A Musing Environment

Update: It’s done, it’s a 5th grade reader (pdf) let me know what you think.

I’ve started an intro to climate change for 4th graders. Many of the concepts are normally introduce in higher grades (greenhouse effect in high school). It would be 5 essays, 125ish words each.

If you know of such a reader already, save me the trouble!! Tell me about it.

If you know a lot about writing for young people, please help. I’ve been working with two 4th graders for months and haven’t seen a semi-colon; I’m not completely clueless.

Thanks to the AAAS blog Science Insider:

• According to PEW, a declining number of Americans see climate change occurring, 58% in October 2009, down from 71% in April 2008. The numbers seeing climate change as anthropogenic are down to 36%, from 47% in 2008.

More people believe the problem is serious than believe it is anthropogenic.

Very Serious/Serious/Don’t Know
2008 44/29/3
2009 36/16/3

Fewer see solid evidence of global warming, from 2008 to 2009:
%2008—>%2009 (net change)
Dem 83—>75 (-12%)
Rep 49—>35 (-14%)
Ind 75—>53 (-22%)

Half of Americans favor setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions even if energy prices go up, though only 14% have heard a lot about cap and trade. Of that group, emissions limits are opposed 2 to 1.

• From the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre comes a new world map showing the effects of 4°C/7°F increase in temperature, expected some time this century, perhaps as early as 2060.

Where I live,
• Temperature would rise 6 – 7°C (increase is greater on land). Forest fires would increase.
• Some crop yields decrease 40%, perhaps more because estimates about decreases in crop yield don’t include more weather extremes.

Worldwide,
• Assuming a population of 7.5 billion (OK, where did the others go?), 3 billion would be living with water shortage, less than 1000 cubic meters/year.
• Now, 600 million are living within 10 meters of sea level, so any rise would increase flooding and reduce freshwater availability.
• In eastern North America, the hottest day of the year could be 10-12°C, 18-22°F, warmer.
• Water runoff could decrease 70% around the Mediterranean, southern African, and large areas of South America.
• Himalayan glaciers will be reduced significantly by 2050, even at less than 4°C increase. Almost a quarter of China’s population lives in regions where glacial melt is the principal dry season water source, and 70% of the Indus river basin flow comes from glacier melt.

Project 2061 has received funding to develop teaching materials for climate change. Over the next 3 years, scientists, teachers, and others will work together to produce materials that will be made available online for free.

The team will use data collected by NASA and NOAA on global observations of oceans, atmosphere, land surface, and the biosphere. The team will also address common misconceptions that many students have about key ideas related to climate and climate change.

“We think that these kinds of activities—missing from most textbooks—can make a big difference in both motivating students and in helping them understand important science ideas,” [Jo Ellen] Roseman [director of Project 2061] said.

I’ve been seeing suggestions that the way to address climate change is to tackle areas of agreement first. Large numbers of Americans agree that solar and wind are the solution? Congress should finance solar and wind because we can agree on them even if solar in particular is not an important solution (yet).

My take is different—focusing on the hard issues is more likely to get us to meaningful mitigation. First, we need to solve the hard issues anyway. And Americans are going to continue to see climate change at the bottom of the environmental list if we don’t see more people clearly moving out of their comfort zone to solutions that are important.

Here’s my list of the hard issues:

• Easiest in this category are technology choices such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, and so on for those with strong feelings about particular technology choices.

• Harder is agreeing that climate change will cost, that we are going to pay for mitigation, and how. Economists estimate the cost at 1 – 3% of the gross domestic product per year for the next several decades (or forever) plus the cost of adaptation. This means in economists’ terms that we will lose one year of increased prosperity, and then the GDP will continue its upward trend. It also means that we in the US pay as much as $1400+ per capita per year. More if we insist on a strong solar component in our solution. Yes, mitigation is significantly cheaper than the alternative. Yes, our incomes would double in 29 years (instead of 28 years). Is this enough to madke negotiation easy?

[Example: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group 3 (pdf, page 80) finds a cost of less than 3% of the GDP by 2030, though for lesser reductions. The number of their studies was small.]

• Hardest is finding ways to restrict our behavior. A number of people have told me that they obey the law, but find voluntary change difficult. How can we find ways to restrict flying, driving, buying big houses in the ‘burbs, and so on?

What is your list of hard behaviors?

Do you agree that we should start with the hard behaviors first?

From the writeup at Climate Feedback, the Nature.com blog:

Mere exposure to green products can make people behave more altruistically, but purchasing those same products can have quite the opposite effect, suggests a new study in press at the journal Psychological Science.

The blog entry didn’t demonstrate this, just that given two randomly assigned groups of people, those exposed to green products and those who purchased them, actually buying the products appeared to provide a “moral offset” on the next task.

Note: I see this in real life (based on people I know, this is not scientifically valid!!!) except among Prius owners, for whom the Prius purchase is part of a set of changes they make in their lives.

What do you see?

Green consumers photo credit

Update: Also, I wonder how accurate my impressions are, even among my very limited sample.

The New York Times, When ‘Green’ Consumers Decide,‘ I’ve Done Enough’, gives more information.

In a Q&A session, I asked people for their concerns on nuclear waste, numbers at risk, year when this would occur, and where they had read about this concern.

Many were proxies for actual concerns: the government lies to us or the US government will likely collapse within hundreds of years and there is no way to protect the waste afterward.

Concerns ranged from nuclear waste transport (no scenarios as to what might happen, no numbers of affected) to hundreds of thousands of years from now all North Americans would have mutated to creatures with grimaces and distorted body shapes.

Other species as well? Picture credit

Everyone present, everyone, described their concern coming from their own imagination.

When I began reading about nuclear power in 1995, I had preconceptions about the dangers of nuclear waste. Those who clearly knew what they were talking about did not think that nuclear waste was dangerous, and those who agreed with me provided no numbers and no scenarios, only that nuclear waste is highly radioactive for decades and radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. I could not find any source for the numbers I worried about, or any other numbers that would make nuclear waste appear to be a serious concern.

I have seen this elsewhere. When California newspapers were full of stories about MTBE (a gasoline additive) polluting the water, I asked 10 people what harm came from MTBE. Eight told me cancer, and two birth defects. The actual known problem (pdf) is that for 15%?? of the population, MTBE makes the water unpalatable. In the absence of information, people fill in the blanks.

A second example I read somewhere or other: Mugabe rejected a US offer of food aid because it was transgenic. He told Zimbabweans that the food would make them sick, but not how. The most common concern? The donated food would cause AIDS.

I believe the group trying to explain their concerns about nuclear waste felt that the wide variety of concerns about nuclear waste reflected a number of paths to nuclear waste problems, rather than wild guesses to fill in the blanks.

Have any of you seen concrete numbers on nuclear waste: what harm would occur under what scenarios?

Greg Craven’s book, What’s the Worst that Could Happen?, is an excellent text on critical thinking, applied to the climate change problem. He focuses on sorting through claims which range from “This is the biggest threat in human history” all the way to “No, this is the biggest hoax in history.”

Several tens of pages are devoted to looking at the sources we use. He begins with the ways we deceive ourselves.

So now that you fear your own brain, what can you do to domesticate it? As with all problems, the first step is admitting you have one. This really is the hardest part… The higher the stakes, the greater care you probably want to take in forming your opinion, and having an alarm set up to warn you that you are on fertile ground for confirmation bias.”

Craven suggests ways to fight our own confirmation bias. These include making a list of things that could change our mind, and looking for sources more trustworthy than our biases.

He has some excellent exercises, which demonstrate his own process, different from mine, and different from yours.

An excellent reason to go to sources: to overcome the ideas I bring into the discussion. I realized that early on in my own process, that I had (and still have) preconceptions as well as ignorance, and so found sources I trust more than myself.

From the conference, Betts audio and slides (pdf) gives an overview:

• Current CO2 emissions are near (but not above) upper end of IPCC scenarios
• 4°C global warming (relative to pre-industrial) is possible by the 2090s, especially under high emissions scenario [without considering feedback]
• Many areas could warm by 10°C or more
• The Arctic could warm by 15°C or more
• Annual precipitation could decrease by 20% or more in many areas
• Carbon cycle feedbacks expected to accelerate warming
• With high emissions, best guess is 4°C in 2070s
• Plausible worst case: 4°C by 2060

Note: many areas with higher precipitation are likelier to become drier with temperature increases.

From Nayamuth audio, looking at effect of climate change on sugar cane biofuels in Mauritius, which will decrease between 24 and 62% with a 4°C increase:

Sugarcane industry highly vulnerable to CC
Adaptation impossible because of
• Increased water demand
• High costs of irrigation network
• High costs of water storage
• Less water from reduced rainfall
• 4°C beyond adaptation limit
4°C = GHG emissions = Further GLOBAL WARMING [due to lower availability of biofuels]

Karoly, slides (pdf) and audio, talks about wildfire increase:

Australian bushfires linked to climate change associated with a temperature increase of only 0.8°C in February 2009 killed more than 170 people. This year, consistent with predictions, California, Australia, and Athens experienced large fires.

Climate change doesn’t cause fire, but does change weather conditions (seasonal maximum, humidity, and winds), fuel conditions (dry due to droughts), and the frequency of lightning. While there have been large forest fires earlier, the forest fire danger index is much larger than ever before in places like Australia and southern California.

Climate change impacts on fires

• British Columbia: 30% increase in fire season,
95% increase in fire weather severity in summer
for a +3°C world (Nitschke and Innes, 2008)
• California: 12% to 90% increase in number of large
fires (depending on region) for a +3°C world
(Westerling and Bryant, 2008)

Australia’s fires in February were 50% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions this year were from fires, but for now are considered “natural” and not added to the Australia column.

Gemenne, slides (pdf) and audio, talks about population displacement:

Which impacts of climate change induce population displacements, and where?
• Droughts and desertification, water stress
In Subsahelian Africa
In Northern Asia
In Central America

• Extreme weather events
In South-East Asia and Asia-Pacific
In the Gulf of Mexico

• Sea-level rise
In coastal and deltaic regions
In small island states

> Most of these regions are very densely populated

Calculations on the impact of climate change on migration will be difficult, because of the existence of and interaction with other problems, including environmental problems. The impact of climate change on a population depends on adaptive capacities. And little is known about population reaction to environmental disruptions.

See Environmental Change and Forced Migration Scenarios for 23 case studies. The poorest and most vulnerable often lack the resources to migrate.

See more on this conference at
Part 1

Nature’s blog, Climate Feedback, has been covering the conference, 4 Degrees and Beyond. Slides and audio have been posted.

How soon is it coming?
As early as 2060, depending on strength of feedbacks.

To flee the sea, or not to flee?
The questions on ice sheet dynamics have still not been answered, so there is no agreed upon answer.

Adaption to what?

Audio and slides from the conference.
Schnellnhuber talks about the increase in concern with temperature increase since 2001:

burning embers diagram: 2°C increase no longer considered safe. From Proceedings of the National Academy’s Assessing dangerous climate change through an update of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “reasons for concern”. (pdf)

While we don’t know sea level rise in the 21st century, in the long run, sea level was 50 m higher at atmospheric CO2 level of 2x prehistoric (note: we’re adding greenhouse gases in addition to carbon dioxide). The ocean will have oxygen holes (large areas of oxygen depletion). Key message: “Temperature rises above 2°C […] are likely to cause major societal and environmental disruptions through the rest of the century and beyond.“

To be continued

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called for a target of 350 ppm CO2, down from today’s level of 387 ppm. Is this possible?

Apparently not.

It’s still warm in year 3000

From Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Fig. 1 illustrates how the concentrations of carbon dioxide would be expected to fall off through the coming millennium if manmade emissions were to cease immediately following an illustrative future rate of emission increase of 2% per year [comparable to observations over the past decade] up to peak concentrations of 450, 550, 650, 750, 850, or 1,200 ppmv; similar results were obtained across a range of EMICs [Earth system Models of Intermediate Complexity] that were assessed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. This is not intended to be a realistic scenario but rather to represent a test case whose purpose is to probe physical climate system changes. A more gradual reduction of carbon dioxide emission (as is more likely), or a faster or slower adopted rate of emissions in the growth period, would lead to long-term behavior qualitatively similar to that illustrated in Fig. 1. The example of a sudden cessation of emissions provides an upper bound to how much reversibility is possible, if, for example, unexpectedly damaging climate changes were to be observed.

In an interview with Nature Reports Climate Change, Oxford economist Dieter Helm discusses some of the ideas in the upcoming The Economics and Politics of Climate Change. Part of their focus is on why we have accomplished so little since Kyoto.

First, we are looking at GHG production instead of consumption. Shifting industry to China makes the numbers look better, but hasn’t even caused a blip in actual emissions increase.

Then,

What we have learnt is that politicians tend to choose the most expensive options first. Faced with climate change, what’s our solution? In Europe, it’s to devote most of our energies to a rapid build-out of wind power. This is the sort of thing that makes nuclear power look cheap. Climate change is about the massive increase of coal burning internationally, especially the growth of China and India fuelled by coal-based energy — and America too, where the Obama plans are also small relative to the problem.

What exactly will windmills across Europe do to address that overwhelmingly dominant effect? Of course they’ll play some role, but it’ll probably take a couple of weeks for China to add sufficient new coal power stations to cancel out any renewables effort in Britain. It’s time to grow up. It’s time to realize that coal is where the core of the problem lies, and to think cleverly about solutions towards that…

The problem we have in Europe is that people are obsessed by 2020, and that’s a time period in which actually we can’t do much on the technological front. By putting all our emphasis onto the technologies we can get in place by 2020, we’re missing longer-term opportunities like nuclear power, and carbon capture and storage.

And there is the stimulus:

The American government and the British government are spending something like 12 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to prop up consumer spending. My view is the level of consumption is far too high in the US and the UK, both for the macroeconomic cycle and for the environment. We’re living beyond our means. I would have taken the money that’s been used to prop up demand and put it into investment — and climate change can fit within the investment component.

See The Economics and Politics of Climate Change and the rest of the interview.

In a previous post I asked about vital behaviors for climate change activists. What are a few behaviors that are needed by many of us to address climate change more seriously?

Here is my first draft:

Behavior 1: Share your knowledge of the science and impacts of climate change, and help people handle their feelings.

The goal is to give people enough understanding of climate change to appreciate its importance and complexity, and give them enough background for constructive response.

Behavior 2: Choose a behavior change or set of changes that will reduce your greenhouse gas emissions by at least 10% this year. (This will require standing on an accurate scale.) Work with others on the same goal for a year. Do the following or its equivalent: form a support group, set goals, look at what’s hard. You may wish to model yourself on Weight Watchers, Overeaters or Alcoholics Anonymous, or other programs.

The goal is to give people a realistic idea how much can be achieved by behavior change, and to gain insight into how people shed greenhouse gas emissions. Hopefully enough people change their behavior to effect a change in social mores leading to a shift in the behavior in society. It will at least increase your understanding of what it might take.

Behavior 3: Choose a significant technology or policy that Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is necessary, one outside your comfort zone. Learn why it is needed, and begin to advocate for it with a group that is not so comfortable with the policy.

The goal is to shift the recommendations we make, moving to important over comfortable.

Comments?

Check out The Nuclear Energy Debate among Friends: Another Round, in the July 2009 Friends Journal. The online version includes footnotes and links.

This a response to the responses to an earlier article, A Friend’s Path to Nuclear Power . Some of the comments left here were also published in Friends Journal.

Comments?

Severin Borenstein of UC Energy Institute spoke May 5, 2009 at MIT: Meeting US Energy and Climate Challenges with Rational Policy (video)

Borenstein talks about various aspects of energy policy, the difference between GHG tax and cap and trade (not so much because we’re going to have to tweak whichever method is chosen), renewable portfolios, etc.

Borenstein says the cost of GHG has to be pretty high to cause us to change sources. Think $60 – 100/ton CO2-equivalent. $100/ton adds about 5 cent/kWh (more in states that have coal power), 90 cent/gallon for gasoline.

The InterAcademy Panel short statement (pdf) on ocean acidification (2 pages) includes some information that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

Headline messages
• Oceans play a critical role in the global carbon cycle by absorbing about a quarter of the CO2 emitted to the atmosphere from human activities;
• The rapid increase in CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution has increased the acidity of the world’s oceans with potentially profound consequences for marine plants and animals especially those that require calcium carbonate to grow and survive, and other species that rely on these for food;
• At current emission rates models suggest that all coral reefs and polar ecosystems will be severely affected by 2050 or potentially even earlier;
• Marine food supplies are likely to be reduced with significant implications for food production and security in regions dependent on fish protein, and human health and wellbeing;
• Ocean acidification is irreversible on timescales of at least tens of thousands of years;
• Even with stabilisation of atmospheric CO2 at 450 ppm, ocean acidification will have profound impacts on many marine systems. Large and rapid reductions of global CO2 emissions are needed globally by at least 50% by 2050.

Coral at risk: Papah?naumoku?kea park corals discovered by researchers from the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory

Influencer by Patterson, et al, examines how important change is effected. For those of us working on climate change, do we want to educate? Or change behaviors? or both?

The book Influencer gives a number of other examples at the personal, company, and societal level:

• Dr. Wiwat Rojanapithayakorn (pdf) worked with Thai sex workers to require clients use condoms (see World Health Organization description of this and other HIV programs).
• Delancey Street Project focuses on reversing the code of the street, “Care only about yourself, and don’t rat on anyone.” Almost immediately, residents take responsibility for someone else, and confront everyone else about violations.
• The Carter Center found the Guinea worm disease could be eliminated in afflicted communities by straining water collected at the local water supply.

Notice that these are behaviors, not outcomes (eat less than you metabolize is an outcome, eschew sweets a behavior). The influencers identified a small number of vital behaviors which could effect the change.

My own personal experience offers an example: One person’s goal was to shift people’s relationship with the then-Soviet Union, away from seeing Soviets as the enemy and towards a more complicated connection to the people and their motivations, towards the kind of complexity we see in people we know better. To accomplish this, she found ways to humanize stories, good and bad, about this area of the world—showing slides while she told the stories, passing around objects made there. People connect differently when holding an object the other has made.

I was part of the first group she took to visit Russia and other areas. We all agreed to give a slide show about our visit, at least once, and pass around objects made in areas we visited. (She still had some more work to do, or many of us would not have followed through.)

These activities—give slide show, pass around object—were the behaviors she wanted from us, and clearer than “share our experiences”. She wanted the public to handle objects, see pictures, and hear stories.

Climate change workers, what do you hope to accomplish? What do you want those in your reading/speaking audience to do? List two or three vital behaviors you’d like to change in people at your presentations/who read what you have to say. What strategies do you use to change vital behaviors? What types of resistance have you met? What tells you that you have been successful? What part is played by your follow-through?

The American Association for the Advancement of Science blog ScienceInsider is covering swine flu in great detail.

They discuss WHO’S response, and give swine flu mug shots (the virus not the people). They point out that it takes a while to find the origin of disease—three years after HIV/SARS was found in gay Americans, the origin was found in heterosexuals on a different continent.

Temperature increase last century was 0.6°C. Most climatologists would like to see temperature increase this century stay below 1.4°C, and many would like to see a cap of 1.2°C or less.

A recent MIT study looks at the odds of this. FIrst, the no-policy scenario:

No-policy case

Without a policy, it is highly probable that we will see a temperature increase larger than that needed to throw us into a glacial period—about 4 – 6°C separates glacial (ice age) and interglacial period. A temperature increase of about this much is expected to change the climate dramatically.

With a policy, chances are better.

policy case
While the warming is still more than climatologists would like to see, there is a 90% chance of staying below 3°C this century, compared to the no-policy case, where the chances are only 1%.

The predicted increases are greater than predictions from 2002:

The differences are greatest for the reference or “no policy” wheels. In the previous wheel the likelihood of exceeding 5°C was about 4%, but in the new wheels that likelihood is 57%. There is no single revision that is responsible for this change. In our more recent global model simulations, the ocean heat-uptake is slower than previously estimated, the ocean uptake of carbon is weaker, feedbacks from the land system as temperature rises are stronger, cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases over the century are higher, and offsetting cooling from aerosol emissions is lower. No one of these effects is very strong on its own, and even adding each separately together would not fully explain the higher temperatures. Rather than interacting additively, these different affects appear to interact multiplicatively, with feedbacks among the contributing factors, leading to the surprisingly large increase in the chance of much higher temperatures.

from a AAAS blog post: Climate Change Worst Case Scenarios: Not Worst Enough

• We’re increasing greenhouses gases 3 x faster than the worst case prediction. During the 1990s, GHG emissions were increasing 0.9%/year. From 2000-2007, the increase averaged 3.5%/year. This is mostly due to economic growth, mostly in China. However, new coal plants are being built in the EU (think Germany) and US, and China’s per capita GHG emissions are still lower than in the EU.

world greenhouse gas emissions—Note increase from 2000 to 2004 is equal to that from 1990 to 2000.

Changing US emissions

Even as sea level stopped rising from thermal expansion (think mercury in a thermometer), sea level increase between 1993 and 2008 was twice as rapid as in the 1960s, due to more glacier and ice sheet melt.

From another post, Fisheries Worldwide Threatened by Climate Change:

Many commercial fish stocks will likely shift their distributions dramatically as species respond to changes in ocean climate over the next 4 decades… The changing ranges could mean major disruptions to fisheries, with some nations seeing major boosts in yields and other countries–predominantly in the tropics–being the losers. Dozens of species that are unable to adapt will likely go extinct…

The Canadian fishing industry will likewise benefit at the expense of their counterparts in the United States, where cod populations may fall by 50% by 2050. Overall, climate change may cause the continental United States to lose more than 15% of its potential catch by 2050.

Indonesia will also lose out, Norway will benefit, polar species are likely to go extinct.

On the other hand, better marine management has led to healthier Hawaiian coral, and a return to higher haddock stocks in the northeastern US.

Soy is replacing rainforest, and if the US actually does produce 57 billion liters of corn-based ethanol in 2022, Brazil will plant up to a million more acres of soy, producing GHG emissions 130-650 times as much as was saved with the ethanol.

disappearing rain forest

It’s been a pretty gloomy month for climate change news.

Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, said, “I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen…[We’re] looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.” And, he added, “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going” either.

Antarctica is warming. Not a surprise, it’s just warming more slowly than elsewhere.

Tree mortality in the western US has doubled in recent years, along with the increased temperature and decreased water. (Science, subscription needed)

Ocean dead zones, now less than 2% of the oceans, transient and reversible, could increase to 20% by 2100, and last for many thousands of years.

Oceans are not all the same height, with the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal 20 cm (8 in) lower than the Pacific, and more dramatic differences elsewhere. The differences are caused by a difference in density, and currents and winds. El Nino can change sea level by 0.6 m (2 ft). So we might expect uneven consequences from increase in sea level.

Sea level rise from the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is expected to average 5 meters, 16.5 feet. But there is so much ice in Antarctica, sea level nearby is higher because of gravitational attraction, so melting will produce a smaller increase locally. Additionally, shifting all that water from the poles will change the location of the south pole for rotation by 100 m (300 ft), which will shift how the oceans are distributed. The net result is that DC and much of the US will see an increase nearer 6.3 m (21 ft) (Science, subscription needed), and South America will see less.

The emperor penguin is likely to go extinct by 2100 or a bit later.

Emperor penguins mate later, likely because of climate change.

Fire in Australia, drought in China.

It’s hard to keep an intellectual distance when so much bad information arrives at once.