s an idea – can kudzu or bindweed could be made into cellulosic biofuel feedstock? Kill two birds with one stone and all that.

———-

Is GM’s 230 MPG Volt claim real?

A couple of weeks ago, General Motors announced with great fanfare that the Chevy Volt was so energy efficient that it would get 230 MPG. According to the NYTimes, GM used an EPA-approved methodology, but the number itself hasn’t been verified or independently tested. According to an interview with Larry Nitz, GM’s executive director of hybrid powertrain engineering, at GM-volt.com, the EPA methodology is a baseline that is based on a statistical traffic study done in 2001 that measured how the typical vehicle will be used. Since the first 40 miles in a Volt uses no gasoline at all, it turns out that you’ll get 230 MPG if you drive precisely 51.1 miles. Any further than that and you’re gas mileage drops – at 80 miles, you’re down to 100 MPG.

Ultimately, though, figuring MPG for a mostly-electric vehicle is a challenge. If you never drive over 40 miles, you won’t consume any gasoline at all, and so you’re MPG is effectively infinite. But you’re still consuming energy. The difference is that the energy is coming from the electrical grid and whatever coal, natural gas, nuclear, or renewable generator is closest to you. For that reason, it’s probably more accurate, and certainly fairer, to compare the Volt’s overall energy consumption to the energy consumption of other vehicles.

Of course, given that GM has a vested interest in continuing to tout the MPG numbers, it’ll probably be third parties who perform those calculations and not GM.

For a more amusing take on the whole Volt MPG thing, check out satire site Smooth Operator.

———-

Tubular Rail aims to invert train and rail

Let’s perform a simple experiment. First, find a pen. Second, put it on the edge of the table and scoot it slowly off the edge. If you watch it closely as it starts to tip over, you’ll notice that it doesn’t start to tip until about it reaches about the middle. This is because the pen’s center of gravity is supported by the table until you reach approximately the pen’s center. But as soon as the pen’s center of gravity is unsupported, it starts to tip over and will eventually fall to the floor.

This fact – that a cantilevered beam doesn’t start to fall until it reaches it’s midpoint – is the basis behind a new form of train that the developers claim will cost 60% less than traditional rail. It’s called tubular rail, and its developers are at Tubular Rail, Inc. (TRI)

According to the website, it will cost less partly because components can be prefabricated, it has a lower footprint (and so would need fewer easements or use of eminent domain), and lower overall construction costs. And it’s a very interesting idea. The trains turn very gradually as they pass through the support tubes (that also provide power to the train cars) and since they’re suspended over roads and existing rail, they could be used pretty much everywhere.

The website is reasonably slick, but I couldn’t find any indication that their idea has any significant money behind TRI. And by “significant money” I mean enough money for TRI to develop their idea beyond the website stage and turn it into a demonstration project. Hopefully I’m wrong, since this technology could change the game for intermediate and long distance transportation around the country. If it lives up to the hype, that is.

———-

July global ocean temperature sets two records

The Associated Press has reported that the average global ocean sea surface temperature in July set a record for the hottest July since measurements started. The ocean was 0.5924 °Celsius over the previous record, set during the strong El Niño in 1998, of 0.5761. This is according to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) July 2009 highlights page. What the AP didn’t report, however, and neither did the NCDC, is that the preliminary data from July shows that July 2009 was the hottest sea surface temperature anomaly since recording started 130 years ago. Previously, the warmest month was December 1997 (0.5776 °C), as the 1998 El Niño was starting.

UPDATE: Skeptic Dr. Roy Spencer believes that he’s found a significant error in the NOAA SST dataset. He’s posted some data on his website that appears to show a warm bias to the NOAA data as compared to two different satellite datasets. It’s certainly possible that he’s correct, but it’s also possible that undetected errors/biases in the satellites are responsible. However, that there is an unknown error between the satellite and in-situ NOAA measurements appears to be pretty likely. I look forward to finding out the real story here when the source of the error(s) is discovered and corrected.

Additional information from the NCDC that bear mentioning is that, while the United States has been having an unusually cool summer (the 27^th coolest on record), the global land plus sea surface temperature anomaly for July was the 5^th warmest on record, the January through July 2009 period is tied for 6^th warmest on record with 2004, and this July was the 33^rd July in a row that was over the 20^th Century mean for combined land and sea surface temperature anomaly.

To put this into perspective, let’s do a few simple calculations. It takes a lot more energy to heat up a kilogram of water one °C than it does to heat up one kg of air – about 4.2 times as much energy, in fact. But a cubic meter of water has a LOT kg of mass than a cubic meter of air – about 854 times the mass of air at sea level.

So let’s take the volume of the lowest kilometer of atmosphere (roughly representing the land surface temperature region), multiply that by the mass of air at sea level, and then multiply that by the amount of energy it takes to increase that volume of air by 1 °C (aka “heat capacity”), and we get approximately 6.1×10²⁰ Joules (J). A really, really big number.

If we take just the top meter of the global ocean (roughly representing the sea surface temperature), multiply that volume by the mass of seawater, and multiply that number by seawater’s heat capaciy, we get about 1.6×10²³ J. An even bigger number.

Divide the energy in the top meter of the ocean by the energy in the lowest kilometer of atmosphere and you find that the ocean holds approximately 262 times more energy. And this is a conservative estimate, as I didn’t take into account the reduction in atmospheric pressure from sea level to 1 km in altitude, nor did I estimate the actual volume of the wave/wind mixed surface layer of the ocean, which is probably several meters to tens of meters deep. A real calculation would produce an ocean surface heat capacity that was much higher than my quick-and-dirty calculation.

Given that ocean covers more than 70% of the Earth’s surface and just how much more energy the ocean can store than the atmosphere, perhaps the most interesting point made by the NCDC was this, about this year’s El Niño:

El Niño persisted across the equatorial Pacific Ocean during July 2009. Related sea-surface temperature (SST) anomalies increased for the sixth consecutive month in this ENSO domain, where July SSTs were more than 0.5°C (0.9°F) above average. If El Niño conditions continue to mature, as now projected by NOAA, global temperatures are likely to exceed previous record highs.

For your information, the warming water trend is called “El Niño” because it historically peaks in December, which is why it’s named after the Spanish name of the Christ child.

Image credits:
NASA/Trent Schindler and Matt Rodell
Pacific Northwest Weed Management
Motor Trend
Tubular.com
SSEC

• ACCCE hired Bonner, but didn’t notify Congress of forgeries when they were discovered
• Cash for Clunkers doesn’t do much for climate
• National Academy of Sciences: we need independent GHG emission confirmation
• Climate disruption may, or may not, make disease worse

Before the House voted on the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES) earlier this year, someone hired Bonner & Associates (hereafter Bonner) to manufacture some grassroots opposition against ACES. At least one employee did so by forging letters from non-existent people to Representative Tom Perriello of Virginia. These letters were discovered, Bonner claims to have fired the employee, and a partner at Bonner apologized to the two minority groups from which the letters were supposedly sent. The apologies were, it’s fair to say, emphatically not accepted.

Since the Bonner story broke last Friday, there have been a lot of new information about who hired them, whether there were other Congresspeople who received forged letters, the legality or lack thereof, and an official response from a House committee with subpoena powers.

We now know that Bonner sent at least 12 letters to three different Congresspeople – the aforementioned Rep. Perriello, Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, and Rep. Christopher Carney, both of Pennsylvania. We also know that these 12 letters were identified by Bonner and brought to the attention of the clients. And, as of Wednesday, we also know that two more letters have turned up in Rep. Perriello’s office – these forged on letterhead belonging to the Jefferson Area Board for Aging and the American Association of University Women. We don’t presently know if these two additional letters are part of the 12 discovered by Bonner or whether they represent two additional letters, for a total of 14 forged letters.

We also know that the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) was the end client (via another PR company, the Hawthorn Group, which has released its own statement) who had hired Bonner to create the grassroots backlash against ACES – they admitted so in a statement by ACCCE president Stephen L. Miller on their Website. It reads, in part:

We are outraged at the conduct of Bonner and Associates. Bonner and Associates was hired by the Hawthorn Group – our primary grassroots contractor – to do limited outreach earlier this year on H.R. 2454. Based upon the information we have, it is clear that an employee of Bonner’s firm failed to demonstrate the integrity we demand of all our contractors and subcontractors. As a result, these egregious actions led to falsified letters being sent to Members of Congress.

ACCCE has always maintained high ethical and professional standards. In this case, the standards and practices that we require for grassroots advocacy outreach were not adhered to by Bonner and Associates. In this sense, the community groups involved, the Members of Congress who received the fraudulent letters, as well as ACCCE, were all victimized by this misconduct.

However, we also know that the ACCCE knew about the forgeries at least two days before the House vote and did not inform Congress of that fact. This comes from an ACCCE document describing the relationship between the ACCCE and Bonner:

Based upon information ACCCE received from the Hawthorn Group, it was Bonner & Associates’ own internal that identified these false letters and it was Mr. Bonner who first brought this to the attention of the Hawthorn Group. ACCCE was then made aware of the situation by Hawthorn on July 24, 2009.

The House Roll Call vote on ACES occurred on July 26, 2009.

The Sierra Club announced on Monday that it had mailed a letter to Attorney General Holder asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether Bonner’s actions were legal or not. The letter from Patrick Gallagher, Sierra Club Legal Counsel, reads in part:

First, the Department of Justice should ascertain whether forged letters were sent to other Representatives or Senators…. Second, the Department of Justice should investigate whether other community organizations were similarly misrepresented…. Finally, the Department of Justice should pursue criminal charges against Bonner & Associates.

At a minimum, Bonner & Associates, acting through its employees or representatives, appears to have violated 18 U.S.C. 1343 (”Fraud by wire, radio, or television”) and 19 U.S.C. 1346 (”Definition of ’scheme or artifice to defraud’”).

Representative Edward Markey, Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, sent a letter to Jack Bonner with a list of 14 questions to be answered by August 12, 2009. S&R obtained a copy of the letter – you can read it here. Some of the more interesting questions from the letter can be summarized as follows:

1. Who did you do your lobbying for, is your client a registered lobbying firm, and how much did did they pay you?
2. Did Bonner lobby other Congresspeople on ACES and for what clients?
3. Give us details (compensation, contractor vs. employee status, etc.) about the employee you claim to have fired.
4. If you script your employees, give us copies of those scripts.
5. We want copies of all faked letters Bonner sent to any Congressperson, and we also want to know how you got ahold of actual letterhead from the two minority groups from which letters were forged.
6. Explain how you caught the fakes and what methods you used to ensure that you found all the faked letters and their recipients, and if you destroyed anyting, we want to know that too.

Rep. Markey has also sent a letter to the ACCCE demanding answers to questions similar to those posed to Bonner. S&R has also obtained a copy of this letter and you can read it here. It says, in part:

Press reports indicate that ACCCE may not have told the other affected offices that they too had received fraudulent letters until Monday, August 3, 2009.

The deliberate inaction prior to the House vote and the extended silence after the House vote – some 40 days after the ACCCE knew what had happened – raises serious concerns.

This story is still developing, and S&R will bring you periodic updates as the become available.

———-

Cash for Clunkers doesn’t do much for climate

According to an Associated Press article, Cash for Clunkers (C4C) has not had an appreciable effect on U.S. consumption of oil or its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. According to the article, C4C reduced oil consumption by about 72 million gallons of gas per year, or the amount of gasoline consumed by Americans every 4.5 hours. Similarly, the GHG savings equates to about saving 57 minutes of GHG emissions per year.

The problem is that the estimated number of clunkers removed from the roads is only 250 thousand, compared to at total of approximately 260 million cars in the U.S.

There are certainly benefits to this program, but according to the individuals interviewed for the AP story, the benefits aren’t GHGs. Instead, the benefits are to the economy as a whole and the reduction of standard pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide. But two climate experts interviewed for the article had this to say about it:

“As a carbon dioxide policy, this is a terribly wasteful thing to do,” said Henry Jacoby, a professor of management and co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT. “The amount of carbon you are saving per federal expenditure is very, very small.”

and

“It’s not that it’s a bad idea; just don’t sell it as a cost-effective energy savings method,” [Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University,] said. “From an economic standpoint it seems to be a roaring success. From an environment and energy perspective, it’s not where you would put your first dollar.”

It’s also entirely possible that these complaints are actually the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. As S&R reported last month, GHG and pollution emissions vary with the total lifecycle of that transportation method. For this reason, replacing “clunkers” that aren’t truly clunkers could actually increase GHG and pollution emissions as a result of the emissions created in the process of manufacturing the new vehicle.

Whether this is actually so remains for someone else to determine.

———-

National Academy of Sciences: we need independent GHG emission confirmation

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Methods for Estimating Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the National Research Council sent NASA administrator Charles Bolden a letter expressing their support for the replacement of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) that failed to reach orbit earlier this year. The letter says that a replacement OCO is necessary for independent verification of carbon emissions reports that are presently self-reported by nations on an irregular basis.

National emission inventories, required under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, are self-reported and are not required regularly for all countries. Verification requires checking these self-reported emissions estimates. However, independent data against which to verify the statistics used to estimate CO2 emissions, such as fossil fuel consumption, are not available.

In addition, while the Japanese GOSAT has the ability to monitor CO₂, the letter claims that GOSAT’s spatial resolution is too low and it’s accuracy insufficient to measure the emissions of a power plant against the background CO₂.

The letter points out that, while OCO’s short on-orbit lifetime and poor global coverage makes OCO unsuitable to observe trends, but that OCO would be an ideal testbed for the technologies that could monitor the entire globe for years or decades at a time. And given the significant limitations of terrestrial monitoring of GHGs, satellites will be necessary to confirm the self-reported national emissions.

———-

Climate disruption may, or may not, make disease worse

It’s long been a tenet of climate disruption that increasing global temperatures will result in a wider range for tropical diseases and thus greater incidence of disease. But a feature article in Conservation Magazine asks a number of questions about the accuracy of this understanding and ultimately concludes that there are too many unknowns at this point to really know how diseases will respond to a warming world.

The basic problem is this: when there are so many other possible factors in the spread of disease, how can you accurately attribute the wider spread of a disease to climate disruption? The examples provided in the article illustrate this difficulty.

According to the article, tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) increased in the Baltics at the same time that the region warmed up significantly. But the Soviet Union collapsed over the same period as well, and the rate of poverty rose as a result. Since poorer people are less likely to get vaccinated and are more likely to forage for food in areas where ticks are more common, TBE researcher, Sarah Randolph concluded that “the disease surge probably had far more to do with human actions than planetary changes.”

Mosquitoes are some of the most prolific disease vectors in the world, spreading malaria and West Nile Virus among dozens of other pathogens and parasites. According to the article, West Nile cases in the U.S. appear to have more to do with the lifecycles of the mosquitoes that carry the virus than with climate change. Specifically, in the western U.S., West Nile cases spike the year after a dry year, while West Nile cases spike in wet years in the eastern U.S. These differences result from the relationship between different mosquitoes and their predators. Hot years in the West kill off mosquito predators and the mosquitoes recover before the predators do, leading to an increase in mosquitoes and accompanying West Nile cases. In the East, however, mosquitoes breed in standing water (water-filled tires, for example), and so rainier years produce more mosquitoes and more West Nile cases.

However, the data is only over a few short years, and whether this relationship holds for longer periods is, as yet, undetermined. But the observed reaction of West Nile to precipitation and heat illustrates that whether the disease gets more common and widespread or not will vary from region to region.

The questions are not limited just to human disease and parasites – how animal parasites, and the animals afflicted, will change as a result of climate disruption is also uncertain. According to the article, monarch butterflies are often afflicted by a parasite that makes the butterflies less able to fly long distances. Because so many monarchs migrate to Mexico, the migrating butterfly population remains healthy. But non-migrating monarchs in Florida have a much higher incidence of parasite infection than the migrating monarchs do. And so it’s possible that, if monarch wintering sites move further north out of Mexico and into Texas, the incidence of parasitic infection in monarch butterflies could rise.

But other parasites, such as those that infect musk ox in the Arctic, may respond differently, according to the article. The parasites infect the musk ox via accidental ingestion of slugs. If climate disruption kills off the slugs, then musk ox may actually get healthier as a result of climate disruption.

At this point there’s not enough information to know.

Image credits:
PhotoCarsOnline.com
NASA/JPL

The WG1 report was authored and reviewed by approximately 2000 scientists with varying expertise in climate and related fields, and so having a list of over 30,000 scientists that rejected the WG1’s conclusions was a powerful meme that AGW skeptics and deniers could use to cast doubt on the IPCC’s conclusions and, indirectly, on the entire theory of climate disruption. And in fact, this meme has become widespread in both legacy and new media today.

It is also completely false.

According to the Petition Project “qualifications” page, “Signatories are approved for inclusion in the Petition Project list if they have obtained formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher in appropriate scientific fields.” The fields that are considered “appropriate” by the OISM are as follows:

• Atmosphere, Earth, and Environment fields: atmospheric science, climatology, meteorology, astronomy, astrophysics, earth science, geochemistry, geology, geophysics, geoscience, hydrology, environmental engineering, environmental science, forestry, oceanography
• Computers and Math: computer science, mathematics, statistics
• Physics and Aerospace: physics, nuclear engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering
• Chemistry: chemistry, chemical engineering
• Biochemistry, Biology, and Agriculture: biochemistry, biophysics, biology, ecology, entomology, zoology, animal science, agricultural science, agricultural engineering, plant science, food science
• Medicine: medical science, medicine
• General Engineering and General Science: engineering, electrical engineering, metallurgy, general science

The OISM’s qualifications for being a “scientist” are expansive, and as such there are a number of questions that have to be answered before we can take this list seriously. What expertise does a nuclear engineer or a medical doctor or a food scientist or mechanical engineer have that makes them qualified to have an informed opinion on the cause(s) of recent climate disruption? How many of these names are working climate scientists instead of science or math teachers or stay-at-home-mom’s with engineering degrees? How many of these people has actually published a peer-reviewed paper on climate? How many people took a look at the card that served as a “signature” (click on the image to see a larger version) and realized that they could lie about having a science degree and their deception would never be discovered?

At this point it’s literally impossible to know because the names and degrees on the list cannot be verified by anyone outside the OISM. We can only take the OISM’s word that they’re all real names, that all the degrees are correct, and so on. This does not stand up to the most basic tests of scientific credibility.

Unfortunately, the OISM’s list has had its credibility fabricated for it by individuals and groups as diverse as Steve Milloy of Fox News (see this link for a S&R investigation into the background and tactics of Steve Milloy), L. Brent Bozell of conservative “news” site Newsbusters and founder of the conservative Media Research Center, Benita M. Dodd of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, the libertarian/conservative site American Thinker (a site that has regularly failed to fact-check their AGW posts), conservative commentator Deroy Murdock (who works on Project 21 with the wife of one of Steve Milloy’s long-time associates), RightSideNews, Dakota Voice, Dennis T. Avery of the Hudson Institute, Lawrence Solomon of the Financial Post, Michelle Malkin, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, to name just a few of the better known. As a result, the OISM’s petition has been elevated to a level of credibility that is arguably undeserved.

While it’s not possible to test the validity of OISM list directly, it is possible to test the conclusions that have been drawn from the OISM list. Specifically, we can test what percentage the 30,000 “scientists” listed on the OISM petition represent when compared to the total number of scientists in the U.S. And we can then compare that to the percentage represented by the 2000 IPCC AR4 WG1-associated scientists as compared to the estimate number of U.S. climate-related scientists.

According to the OISM website, anyone with a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Doctorate of Philosophy in a field related to physical sciences is qualified as a scientist. In addition, the OISM sent the petition cards pictured above only to individuals within the U.S. Based on this information, we can us the OISM’s own guidelines to determine how many scientists there are in the U.S. and what percentage of those scientists are represented by the OISM petition.

The U.S. Department of Education tracks the number of graduates from institutions of higher education every year, and has done so since either the 1950-51 or 1970-71 school years, depending on what specifically the Dept. of Ed. was interested in. This data was last updated in the Digest of Education Statistics: 2008. We’re specifically interested in the number of degrees that have been awarded in the various scientific disciplines as defined by the OISM in the list above. This information is available in the following tables within the 2008 Digest: 296, 298, 302, 304, 310, 311, and 312. Table 1 below show how many graduates there were in the various categories defined by the Dept. of Ed. since the 1970-71 school year (click on the image for a larger version). The numbers have been corrected to account for the fact that PhD’s will usually have MS degrees as well, and that both are preceded by BS degrees.

As you can see, Table 1 shows that there were over 10.6 million science graduates as defined by the OISM since the 1970-71 school year. This is a conservative estimate as illustrated by teh 242,000 graduates in biological and biomedical sciences from 1950-51 through 1969-70 alone, never mind the 166,000 engineering graduates, and so on. Many of these individuals are still alive today and would be considered scientists according to the OISM definition thereof.

The OISM website lists how many signatures they have for scientists in each of their categories. Given the number of graduates and the number of signatures claimed by the OISM, we can calculate the percentage of OISM-defined scientists who signed as referenced to the total. These results are shown in Table 2 below.

In other words, the OISM signatories represent a small fraction (~0.3%) of all science graduates, even when we use the OISM’s own definition of a scientist.

However, as mentioned above, it’s entirely reasonable to ask whether a veterinarian or forestry manager or electrical engineer should qualify as a scientist. If we remove all the engineers, medical professionals, computer scientists, and mathematicians, then the 31,478 “scientists” turn into 13,245 actual scientists, as opposed to scientists according to the OISM’s expansive definition. Of course, not all of them are working in science, but since some medical professionals and statisticians do work in science, it’s still a reasonable quick estimate.

However, it’s not reasonable to expect that all of those actual scientists are working in climate sciences. Certainly the 39 climatologists, but after that, it gets much murkier. Most geologists don’t work as climate scientists, although some certainly do. Most meteorologists do weather forecasting, but understanding the weather is radically different than understanding climate. So we can’t be sure beyond the 39 climatologists, although we can reasonably assume that the number is far less than the 13,245 actual scientists claimed by the OISM.

13,245 scientists is only 0.1% of the scientists graduated in the U.S. since the 1970-71 school year.

We can, however, compare the number of atmospheric scientists, climagologists, ocean scientists, and meteorologists who signed this petition to the number of members of the various professional organizations. For example, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) has over 55,000 members, of which over 7,200 claim that atmospheric sciences is their primary field. The OISM claims 152 atmospheric scientists. Compared to the atmospheric scientist membership in the AGU, the OISM signatories are only 2.1%, and this estimate is high given the fact that the AGU does not claim all atmospheric scientists as members.

The AGU hydrology group has over 6,000 members who call hydrology their primary field. The OISM list has 22 names that claim to be hydrologists, or 0.4%.

The AGU ocean sciences group claims approximately 6,800 members. The OISM has 83 names, or 1.2%. And again, given that AGU membership is not required to be a practicing ocean scientists, this number is inflated.

The American Meteorological Society claims over 14,000 members and the OISM claims 341 meteorologists as petition signatories. That’s only 2.4%.

It’s clear that the OISM names don’t represent a significant number of scientists when compared to either the total number of science graduates in the U.S. or to the number of practicing scientists who work in likely relevant fields. But that’s not all.

Over recent years, various organizations have set out to estimate just how widespread the supposed “scientific consensus” on AGW actually is. Two recent efforts were conducted by the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University and by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The STATS survey found that 84% of climate scientists surveyed “personally believe human-induced warming is occurring” and that “[o]nly 5% believe that that human activity does not contribute to greenhouse warming.” The STATS survey involved a random sampling of “489 self-identified members of either the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union” and it has a theoretical sampling error of +/- 4%.

The Pew survey was taken in early 2009 and asked over 2000 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) their opinion on various scientific issues, including climate disruption. 84% of AAAS respondents felt that “warming is due to human activity” compared to only 10% who felt that “warming is due to natural causes.” The AAAS has over 10 million members, and the results of the survey are statistically valid for the entire population with a theoretical sampling error of +/- 2.5%.

84% of 10 million scientist members of the AAAS is 8.4 million scientists who agree that climate disruption is human-caused. 84% of the climate scientists (conservatively just the members of the atmospheric science group of the AGU) is, conservatively, 6,000 scientists who have direct and expert knowledge of climate disruption. The 13,245 scientists and 152 possible climate scientists who signed the OISM petition represent a small minority of the totals.

The IPCC AR4 WG1 report was written and reviewed by approximately 2000 scientists. If we assume that the 20,000 AGU members who claim to be atmospheric scientists, ocean scientists, or hydrologists represent the pool of potential experts in climate science in the U.S., then approximately 10% of all climate scientists were directly involved in creating the over 1000 page report.

That compares to less than 1% of all OISM “scientists” who mailed a pre-printed postcard.

Ultimately, The OISM petition will continue to rear it’s ugly head until its fabricated credibility has been thoroughly demolished. Social conservatives and libertarians, each of which has their own ideological reasons to push the OISM petition, have been effective at keeping the “30,000 scientists reject warming chicken-littleism of IPCC” meme circulating throughout conservative media outlets, even as climate disruption-focused media have worked at limiting the damage from the OISM petition. But given the fact that the science supporting a dominantly anthropogenic cause for climate disruption is overwhelming, it’s only a matter of time before the OISM petition wilts in the heat.

• NE Pacific clouds observed to amplify warming
• Skeptical Inquirer publisher calls Inhofe’s list uncredible
• The ozone hole has reduced ocean CO₂ absorption
• Clinton Climate Initiative and Microsoft partner on Project 2°
• We might as well drive Model-Ts

The question of whether clouds are a positive or a negative feedback is one of the biggest remaining questions in climate modeling. A new paper in the journal Science is another piece of evidence that clouds will amplify the effects of climate disruption instead of dampen it.

The authors of the study analyzed two unrelated observational methods and found that both showed a decrease in cloud cover over the Northeast (NE) Pacific as a result of climate changes in sea surface temperature (SST), sea level pressure (SLP), and two measurements of the troposphere (the lower atmosphere). The observational methods used were satellites and direct observation from ships, and even though the methods were different, both methods produced similar results and similar correlations to SST et al. As a result, the conclusions of the paper are stronger than most.

And those conclusions are that, as the NE Pacific heats up, the amount of cloud cover over the region declines. Less cloud cover over water means that the water absorbs more solar energy, further heating up the ocean surface. Similarly, cooler water in the NE Pacific means more clouds that further cool the ocean’s surface. In addition, observations shown in the paper illustrate this same relationship holds across the entire Pacific.

The authors also compared the observations to the 18 general circulation models (GCMs) in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 archive for how the models compared to the new clouds observations, and the results were striking – only two of the models produced the same statistical correlation sign (+ or -) as the observations, and one of those two is a statistical outlier for wind circulation.

According to the paper’s lead author Dr. Amy Clement of the University of Miami, one of the next steps is to extend their results out of the NE Pacific to the rest of the Pacific and, ultimately, to the rest of the globe. But according to Clement, the biggest problem is that only one GCM accurately reproduces all the observed cloud effects in the NE Pacific.

“This is the best we can do,” she said. “As more models pass this test, then we can begin to have more confidence in the sign of the low cloud feedback and how much that contributes to global climate sensitivity.”

Time, and much more research, will tell.

Thanks to Amy Clement, lead author of the paper for answering my questions and providing me with a review copy of her paper

———-

Skeptical Inquirer publisher calls Inhofe’s list uncredible

Before Marc Morano left Sen. Inhofe’s (R-OK) staff to become highly paid climate disruption denier and professional pundit, he collected a list of 687 scientists who supposedly rejected the the science underlying climate disruption. It was titled the United States Senate Minority Report on Global Warming, and the purpose was to play a numbers game with the IPCC scientists responsible for writing and reviewing the Fourth Assessment Report working group 1 scientific review. Supposedly, the 687 “expert” in the Minority Report outnumbered the IPCC scientists because of how many scientists were responsible for writing the IPCC Summary for Policymakers. Given that 2000 or so scientists wrote and/or reviewed the WG1 study, this claim was clearly and obviously false to anyone who understood the way that the IPCC WG1 worked, but that didn’t stop Morano and Inhofe from making the claim. Nor did it stop legions of uninformed climate disruption deniers from repeating the claim ad inifinitum.

While bloggers and some journalists have put a great deal of time into exposing the Inhofe list, it’s too easy to dismiss bloggers as activists and journalists as members of the mythical “liberal media.” But the avowed skeptical organization the Center for Inquiry isn’t so easily dismissed, especially by individuals claiming the mantle of “climate change skeptic.” Which is why the Center’s scathing investigation of the credibility – or rather the lack thereof – of the Inhofe list is such a big deal.

What the Center’s investigation found is that 80% of the scientists on the list had never published a climate-related paper. The Center could verify that only 10% were for certain involved in climate science, with an additional 5% that could have been. And 4% largely or entirely agreed with the scientific theory human-caused climate disruption. I think it’s fair to say that the Center’s claim that “[t]hese results cast serious doubt on the Senate Minority Report’s credibility” is a bit understated.

What does this mean for Inhofe’s infamous list? Probably not much. Morano no longer works for Inhofe, after all, and neither man has been overly concerned with verifiable scientific fact when it comes to climate disruption. But having the publisher of what is arguably the premier skeptical publication in the world say that the list is not credible won’t make their lives any easier. And over the long run, that’s probably a good thing.

———-

The ozone hole has reduced ocean CO₂ absorption

In 2007, scientists studying the Southern Ocean reported that it was not absorbing CO₂ as efficiently as had been expected. A study published in November, 2008 partly contradicted the 2007 conclusion and said that the original study was flawed due to insufficient resolution in oceanic current eddies. A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters adds yet another chapter to the ongoing questions about the Southern Ocean’s ability, or lack thereof, to absorb anthropogenic CO₂.

The fundamental absorption mechanism of any gas in water is related to the partial pressures of the gas in the air vs. dissolved in the water. At a constant temperature, the partial pressure at the water surface will equal the partial pressure of that gas in the air. Increase the amount of the gas in the air and more of it will slowly absorb into the water. This is fundamentally why increasing concentrations of CO₂ due to fossil fuel combustion is driving ocean acidification – the partial pressure of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing and the ocean is absorbing more CO₂ as a result.

But this simple relationship isn’t sufficient to describe the real ocean. The real ocean has waves, is in contact with wind, and has currents and upwellings that change the relationship on local and regional scales. And it’s these real ocean effects that the study’s authors have modeled using coupled-climate-carbon models (CCCMs), models that focus on the effects of the carbon cycle on climate and vice versa. And the CCCMs have found that the ozone hole over Antarctica has been a significant factor in the reduction of CO₂ absorption by the Southern Ocean.

The Southern Annual Mode (SAM) is an atmospheric pattern that moves westerlies (prevailing winds in the mid-latitudes that tend to blow from west to east) closer to the pole. According to the paper, the SAM has moved poleward as a result of increasing GHGs and ozone depletion, and wind stresses on the Southern Ocean have increased. The result of increased wind is greater ocean mixing between the surface layers and deep, carbon-rich layers of the ocean. Essentially, the ocean surface layers that are carbon-poor are being blown off the deeper layers, creating a condition where the ocean can’t absorb as much CO₂ because the ocean has a higher CO₂ partial pressure than it would have had if the westerlies hadn’t been blowing so strongly.

The authors ran two sets of models, one with the effects of the ozone hole included and one without, and then compared the model runs with observed changes in the the partial pressure of CO₂ both in the Southern Ocean and in the air above it. The model that didn’t include the effects of the ozone hole didn’t match reported observations.

In addition, as the SAM exposes deep, carbon-rich water to the surface, ocean acidification of the Southern Ocean accelerates and the effects thereof worsen. These effects include reduced calicification of plankton and larger areas of low oxygen (hypoxia) that could lead to larger ocean dead zones.

In November, the Carboholic reported on a study that claimed the Southern Ocean was still absorbing CO₂ and that the problem with studies like this one was that they didn’t have detailed enough ocean models. The authors of this study addressed the criticisms of the prior one directly and concluded that more detailed ocean models were not necessary in this case because the CCCMs used were able to replicate observated changes in CO₂. It remains to be seen, however, what happens when both model types from the two studies are combined.

———-

Clinton Climate Initiative and Microsoft partner on Project 2°

Project 2° is an attempt to provide cities with easy-to-use software tools that can track and manage their greenhouse gas emissions. The idea is that cities all have the same sources of GHG emissions – transportation, electricity generation, energy consumption, and industry – and the similarities mean that all cities have similar needs with respect to their ability to determine where, how, and how much emissions are coming from each sector.

At the moment, the Project 2° website indicates that there are only three cities using the software – Chicago, Houston, and Rotterdam, with Chicago having the most information available on the website. Other resources at the Project 2° website are contact links for access to experts, documentation on official international GHG accounding guidelines, and a detailed demonstration of how the software works.

I don’t know if this will take off or not. Having Microsoft and Autodesk on board certainly doesn’t hurt Project 2°’s chances any, but who knows. Ultimately, though, something like Project 2° is needed if cities are going to be able to get a handle on their GHG emissions and how best to cut them in the near future.

———-

We might as well drive Model-Ts

Overall vehicle fuel efficiency hasn’t increased much in decades. Generally speaking, as gasoline and diesel engines have been made more efficient, the efficiency gains have been eaten up with increased vehicle mass and additional gadgets. According to a New Scientist article, modern automobiles, trucks, motorcycles, and buses are not dramatically more efficient than the Ford Model-T.

University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute researchers Michael Sivak and Omer Tsimhoni analyzed the total fleet fuel efficiency for cars et al from 1923 to 2006 and found that overall efficiency improved at only 2% per year average. In addition, the bulk of that 2% annual improvement actually took place between the OPEC oil embargo in the 1973 and 1991. According to the article, from 1991 to 2006, fuel efficiency improved a grand total of 1.8%.

One of the most critical points in the article is that removing old, low efficiency vehicles is critical to raising overall fleet fuel efficiency. Thus the various “Cash for Clunkers” ideas that have been implemented locally and the federal plan that was recently signed into law by President Obama.

The other critical point made in the article is not necessarily obvious:

“Society has much more to gain from improving a car from 15 to 16 mpg (6.38 to 6.8 km/l) than from improving a car from 40 to 41 mpg (17 to 17.43 km/l),” [Sivak and Tsimhoni] write in their paper. “Similarly, the benefits are greater from improving a truck from 4 to 4.5 mpg (1.7 to 1.92 km/l) than from improving a truck from 7 to 7.5 mpg (3.19 km/l).”

It’s not necesarily obvious that this claim is correct until you invert the numbers. Improving fuel efficiency from 15 to 16 mpg is 6.7 to 6.3 gallons per 100 miles, or 0.4 gallons less fuel burned. Improving efficiency from 40 to 41 mpg means burning only 0.1 gallons less fuel (2.5 to 2.4 gallons per 100 miles). In the same way, going from 4.0 to 4.5 mpg is better than going from 7.0 to 7.5 mpg because the improvement is 3 gallons per 100 miles vs. 1 gallon per mile respectively.

Image credits:
NASA Earth Observatory
San Francisco Chronicle
Geophysical Research Letters
CSIRO