The following is a recent summary of the current status of the attempt by the United Nations to control (extort money from taxpayers) global climate change through the reduction of "carbon emissions". They are as Mr. Lomborg says, "flogging a dead horse". It is a dead issue, or it should be.
First off, the science behind the myth of man-caused global warming is based on lies and political manipulation (see "climategate"). Second, there is much doubt that "carbon emissions", which really means carbon dioxide emissions, can cause or are causing global warming. In fact, in spite of all the burning of "evil" fossil fuels over the past couple of centuries or so, it looks like the Earth is cooling, not warming. As Lomborg says, let's get on with something important.
Peter
The Emperor’s New Climate-Change Agreement
Bjørn Lomborg
AUTHOR INFO
Bjørn Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School.
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/lomborg80/English
COPENHAGEN – Dressing up failure as victory has been integral to climate-change negotiations since they started 20 years ago. The latest round of talks in Durban, South Africa, in December was no exception.
Climate negotiations have been in virtual limbo ever since the catastrophic and humiliating Copenhagen summit in 2009, where vertiginous expectations collided with hard political reality. So as negotiators – and a handful of government ministers – arrived in Durban, expectations could not have been lower.
Yet, by the end of the talks, the European Union’s climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, was being applauded in the media for achieving a “breakthrough” that had “salvaged Durban,” and, most significantly, for achieving the holy grail of climate negotiations, a “legally binding treaty.” According to British climate minister Chris Huhne, the results showed that the United Nations climate-change negotiation system “really works and can produce results.”
Sure, the agreement would come into effect only in 2020 – which sounds oddly complacent when environmentalists and political leaders warned ahead of the Copenhagen conference that we had just six months or 50 days to solve the climate problem. But, as the British newspaper The Guardian assured readers, this was a breakthrough, because developing countries, including India and China, were, for the first time, “agreeing to be legally bound to curb their greenhouse gases.” And, just as importantly, the US was making the same promise.
Let’s take a look at the actual agreement reached in Durban that generated all that congratulatory back-slapping. It won’t take long: the document runs to two pages, contains no commitments to cut emissions, and outlines no policies to implement the undefined cuts. There is simply a promise “to launch a process to develop a protocol, another legal instrument, or an agreed outcome with legal force.”
An agreement to launch a legal process. That is what everyone got so worked up about? And, again, the negotiators merely promised to set themselves a deadline of 2015 to finish setting up this legal process, which would enter into force five years hence.
Just a few days later, the Indian environment minister, Shrimati Jayanthi Natarajan, stressed that there was no legally binding treaty: “India cannot agree to a legally binding agreement for emissions reduction at this stage of our development.…I must clarify that [Durban] does not imply that India has to take binding commitments to reduce its emissions in absolute terms in 2020.”
India was not alone. The day after the Durban conference, Canada officially withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, which Russia and Japan have already declined to extend, leaving only the EU’s member states and a few other countries committed to further reductions.
Hollow victories have been central to climate negotiations since they began. The Durban agreement uncannily echoes the agreement reached in Bali in 2007 “to launch a comprehensive process to enable the full, effective, and sustained implementation of the [UN Climate] Convention through long-term cooperative action.” According to that deal – which was, of course, much celebrated at the time – a legal treaty was supposed to be ready for the 2009 Copenhagen meeting.
In Kyoto in 1997, the treaty was acclaimed as “a milestone in the history of climate protection,” and President Bill Clinton declared that “the United States has reached an historic agreement with other nations of the world to take unprecedented action to address global warming.”
Of course, the treaty had already been rejected in the US Senate by a 95-0 vote, and thus was dead on arrival. This, and lax interpretations of emissions in the years following Kyoto, meant that more emissions occurred under the protocol than had been expected to occur in its absence according to research undertaken by the economists Christoph Böhringer and Carsten Vogt.
Even at the start of global climate-change negotiations in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the aim of putting the planet “on a course to address the critical issue of global warming” soon went awry. Rich countries fell 12% short of their promise to cut emissions to 1990 levels by 2000.
For 20 years, climate negotiators have repeatedly celebrated deals that haven’t panned out. Worse, for all practical purposes, the promises that have been made have had no impact on global CO2 emissions. They have only provided false hope that we have addressed climate change and allowed us to push it to the back burner for another few years. So, before we get too excited celebrating the “breakthrough” of Durban, we would do well to reflect on a two-decade history of flogging a dead horse.
We will never reduce emissions significantly until we manage to make green energy cheaper than fossil fuels. We must focus sharply on research and development to drive down alternative energy prices over coming decades.
The first step toward doing that is to end our collective suspension of disbelief when it comes to climate-change negotiations. We need to see through the hype and self-serving political spin. We owe it to the future to do better.
Bjørn Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
www.project-syndicate.org
Showing posts with label KYOTO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KYOTO. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Monday, June 4, 2007
Global Meltdown, By Andrew Revkin
This article published at AARP's Website summarizes the conventional wisdom involved in the current debate over "carbon emissions", global warming, climate change, energy supplies, alternative energy sources, and world politics. He offers no new insight, but this is worth reading as a kind of primer on the subject.
Peter
From: http://www.aarpmagazine.org/lifestyle/global_meltdown.html
Global Meltdown
By Andrew Revkin, July & August 2007
It’s becoming a legacy issue for older Americans: what type of planet are we leaving our children? One of the nation’s top reporters on the environment reveals the latest science behind climate change
KANGERLUSSUAQ, GREENLAND
I’m staring up at the crumbling edge of the frozen white cap cloaking most of this vast Arctic island. The ice is thousands of years old, yet melting relentlessly in the bright May sunshine, sending a torrent of gray water to the sea. With me is Joe McConnell, a snow scientist who just spent three weeks drilling samples from the ice sheet, which extends over an area four times the size of California and is almost two miles high at its peak.
McConnell, 49, an expert on the world’s frozen places, is from—of all places—the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. That incongruity isn’t so jarring when he explains that many of the world’s driest communities, from the Andes to the American Southwest, are home to the billion-plus people who get much of their water from mountain snow and glaciers.
The ice-gouged, U-shaped valleys around us, now covered with lichens and shrubs, show that the earth’s climate has changed naturally for billions of years, ever since there’s been an atmosphere. Great warmings and coolings have sent ocean levels rising and falling as enormous amounts of water were locked in glaciers or released like the flows we see here in Greenland.
But the current warming trend is happening much faster than previous hot spells, says McConnell, and none of the forces that usually affect climate—such as variations in the sun’s strength—are in sync with this recent change. Should these patterns continue, he believes, the consequences are clear. “If Greenland melted, it’d raise sea levels by twenty feet,” he explains. “There goes most of the Mississippi embayment. There go the islands in the South Pacific. Bangladesh is obliterated. Manhattan would have to put up dikes.” A similar amount of ice is vulnerable in western Antarctica, another focus of McConnell’s work. While this would most likely be a slow-motion sea change taking many centuries, gases being pumped into the atmosphere by cars, planes, factories, and power plants could raise the odds of such a shift.
“There’s definitely a lot of melting going on,” McConnell says, flinching as a crack echoes from the warming white ice cliff above and a towering slab tilts.
Welcome to life on the frontlines of climate change.
For nearly 20 years I’ve been reporting on the extraordinary idea that humans, mainly by burning billions of tons of fossil fuels, are nudging the planet’s thermostat by adding to the atmosphere’s see-through blanket of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases,” which traps some of the sun’s energy. This quest has taken me from the shrinking sea ice at the North Pole to the burning forests of the Amazon, from the fraught political battlegrounds of Washington to the tenuous sands of the Maldives, a string of islets in the Indian Ocean where a sea level rise of a couple of feet—a real prospect in a warming century—could render the country uninhabitable. In all my time covering this issue, I’ve never seen the debate as heated as it is now, with talk show hosts, politicians, moviemakers, and novelists alternately claiming human-caused warming is a planetary emergency or a hoax.
But beneath the volleys of sound bites are real people with real concerns. When I give talks on global warming, quite a few of my over-50 peers in the audience remark that this is, at its heart, an issue of legacy. It is our children’s climate, and our grandchildren’s, that is being shaped by the building greenhouse effect. One disturbing part of that legacy is this: while half the gas billowing from smokestacks and tailpipes is typically absorbed by the oceans or plants each year, the rest remains stashed in the air for a century or longer, building like unpaid credit card debt.
NEW YORK CITY
In the intellectual equivalent of a pro-wrestling “smackdown,” two teams of combatants enter a plush, packed auditorium on the Upper East Side for a debate titled “Global Warming Is Not a Crisis,” staged by a group called Intelligence Squared U.S.
The climate-change debunkers include Richard S. Lindzen, 67, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who claims that human-caused warming is inconsequential, and Michael Crichton, 64, the novelist and moviemaker. Crichton stirred the climate debate with a 2004 novel, State of Fear, in which the bad guys were radical environmentalists trying to scare the world about global warming in order to line their pockets. Opposed are three climate scientists: one from NASA, one from a leading university, and one from a private group called the Union of Concerned Scientists. Most of the night focuses on their differences, mainly concerning the value of quick, aggressive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Richard C.J. Somerville, 66, a veteran University of California, San Diego, climatologist, attacks the “not a crisis” position. “[A crisis] does not mean catastrophe or alarmism,” he says. “It means a crucial or decisive moment, a turning point, a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent. Our task tonight is to persuade you that global warming is indeed a crisis in exactly that sense. The science warns us that continuing to fuel the world using present technology will bring dangerous and possibly surprising climate changes by the end of this century, if not sooner.”
But Crichton insists that pressing real-time problems trump an iffy, long-term one. “Every day 30,000 people on this planet die of the diseases of poverty,” he tells the crowd. “A third of the planet doesn’t have electricity. We have a billion people with no clean water. We have half a billion people going to bed hungry every night. Do we care about this? It seems that we don’t. It seems that we would rather look a hundred years into the future than pay attention to what’s going on now.”
What’s largely lost in the sparring—Crichton’s team prevails in an audience vote—is that the debate has not been about whether humans are contributing to rising temperatures. Crichton and Lindzen, both of whom consider former vice president Al Gore and his allies alarmists, readily agree that human-generated greenhouse gases warm the earth. Indeed, the list of people accepting the need to cut these gases includes former foes of environmentalists. One convert is evangelist Pat Robertson, who said on his 700 Club TV program last year that “it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air.… We really need to do something on fossil fuels.” Another conservative taking warming seriously is former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. “The evidence is sufficient,” he said in April, “that we should move toward the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading of the atmosphere.”
What’s driving the change in attitudes is a steadily growing body of scientific evidence on human activities and warming. A report released earlier this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—made up of hundreds of the world’s leading climate experts—said with 90 percent certainty that most of the warming since 1950 has been driven by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The report concluded with “high confidence” that human-caused climate change was already affecting regional conditions from the poles to the Tropics, and that hundreds of millions of people could be harmed by coastal flooding, dwindling water supplies, and shifting weather patterns within a few decades. The changes could also drive many species toward extinction, particularly those with rapidly shrinking habitats, such as polar bears. Warming in this century, by many estimates, could be between three and eight times the warming in the 20th century, when the planet’s average temperature rose just over one degree Fahrenheit in all. The United States was among 113 countries that endorsed the report.
The new report also predicts a mix of consequences, not all bad. More rainfall and longer growing seasons will likely benefit higher latitudes for decades, while less rainfall and harsher droughts are likely in some of the world’s poorest places—most notably, Africa. An open-water Arctic Ocean in summers, while posing a threat to polar bears, could create new intercontinental shipping lanes thousands of miles shorter than existing ones.
What the debate comes down to is not whether changes are coming but when they’ll occur—and how severe they’ll be. There is serious scientific disagreement about such vital questions as how fast and far temperatures, seas, and storm strength could rise. Warmer waters, for example, could lead to more Katrina-strength hurricanes. Yet new studies find that hurricanes might be torn apart by wind conditions associated with, yes, rising temperatures. This uncertainty is not humanity’s friend, experts say, especially as the global population crests in coming decades, putting ever more people at risk of flooding, famine, and other climate-driven threats.
“We’re altering the environment far faster than we can possibly predict the consequences,” says Stephen H. Schneider, 62, a Stanford University climatologist who has been working on the puzzle of humans and climate for more than half his life.
Schneider has long believed that responding to the greenhouse challenge is as much about hedging against uncertain risks as it is about dealing with what is clearly known. And the risks, as he sees it, are clear: there is a real chance things could be much worse than the midrange projections of a few degrees of warming in this century—and any thought that more science will magically clarify what lies ahead is probably wishful thinking.
When he lectures about global warming these days, Schneider often asks listeners about a more familiar risk. “How many of you have had a serious fire in your home?” he begins. In a crowd of 300 or so, usually three or four hands rise.
His next question: “How many of you buy fire insurance?”
Hundreds of hands go up.
For Schneider that pattern shows how well people deal with uncertain but potentially calamitous risks in their daily lives. The trick lies in transferring that same behavior to dealing with a risk facing our common home—the planet itself.
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
I’m standing in a cramped lab at the California Institute of Technology, squinting at a blinding light. It’s visible through a small glass port in the side of a metal furnace where scientists are cooking up a new kind of device for turning sunlight into electricity. Inside, atoms of metals are being deposited onto minute rods in ways that could someday boost the efficiency of solar panels.
Solar power is widely seen as the sole alternative energy source that is abundant enough—and someday could be cheap enough—to eventually supplant fossil fuels. Windmills, while effective in certain conditions, face problems at large scale. In Texas, for example, the hottest days—which prompt the biggest surge in power use—tend to be the least windy. Nuclear power, while producing few emissions, has its own problem of scale. Princeton experts recently estimated that the world would need nearly 900 new nuclear power plants in the next 45 years just to reduce the expected carbon dioxide release by 10 percent in that time.
And so research sites like this one in Pasadena are the critical, yet largely overlooked, battlefronts in the global warming war. In the mist-draped hills of New Haven, West Virginia, engineers and scientists have drilled more than 9,000 feet beneath one of the country’s giant coal-fired power plants to see whether layers of rock can provide a repository for vast amounts of CO2 released as the coal burns. In the “biology building” at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory outside Denver, special strains of algae slosh like pea soup in racks of beakers under bright lights. In certain conditions these algae can generate bubbles of hydrogen, a tantalizing substitute for fossil fuels if it can be produced cheaply and cleanly. So far, the gas has been produced in teacup amounts.
The gulf between such embryonic efforts and what’s needed to avoid a buildup of greenhouse gases remains wide, despite statements by politicians of both parties about solving U.S. energy and climate problems. Funding for such research peaked in the United States and abroad during the oil shocks of the 1970s, then dwindled. It has never grown since—only Japan has sustained investment in such research. Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory were heartened when $34 million of new money was included in their latest science budget last year. But Arthur J. Nozik, 71, a chemical physicist there, notes that this is roughly the cost of one F-18 jetfighter. In the end, only $8 million was authorized by Congress in 2007.
The challenge of shifting to new energy options is made vastly more difficult because the world’s existing energy system—85 percent based on coal, oil, and other fossil fuels—is so integrated into modern life. “We already have electricity coming out of everybody’s wall socket,” says Nathan S. Lewis, 51, a chemistry professor who codirects the Powering the Planet project at Caltech. “This is not a new function we’re seeking. It’s a substitution. It’s not like NASA sending a man to the moon. It’s like finding a new way to send a man to the moon when Southwest Airlines is already flying there every hour handing out peanuts.”
Numerous experts say the only way to propel such a change is with taxes on fuels that produce the most greenhouse gases, or new emission-reduction treaties, such as the Kyoto Protocol (which the United States did not ratify), or bills—like many being discussed on Capitol Hill—that require emissions reductions. But there are major political impediments, both globally and domestically. And do Americans have the stomach for higher taxes and heating bills? Perhaps, says Peter Schwartz, 61, who analyzes risks for corporations and the government, if we see global warming as a security threat—one that could create calamities ranging from large-scale migrations to conflicts over food and water.
With or without new laws or taxes, the need for technological advances is vital, says Martin I. Hoffert, 69, a physics professor at New York University. Hoffert has testified repeatedly before Congress about the lack of investment in energy research—efforts that could help avoid oil wars, lower energy costs, and help poorer countries advance without overheating the planet. “Technology evolution is like biological evolution,” he says. “Most mutations, like most innovative technologies, don’t survive. But without mutations, evolution stops. It only takes one transistor to change the world.” And it won’t necessarily cost a fortune: John Holdren, 63, an energy and climate expert at Harvard, says that a rise in the federal gas tax of 2.5 cents a gallon would triple the federal energy-research budget.
Meanwhile, the demand for energy worldwide is increasing, and not only in such countries as India and China. Two billion people still cook meals on firewood or dried dung, and more than 1.5 million of those—mainly women and children—die young from breathing clouds of indoor smoke. In a world heading toward 9 billion or more people by 2042 who either are born into—or dream of—our plugged-in, air-conditioned, frequent-flier lifestyle, revolutionary new energy sources are needed.
It may be that what we face is less a climate crisis than an energy challenge. Many experts believe the key to limiting climate risks and solving a host of momentous problems—including the end of abundant oil—is to begin an ambitious quest for new ways to conserve, harvest, and store energy without creating pollution.
Harnessing the power of the sun remains the Holy Grail of most energy experts. But research on solar technologies remains tiny in scale, though the potential has been clear for decades. Consider this incredibly prescient quote: “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
The year? 1931. The speaker? Thomas Edison.
“The biggest challenge is how to get people to wake up and realize this is a one-shot deal,” says Caltech’s solar guru, Lewis. “If we fail, we are witting participants in the biggest experiment that humans have ever done: moving CO2 levels to more than twice their value in the past 670,000 years and hoping it turns out okay for generations to come.”
Andrew Revkin is a reporter with The New York Times and the author of The North Pole Was Here: Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), the first book on global climate change written for both children and adults. His stories on global warming can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/revkin
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Peter
From: http://www.aarpmagazine.org/lifestyle/global_meltdown.html
Global Meltdown
By Andrew Revkin, July & August 2007
It’s becoming a legacy issue for older Americans: what type of planet are we leaving our children? One of the nation’s top reporters on the environment reveals the latest science behind climate change
KANGERLUSSUAQ, GREENLAND
I’m staring up at the crumbling edge of the frozen white cap cloaking most of this vast Arctic island. The ice is thousands of years old, yet melting relentlessly in the bright May sunshine, sending a torrent of gray water to the sea. With me is Joe McConnell, a snow scientist who just spent three weeks drilling samples from the ice sheet, which extends over an area four times the size of California and is almost two miles high at its peak.
McConnell, 49, an expert on the world’s frozen places, is from—of all places—the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. That incongruity isn’t so jarring when he explains that many of the world’s driest communities, from the Andes to the American Southwest, are home to the billion-plus people who get much of their water from mountain snow and glaciers.
The ice-gouged, U-shaped valleys around us, now covered with lichens and shrubs, show that the earth’s climate has changed naturally for billions of years, ever since there’s been an atmosphere. Great warmings and coolings have sent ocean levels rising and falling as enormous amounts of water were locked in glaciers or released like the flows we see here in Greenland.
But the current warming trend is happening much faster than previous hot spells, says McConnell, and none of the forces that usually affect climate—such as variations in the sun’s strength—are in sync with this recent change. Should these patterns continue, he believes, the consequences are clear. “If Greenland melted, it’d raise sea levels by twenty feet,” he explains. “There goes most of the Mississippi embayment. There go the islands in the South Pacific. Bangladesh is obliterated. Manhattan would have to put up dikes.” A similar amount of ice is vulnerable in western Antarctica, another focus of McConnell’s work. While this would most likely be a slow-motion sea change taking many centuries, gases being pumped into the atmosphere by cars, planes, factories, and power plants could raise the odds of such a shift.
“There’s definitely a lot of melting going on,” McConnell says, flinching as a crack echoes from the warming white ice cliff above and a towering slab tilts.
Welcome to life on the frontlines of climate change.
For nearly 20 years I’ve been reporting on the extraordinary idea that humans, mainly by burning billions of tons of fossil fuels, are nudging the planet’s thermostat by adding to the atmosphere’s see-through blanket of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases,” which traps some of the sun’s energy. This quest has taken me from the shrinking sea ice at the North Pole to the burning forests of the Amazon, from the fraught political battlegrounds of Washington to the tenuous sands of the Maldives, a string of islets in the Indian Ocean where a sea level rise of a couple of feet—a real prospect in a warming century—could render the country uninhabitable. In all my time covering this issue, I’ve never seen the debate as heated as it is now, with talk show hosts, politicians, moviemakers, and novelists alternately claiming human-caused warming is a planetary emergency or a hoax.
But beneath the volleys of sound bites are real people with real concerns. When I give talks on global warming, quite a few of my over-50 peers in the audience remark that this is, at its heart, an issue of legacy. It is our children’s climate, and our grandchildren’s, that is being shaped by the building greenhouse effect. One disturbing part of that legacy is this: while half the gas billowing from smokestacks and tailpipes is typically absorbed by the oceans or plants each year, the rest remains stashed in the air for a century or longer, building like unpaid credit card debt.
NEW YORK CITY
In the intellectual equivalent of a pro-wrestling “smackdown,” two teams of combatants enter a plush, packed auditorium on the Upper East Side for a debate titled “Global Warming Is Not a Crisis,” staged by a group called Intelligence Squared U.S.
The climate-change debunkers include Richard S. Lindzen, 67, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who claims that human-caused warming is inconsequential, and Michael Crichton, 64, the novelist and moviemaker. Crichton stirred the climate debate with a 2004 novel, State of Fear, in which the bad guys were radical environmentalists trying to scare the world about global warming in order to line their pockets. Opposed are three climate scientists: one from NASA, one from a leading university, and one from a private group called the Union of Concerned Scientists. Most of the night focuses on their differences, mainly concerning the value of quick, aggressive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Richard C.J. Somerville, 66, a veteran University of California, San Diego, climatologist, attacks the “not a crisis” position. “[A crisis] does not mean catastrophe or alarmism,” he says. “It means a crucial or decisive moment, a turning point, a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent. Our task tonight is to persuade you that global warming is indeed a crisis in exactly that sense. The science warns us that continuing to fuel the world using present technology will bring dangerous and possibly surprising climate changes by the end of this century, if not sooner.”
But Crichton insists that pressing real-time problems trump an iffy, long-term one. “Every day 30,000 people on this planet die of the diseases of poverty,” he tells the crowd. “A third of the planet doesn’t have electricity. We have a billion people with no clean water. We have half a billion people going to bed hungry every night. Do we care about this? It seems that we don’t. It seems that we would rather look a hundred years into the future than pay attention to what’s going on now.”
What’s largely lost in the sparring—Crichton’s team prevails in an audience vote—is that the debate has not been about whether humans are contributing to rising temperatures. Crichton and Lindzen, both of whom consider former vice president Al Gore and his allies alarmists, readily agree that human-generated greenhouse gases warm the earth. Indeed, the list of people accepting the need to cut these gases includes former foes of environmentalists. One convert is evangelist Pat Robertson, who said on his 700 Club TV program last year that “it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air.… We really need to do something on fossil fuels.” Another conservative taking warming seriously is former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. “The evidence is sufficient,” he said in April, “that we should move toward the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading of the atmosphere.”
What’s driving the change in attitudes is a steadily growing body of scientific evidence on human activities and warming. A report released earlier this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—made up of hundreds of the world’s leading climate experts—said with 90 percent certainty that most of the warming since 1950 has been driven by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The report concluded with “high confidence” that human-caused climate change was already affecting regional conditions from the poles to the Tropics, and that hundreds of millions of people could be harmed by coastal flooding, dwindling water supplies, and shifting weather patterns within a few decades. The changes could also drive many species toward extinction, particularly those with rapidly shrinking habitats, such as polar bears. Warming in this century, by many estimates, could be between three and eight times the warming in the 20th century, when the planet’s average temperature rose just over one degree Fahrenheit in all. The United States was among 113 countries that endorsed the report.
The new report also predicts a mix of consequences, not all bad. More rainfall and longer growing seasons will likely benefit higher latitudes for decades, while less rainfall and harsher droughts are likely in some of the world’s poorest places—most notably, Africa. An open-water Arctic Ocean in summers, while posing a threat to polar bears, could create new intercontinental shipping lanes thousands of miles shorter than existing ones.
What the debate comes down to is not whether changes are coming but when they’ll occur—and how severe they’ll be. There is serious scientific disagreement about such vital questions as how fast and far temperatures, seas, and storm strength could rise. Warmer waters, for example, could lead to more Katrina-strength hurricanes. Yet new studies find that hurricanes might be torn apart by wind conditions associated with, yes, rising temperatures. This uncertainty is not humanity’s friend, experts say, especially as the global population crests in coming decades, putting ever more people at risk of flooding, famine, and other climate-driven threats.
“We’re altering the environment far faster than we can possibly predict the consequences,” says Stephen H. Schneider, 62, a Stanford University climatologist who has been working on the puzzle of humans and climate for more than half his life.
Schneider has long believed that responding to the greenhouse challenge is as much about hedging against uncertain risks as it is about dealing with what is clearly known. And the risks, as he sees it, are clear: there is a real chance things could be much worse than the midrange projections of a few degrees of warming in this century—and any thought that more science will magically clarify what lies ahead is probably wishful thinking.
When he lectures about global warming these days, Schneider often asks listeners about a more familiar risk. “How many of you have had a serious fire in your home?” he begins. In a crowd of 300 or so, usually three or four hands rise.
His next question: “How many of you buy fire insurance?”
Hundreds of hands go up.
For Schneider that pattern shows how well people deal with uncertain but potentially calamitous risks in their daily lives. The trick lies in transferring that same behavior to dealing with a risk facing our common home—the planet itself.
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
I’m standing in a cramped lab at the California Institute of Technology, squinting at a blinding light. It’s visible through a small glass port in the side of a metal furnace where scientists are cooking up a new kind of device for turning sunlight into electricity. Inside, atoms of metals are being deposited onto minute rods in ways that could someday boost the efficiency of solar panels.
Solar power is widely seen as the sole alternative energy source that is abundant enough—and someday could be cheap enough—to eventually supplant fossil fuels. Windmills, while effective in certain conditions, face problems at large scale. In Texas, for example, the hottest days—which prompt the biggest surge in power use—tend to be the least windy. Nuclear power, while producing few emissions, has its own problem of scale. Princeton experts recently estimated that the world would need nearly 900 new nuclear power plants in the next 45 years just to reduce the expected carbon dioxide release by 10 percent in that time.
And so research sites like this one in Pasadena are the critical, yet largely overlooked, battlefronts in the global warming war. In the mist-draped hills of New Haven, West Virginia, engineers and scientists have drilled more than 9,000 feet beneath one of the country’s giant coal-fired power plants to see whether layers of rock can provide a repository for vast amounts of CO2 released as the coal burns. In the “biology building” at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory outside Denver, special strains of algae slosh like pea soup in racks of beakers under bright lights. In certain conditions these algae can generate bubbles of hydrogen, a tantalizing substitute for fossil fuels if it can be produced cheaply and cleanly. So far, the gas has been produced in teacup amounts.
The gulf between such embryonic efforts and what’s needed to avoid a buildup of greenhouse gases remains wide, despite statements by politicians of both parties about solving U.S. energy and climate problems. Funding for such research peaked in the United States and abroad during the oil shocks of the 1970s, then dwindled. It has never grown since—only Japan has sustained investment in such research. Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory were heartened when $34 million of new money was included in their latest science budget last year. But Arthur J. Nozik, 71, a chemical physicist there, notes that this is roughly the cost of one F-18 jetfighter. In the end, only $8 million was authorized by Congress in 2007.
The challenge of shifting to new energy options is made vastly more difficult because the world’s existing energy system—85 percent based on coal, oil, and other fossil fuels—is so integrated into modern life. “We already have electricity coming out of everybody’s wall socket,” says Nathan S. Lewis, 51, a chemistry professor who codirects the Powering the Planet project at Caltech. “This is not a new function we’re seeking. It’s a substitution. It’s not like NASA sending a man to the moon. It’s like finding a new way to send a man to the moon when Southwest Airlines is already flying there every hour handing out peanuts.”
Numerous experts say the only way to propel such a change is with taxes on fuels that produce the most greenhouse gases, or new emission-reduction treaties, such as the Kyoto Protocol (which the United States did not ratify), or bills—like many being discussed on Capitol Hill—that require emissions reductions. But there are major political impediments, both globally and domestically. And do Americans have the stomach for higher taxes and heating bills? Perhaps, says Peter Schwartz, 61, who analyzes risks for corporations and the government, if we see global warming as a security threat—one that could create calamities ranging from large-scale migrations to conflicts over food and water.
With or without new laws or taxes, the need for technological advances is vital, says Martin I. Hoffert, 69, a physics professor at New York University. Hoffert has testified repeatedly before Congress about the lack of investment in energy research—efforts that could help avoid oil wars, lower energy costs, and help poorer countries advance without overheating the planet. “Technology evolution is like biological evolution,” he says. “Most mutations, like most innovative technologies, don’t survive. But without mutations, evolution stops. It only takes one transistor to change the world.” And it won’t necessarily cost a fortune: John Holdren, 63, an energy and climate expert at Harvard, says that a rise in the federal gas tax of 2.5 cents a gallon would triple the federal energy-research budget.
Meanwhile, the demand for energy worldwide is increasing, and not only in such countries as India and China. Two billion people still cook meals on firewood or dried dung, and more than 1.5 million of those—mainly women and children—die young from breathing clouds of indoor smoke. In a world heading toward 9 billion or more people by 2042 who either are born into—or dream of—our plugged-in, air-conditioned, frequent-flier lifestyle, revolutionary new energy sources are needed.
It may be that what we face is less a climate crisis than an energy challenge. Many experts believe the key to limiting climate risks and solving a host of momentous problems—including the end of abundant oil—is to begin an ambitious quest for new ways to conserve, harvest, and store energy without creating pollution.
Harnessing the power of the sun remains the Holy Grail of most energy experts. But research on solar technologies remains tiny in scale, though the potential has been clear for decades. Consider this incredibly prescient quote: “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
The year? 1931. The speaker? Thomas Edison.
“The biggest challenge is how to get people to wake up and realize this is a one-shot deal,” says Caltech’s solar guru, Lewis. “If we fail, we are witting participants in the biggest experiment that humans have ever done: moving CO2 levels to more than twice their value in the past 670,000 years and hoping it turns out okay for generations to come.”
Andrew Revkin is a reporter with The New York Times and the author of The North Pole Was Here: Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), the first book on global climate change written for both children and adults. His stories on global warming can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/revkin
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Friday, April 20, 2007
Temperature, CO2, Global Warming? Think Again
Here are some good comments from "Tom". It should be shocking that more skeptical scientists are not being heard from. It should make us very suspicious about what the IPCC, United Nations, the mass media, and our politicians are telling us.
Peter
Comment from: tom [Visitor]
My goodness, the measurement of the .6C +/- .2C change in a 100yrs+ or so is taken as absolute fact. The measurement of a global mean temp by the use of surface sensors is pretty close to pure folly. Each individual sensor measures nothing more than the immediate micro climate around the sensor. Taking a sensors data and statistically extrapolating it to represent 100s if not 1000s of km2 of surface area is not a simple task and then merging this data with proxy data is even more complex. Yet we take these numbers as if they are solid...well I don't but the IPCC does. These numbers are not solid...if the .6C change has a +/- .2C margin of error, that means we have a potential margin of error of .4C absolute.
Yet, all we hear in the news is how EVERYTHING is caused by global warming. It's really disgusting to this scientist. What is NOT known is much larger than what IS known with respect to climate science. The IPCC got rid of the HOCKEY STICK graph for their 4th assessment...why? It was so prominently played in the last assessment..what changed? The NAS debunked it for all practical purposes, that's why. Because the Medieval times were warmer than today in all liklihood, without increased CO2.
Historical temperature reconstruction is an INexact science. Global Climate Models are far from predicting the future. The scientific method in all of this popular discussion seems to be missing. I am at my wits end and this "science" publication has gone so far off of the scientific roadway as to deem it a laughable publication...especially this current article I am responding to. Wow.
CO2 lags temperature change in the ice core data. Many studies (accepted in scientific journals worldwide) show this. Temperature changes first then co2 follows in the ice core data. Co2 is not a driver of temperature change in paleoclimate study. It likely has some effect due to its radiative properties, but the Sun/Cosmic rays and other climate drivers likely outweigh co2's effect by magnitudes.
Mixing politics, pop culture with a scientific subject in its infancy is dangerous...it is dangerous because of what the alarmists claim we need to do...we don't even have the methodolgy to measure the change in temps if KYOTO were to be implemented entirely. Yet the economic effects would be huge. When push comes to shove and you the general public realizes how much money this charade will cost them they will revolt. Right now it is all just mass media hyperbole and most people don't really give a hoot. Al Gore is an opprotunist and leftist hollywood along with the willing mainstream media are playing the ultimate hypocrites.
Peter
Comment from: tom [Visitor]
My goodness, the measurement of the .6C +/- .2C change in a 100yrs+ or so is taken as absolute fact. The measurement of a global mean temp by the use of surface sensors is pretty close to pure folly. Each individual sensor measures nothing more than the immediate micro climate around the sensor. Taking a sensors data and statistically extrapolating it to represent 100s if not 1000s of km2 of surface area is not a simple task and then merging this data with proxy data is even more complex. Yet we take these numbers as if they are solid...well I don't but the IPCC does. These numbers are not solid...if the .6C change has a +/- .2C margin of error, that means we have a potential margin of error of .4C absolute.
Yet, all we hear in the news is how EVERYTHING is caused by global warming. It's really disgusting to this scientist. What is NOT known is much larger than what IS known with respect to climate science. The IPCC got rid of the HOCKEY STICK graph for their 4th assessment...why? It was so prominently played in the last assessment..what changed? The NAS debunked it for all practical purposes, that's why. Because the Medieval times were warmer than today in all liklihood, without increased CO2.
Historical temperature reconstruction is an INexact science. Global Climate Models are far from predicting the future. The scientific method in all of this popular discussion seems to be missing. I am at my wits end and this "science" publication has gone so far off of the scientific roadway as to deem it a laughable publication...especially this current article I am responding to. Wow.
CO2 lags temperature change in the ice core data. Many studies (accepted in scientific journals worldwide) show this. Temperature changes first then co2 follows in the ice core data. Co2 is not a driver of temperature change in paleoclimate study. It likely has some effect due to its radiative properties, but the Sun/Cosmic rays and other climate drivers likely outweigh co2's effect by magnitudes.
Mixing politics, pop culture with a scientific subject in its infancy is dangerous...it is dangerous because of what the alarmists claim we need to do...we don't even have the methodolgy to measure the change in temps if KYOTO were to be implemented entirely. Yet the economic effects would be huge. When push comes to shove and you the general public realizes how much money this charade will cost them they will revolt. Right now it is all just mass media hyperbole and most people don't really give a hoot. Al Gore is an opprotunist and leftist hollywood along with the willing mainstream media are playing the ultimate hypocrites.
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