Climate Change, July, 2023: Not the Mild Good News I Had Hoped For

Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

This April (after a long hiatus from blog posting) I hoped to be able to post a climate change piece with a few bits of good news among the bad.  CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa, it appeared, had cut its year-to-year growth rate nearly in half.  The use of solar power rather than coal or oil for energy in homes and cars was slowly growing as price drops for solar continued and the US passed the Inflation Reduction Act with incentives for solar and electric-vehicle use, as well as embedding climate change efforts more deeply in the US government bureaucracy.  Arctic sea ice appeared for the last six years to have reached a new equilibrium level, never breaching the 2016 lows.

And then, from April to July, several things happened almost simultaneously:

1.       James Hansen et al published a paper arguing that (a) global warming for a doubling of CO2 was most likely to be not 4 degrees C as he had previously estimated, but 4.5 degrees C, (b) this would be increased by an inevitable decrease in human-caused aerosols starting a few years ago, and (c) it was now possible to project to some extent the degree to which this warming would happen over the next century.

2.       “Hothouse Earth”, by Bill McGuire, talks specifically about what we may expect in the next 30-50 years in particular, including a halving of global food production.

3.       Monthly CO2 (Mauna Loa) saw a very large rise in April, to a rate 3 ppm above April 2022, and May and June show similar jumps, while our best measure of yearly CO2 jumped to 421 ppm in June, more than 50% above its 1850 280-ppm baseline – implying, together with Hansen et al’s work, that 3 degrees C of global warming above that time period is now “baked in” and unavoidable.

4.       Global sea surface temperatures are now well into record territory, and sea temperatures around Florida are now around 95 degrees, hot enough to kill coral and some fish.

5.       Antarctic sea ice has diverged dramatically from recorded extents – since it is winter in the Antarctic, this means that warm winds from an incipient equatorial El Nino have prevented as much as 1/3 of historical sea ice refreezing.  It would seem inevitable that new record lows will continue to be set all the way to Antarctic sea ice minimum in late January, with follow-on effects on Antarctic land ice melting and hence ocean level rise.

6.       Dangerous air quality from Canadian wildfires has affected the northern US, while record heat, often around 110 F, is affecting the southern US.

7.       From July 3^rd to the 5^th, global record land temperatures for apparently the last 125,000 years occurred, reaching above 17 degrees C.

Looking Forward with Great Wariness

All of this is worrying enough.  But it is also the case that by all accounts, a new El Nino is starting, and may well last for a year or more.  The past few times an El Nino has occurred, if I remember correctly, CO2 has spiked upwards at a record pace and global land temperatures have also risen significantly.  The prospect of grueling heat waves not just this summer but next is certainly a cause for major concern.

I should also, I suppose, mention articles suggesting that the melting of permafrost with attendant methane release is continuing to ramp up.  It is not clear how much this increases global warming independent of CO2 increases:  methane (CO4) is more powerful in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas, but much less prevalent than CO2.  At the same time, a certain amount of methane breaks down in the atmosphere to CO2, thus increasing carbon dioxide concentration.

Overall

My conclusion from all of the above is that most if not all of our decrease in CO2 emissions is being “drowned out” by the shift to El Nino, economic rebound from COVID, decreases in aerosols, and increased permafrost melting. 

One good thing is that popular news outlets aside from The Guardian – including CNN, AP, and the New York Times – are willing to report that today’s weather extremes are indeed caused by climate change.  On the other hand, I see not only that 150-odd Republican Representatives (a majority of Republicans in the US House of Representatives) are still classed as “climate deniers”, but also that an increasing number of people at the other extreme have given up hope of doing anything about climate change – often because they sense correctly that the 1.5 degree C target for “avoiding disaster”, and also the 2 degree target for “avoiding catastrophe” are certain to be overrun.

However, this, I must emphasize, is not, in my view, the proper way to view the future.  What lies beyond these targets – the next doubling of CO2, and the next – increases the scale of the disaster almost tenfold.  It is true, I think, that once one target is breached, the next is harder to stop short of, because both of feedbacks from initial warming and increasing sunk costs of fossil-fuel infrastructure that makes its replacement harder.  However, those feedbacks decrease over time to nothing if we succeed in slowing CO2 emissions dramatically, and the success of solar power shows that green energy can succeed even if it means uprooting what’s there for a whole new system.

And so, our initial successes count far more towards preventing disasters numbers 2 and 3 than they do towards avoiding today’s disaster; and the consequences of success or failure in our quest are far greater.  Think 2 billion lives lost or 8 billion rather than 500 million and that may give you an idea of what is at stake.   Thus, what is happening is a matter for heartbreak and anger at those responsible, but not for despair.  On the contrary, it is a matter for steadfast effort. 

As was once said, it’s the only game in town, and you lose no matter what you do.  But if you do it right, you won’t go broke before the game ends.  Or, to put it another way, humanity and nature will not by and large die if we try well enough, although we cannot prevent mass murder, both before and after we die.  And that’s the best obituary we can hope for.

Reading New Thoughts: The Possible Death of Race (Verny, “The Embodied Mind”)

 Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

Thomas Verny’s “The Embodied Mind” would appear at first glance to have nothing to do with genetics or “race”/ethnicity.  It is, in fact, an interesting attempt to argue that memory, thought, and even consciousness takes place in other areas of the body besides the mind.  However, as part of its argument that memories can be passed from generation to generation, it takes a detailed look at recent research in epigenetics – including both animal experiments and human analyses.   And from this, I have concluded that it is reasonable to draw some brief initial conclusions about the role that epigenetics plays in differential inheritance of characteristics.

So let me lay out, first, the overall model of inherited or socially influenced differences that I see as underlying recent research, more or less, and then discuss how I see this research impacting our whole notion of race and ethnicity as factors in such areas as intelligence (however defined), success in life (however defined), and physical skills.

The Disruptive Effect of Epigenetics in Theory

Crudely speaking, I used to sense that the theory of evolution reduced causes for differences into two:  genes (which are inherited and are slow to change because they involve mutations that “crowd out” existing genetic structure because they are better fitted to a new physical environment) and society (behaviors and skills learned from others, typically relatives).  Thus, absent concrete knowledge of the genome, it was possible that all differences between groups could be explained by differences in genes, and it was possible that none of it could be explained by genes.

The first major disruption to the wealth of research trying to determine how much could be explained by genetics, I think, was the sequencing of the genome.  This and follow-on research establish that 99% of the human genome is identical, and that while physical appearance (e.g., eye, hair, and skin color) and a few diseases or disorders (e.g., sickle-cell anemia)  still seemed to be clearly genetically based, almost everything else could not be explained genetically by less than 10-20 “different” genes or even no matter how many “different” genes one tried to use as a combined explanation.  Moreover, when one tried to group by so-called “race” or ethnicity, then the research tended to show that the maximum difference in genes was between African and all other groupings, with steadily decreasing differences between Asian, European, American, and Polynesian groupings – clearly explained by the fact that Africans had remained in the same physical environment over the last 50,000 years, with relatively little cross-breeding, while the others had typically moved at least once to a different physical environment in the intervening 50,000 years.  So even where differences in genes might be held to explain performance or skills, for all but the crudest grouping the differences across groups were much less than the <1% maximum.

And then, along came epigenetics. 

What was different and puzzling about epigenetics can be encapsulated in one research result:  There are two groups of one species of fish in different areas of a coral reef with absolutely identical genes – but different physical characteristics (a skin tag in one group, no skin tag in the other). 

The explanation for this, it turns out, is that epigenetics acts like an on-off switch or cap-off/cap-on for a gene or genes.  Flip the cap off, and the gene “expresses” itself in physical characteristics in a new way; flip the cap back on, and the gene goes back to the old “expression”.  These “switches” reside in so-called “junk” DNA, in RNA, and in proteins associated with the workings of the genes.  And, as the research result cited above indicates, they are inheritable, down to (as far as studies have gone) the fourth generation.  What remains unclear is just how a switch that is turned on gets turned off again; it is still possible that it only does so via cross-breeding with those whose gene is not so expressed and/or “crowding out” the inheritors as a smaller and smaller part of the population. 

So epigenetics appears to disrupt “nature vs. nurture” discussions, I think, in two ways:

1.       It appears at first glance to indicate that, even if some difference in characteristics is not explainable by the action of genes, it could be explainable by inheritable epigenetic action on genes – “genes plus epigenetics equals destiny”

2.       Conversely, it suggests that things that have been ascribed to genes may be explained by epigenetics happening right now – a group’s intelligence may be improved or decreased right now by moving to a different physical environment, and that improvement or decrease is inherited (vaguely similar to an episode of the original Star Trek TV series where exposure to mine air lowered intelligence and increased aggression).

The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Get Poorer

However, when I look at the research findings up to now as presented in “The Embodied Mind”, it is apparent that the picture is much more one-sided than it first seems.

Specifically, every research finding cited is of an inherited epigenetic trait that is triggered, more or less, by the physical environment, and applies to all those who are affected by that physical environment state, no matter what their genetic differences are.  Let me restate that:  no matter what group (including male or female) I belong to, I am equally susceptible to proneness to obesity and related disorders if my mother or grandmother underwent prolonged starvation compared to anyone in any other group.  If my mother smoked or drank during pregnancy not only she but I will be at increased risk for cancers or alcoholism – because those gene expressions are epigenetically transmitted to the fetus.  Of course, in the last case one can argue that my “culture” made my mother more or less likely to smoke or drink; but (a) that’s something that can be mitigated by changing education and social encouragement, and (b) in most “races” or ethnicities this is not thought of as part of the core culture.  Anyway, these are just two examples:  in all other cases cited in “The Embodied Mind”, there is no inherited differentiation based on society at all, and therefore no role for race or ethnicity in causing differences.

I must point out that it makes sense that it be so.  It is logical that if 99% of our genes are identical, epigenetics should apply equally to genes that are otherwise the same and genes that are different across individuals and groups.  Therefore, when epigenetics is involved, it makes sense that 99% of the time, it is the physical environment within the last 1-3 generations that is my destiny, and that I can very possibly change that destiny by changing my physical environment, just as I can change things for the better if I change my individual behavior by changing my “culture” or social environment.  

The other “theme” of recent epigenetic research is that in many cases, it involves epigenetic switch-flipping in response to an unusually stressful environment.  Thus, starvation during or near pregnancy is typically happening in response to lack of food affecting not only oneself but one’s relatives or group.  And that, in turn, often tends to line up neatly with whether the group is rich/powerful or poor/powerless.  We might expect therefore that an increasing number of the poor of any race or ethnicity who is subjected to this kind of shock will be at increased risk of diseases and disorders that affect average intelligence as measured by standardized tests, to be less likely to have the education that a rich person does, and to be less effective at jobs, all else being equal.  Likewise, the animal trained to solve certain puzzles may transmit the memory of solving these puzzles epigenetically, and therefore looks like a genetically superior animal in terms of intelligence, and yet, give those same tests to the “poor” animal and his or her descendants will become equally intelligent.

I summarize these two trends in epigenetic research as:  The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.  Given an initial epigenetic boost, the descendants of the rich and powerful are increasingly more likely to keep getting richer, as epigenetic inheritance combines with the social-environment and educational effects of being around other well-off people, while the poor’s descendants may very well become poorer, as inherited epigenetics leads to less ability to take advantage of education, while the social environment dominated by the powerful rich reduces both access to education and job opportunities.  And yet, epigenetic research also suggests that these trends are reversible, to the point of epigenetic equality between rich and poor.

Interestingly, epigenetics calls into question the seemingly strongest research studies indicating a role of genetics in things like intelligence and job success. Take, for example, the study that found that twins in which one of the two was placed with a different family to grow up in tended to reflect their birth parents’ rather than their childhood parents’ testing success.  It seemed like an obvious case of genetic differentiation causing this result (if we assume that the placements were not causing a child of a rich/educated or poor parent to move to a physical/social environment in which the child was given different treatment because of its background).  However, epigenetics suggests that it is far more likely the difference was because of inherited epigenetic differentiation which could be reversed either by changing the physical/social environment for this generation or by “breeding the differentiation out”.

Getting Back to That Possible Death of Race …

So to explain why I think the research trend is to undercut the view of individual differences being due to group differences by race or even by ethnicity, I want to start with what the model of “evolution” of differences seems to be turning into.

As I see it, adding epigenetics to the picture leads to a model something like this:  the five causative factors of these differences seem to be genes (inherited), epigenetics (inherited), the physical environment, the social environment (culture, society, typically corresponding to ethnic or cultural differences), and individual variation not caused by any other factor.  The physical environment may also cause genetic and epigenetic inherited differences, in the case of genetics over thousands of years of time, in the case of epigenetics immediately.

The key question then becomes, how much of these inherited differences can be explained by genetic differences correlated with physical appearance or such genetically inherited traits as lactose tolerance, and how much by epigenetics?  The most likely answer, it appears, is 90-99.5% explained by epigenetics, because if we assume 50% of those times when we thought genes were to blame it was really epigenetics, then for the other 99% of the genes the differences are definitely due to epigenetics and hence if any gene is equally likely to be affected by epigenetics you get 99% x 1 + 1% x 0.5 = 99.5% of the effects of inherited differences explained by epigenetics.

But race and notions of other group-inherited “permanent” characteristics are inherently dependent on genetic evolution for their validity.  If inherited differences are based on the physical environment 1-3 generations back and are easily reversible by a different physical environment or cross-breeding, then very little of “racial” or even “ethnic” differences is explainable by genetic or even epigenetic “destiny”.  It’s easy visually to class people by physical characteristics; but it now appears that inherited groupings that do anything more than that – possibly even in the area of physical skills – will be wrong, at least 9 times out of 10.

What does that leave us with, as a guide to action?  In broad strokes, the levers available to pull to make things better have to do increasingly with the physical environment – different exposures to disease, pollution, starvation from poverty, for example.  If we take the notion of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer from epigenetics or the physical and social environment seriously, we should primarily favor policies that narrow the gap between rich and poor, because other research suggests that that type of move toward “equality” will lead to a better economy and greater innovation that drives life improvements of the future.  So the levers that involve making the physical environment more “equal” in specific ways sound like one place to start. 

I would also note that tackling group social inequities seems to me to be a slightly better bet to pursue than before epigenetics arrived on the scene.  Whatever the apparent split between nature and nurture before epigenetics arrived, it seems clear that social inequities affect some differentiation between groups, and more so now that those inequities can travel down to future generations via both society and epigenetic inheritance – and that such epigenetics-exacerbated social inequities can be reversed both societally and epigenetically.

I’ll add one final thought.  I haven’t touched on the whole notion of individual differentiation across groups, inherited or not.  I really don’t think there’s enough research in the area.  Still, I’ve seen enough anecdotal evidence to form the following generalization:

Groups are more similar than you think; individuals within groups are more different than you think.

That is, there are more men who wouldn’t mind donning a tutu and doing classical ballet than you think; there are more women who wouldn’t mind being bricklayers than you think; there are more white folks who like Afro-pop than you think; there are more African-Americans who like classical music than you think; on and on.

As I say, there is little research supporting this.  Still, I think it’s a useful thing to remind oneself of, whatever the passionate issue to which it applies.

CO2 Update: Slightly Less Bad News

 Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

I continue to monitor the CO2 results measured at Mauna Loa, as pretty much the best indicator out there as to whether our recent efforts at mitigating climate change are having any effect at all, or whether the rate of growth of atmospheric CO2 continues to increase as it has for the last atmospheric growth. 

I have been doing this since around 2010, and have only seen two months’ data over that time that suggested there might be some leveling of the CO2 growth rate.  Of course, that is only the first step in saving the planet – the second is to start decreasing the growth rate, the third is to drive the growth rate to zero, and the final step (which is the point at which we will actually be doing something positive about climate change) is to pursue decreases in CO2 until it reaches about 280 ppm (a far harder task than boosting its level). 

The first of the two data points was last May.  For no obvious reason (and therefore the likeliest reason was actual effectiveness in cutting CO2 emissions) May was almost flat compared to April, although April was a normal-growth month and in all previous years since 2010 May has been significantly above April.  Oh well, maybe it was a one-time event.

But then came March of this year.  As I have never seen before, March has been significantly below February.  It still appears likely that May will end up above 420 ppm – an important milestone, since average yearly atmospheric CO2 was around 280 ppm in the early 1800s before human-caused global warming began.  Each doubling of CO2 is projected to be associated with 3-4 degrees Celsius of global warming (perhaps two-thirds of that being directly caused by CO2 itself), so reaching 420 ppm should in the long run be associated with 2-2.67 degrees of warming.  In any event, reaching 420 ppm is clearly unadulterated Bad News.

However, the second downturn from trend in the last year suggests that maybe, just maybe, we are reaching the point of a level growth rate in atmospheric CO2.  This is slightly supported by the fact that the last four years of CO2 growth rates have been in the 2.3-2.5 range – a period which seems to have mixed mild La Nina (inhibiting CO2 growth rates) and neutral (no effect on CO2 growth rates) weather.  Since this is not too far from the typical case across history (El Nino being more of an exception than La Nina), I conclude that there are therefore three possible signs that a leveling of CO2 growth rates may have been reached.

Thoughts on Implications

I admit that I base my thinking loosely on a draft paper by James Hansen et al in which he argued that the maximum number of doublings of CO2 would be three or four (somewhere above 2240 ppm).  This would be achieved, iirc, if approximately 60-70% of the fossil-fuel reserves identified at the time of writing (2013 or so) were burned.  At the pace at which use was increasing at the time, the appropriate amount of fossil fuels would have been burned and its CO2 moved into the atmosphere in 50-60 years time.  Thus, a continued rise in the growth rate of CO2 represents this worst-case scenario:  if the last nine years continued the growth-rate rise trend, then we would have narrowed the time for avoiding the worst-case scenario to 40-50 years in the future – not to mention drastically decreasing the chances of avoiding the first and second doublings. 

Therefore, I argue, what we would have achieved by leveling the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 is at least more time to avoid the worst-case scenario, and at best a major decrease in the probability of reaching the worst-case scenario.  That is the sense in which I say, this is slightly less bad news.  Considering that the worst-case scenario as described by Hansen involves the death of most of the human race, not to mention much of the rest of the environment – in this nightmare scenario, if you go outside in most places to work during the day during most of the year and stay out more than an hour, you will die of heat stroke – anything that reduces that likelihood is to be celebrated.  But the first two doublings involve the deaths perhaps of hundreds of millions to a billion, so we should be clear-eyed about increasing toughness of the job ahead, even with this news, and recognize that those who seek to prevent us from decreasing that growth rate for their own selfish purposes may well be murderers beyond the scale of the Holocaust, or the Holodomor, or WW II. 

But enough of gloom.  Go enjoy the slightly less bad news, he said on his birthday.

Reading New Thoughts: What Do We Want the World to Be When We Grow Up? (Hiss, “Restoring the Planet”)

 Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

I have recently been reading “Restoring the Planet,” by Tony Hiss, and it has prompted some far more general thoughts about the endgame of successful climate change efforts.

Hiss book lays out, more or less, a global if North-America-centered effort to “set aside” 50% of all land from human use, to be achieved by 2050 (giving a nice slogan, “50 by ‘50”.)  He then discusses the ways in which people are using that effort to identify ecosystems and then as far as possible preserve or restore them, free from humanity’s touch. In other words, the areas being saved are then altered if necessary to create, as far as possible, functioning ecosystems having long-term viability without needing constant human intervention.

For example, one such effort seeks to “carve out” existing spaces where animals roam in fixed patterns and connect these via “corridors” that ensure that humans will not decimate the animals but still allow the animals sufficient range to be viable.  Another seeks to reserve remaining “wilderness” by establishing ownership of the property involved by entities dedicated to keeping it human-unaffected.

These efforts, and others, seem to me today to follow disparate ideas of what the endgame is and how to get there, only loosely coordinated if at all.  I believe that what I have seen can be more or less classified into five approaches, or movements:

1.       Sustainability

2.       Regeneration

3.       Human-designed ecologies

4.       No-human ecologies (more or less the approach described by Hiss)

5.       Human-included ecologies

Terms of Ecological Endearment

The approaches I have listed above overlap in some cases – a human-designed ecology may be aimed at creating a long-term sustainable ecosystem, or simply at regenerating an area to repair the damages of the recent past.  What matters, I think, is the goal of the approach, as an exclusive focus on one approach may or may not lead to the promised land of a low-carbon-emissions steady-state global set of ecosystems.  So it seems appropriate to examine each approach in that light.

Sustainability, it seems, it the most-known approach.  It explicitly requires setting up steady-state ecosystems, and only by inference those with low carbon emissions, since otherwise (one guesses) carbon-emission-induced climate change will make ecosystems unsustainable.  There is an unmistakable air of “whatever works” about the sustainability approach – it is thus entirely agnostic about regeneration and human-designed vs. human-included vs. no-human ecologies.

Regeneration, by contrast, seems to say that simply by restoring a previous state of an ecosystem will automagically result in a steady-state low-carbon-emissions environment, because the previous state of the ecosystem had this characteristic.  What makes this questionable is that one can’t walk through the same river twice: due to the Columbian Exchange, few ecosystems are the way they were 500 years ago, before carbon emissions started rising.

Human-designed ecologies is very much, I think, the province of the “new environmentalists”, those who think that we cannot restore ecosystems to a previous state and therefore we are forced to design new ecosystems, using existing tools, that will achieve a steady state.  Since this is a pragmatic approach, it leans toward leaving humans where they are and/or accommodating but constraining them as they continue expanding into the world’s ecosystems.  However, the question arises as to who decides what’s an appropriate end game – clearly, indigenous populations are not on the priority list of those who advocate human-designed ecologies.

No-human ecologies, by contrast, is the ideological leaning of the “old environmentalists”, who based on their experiences in the 1970s at the advent of the environmentalist movement tend to worry that humans, by and large, blight everything they touch.  I believe that this approach accords with the effort, in the US at least, to buy up everything possible not owned by the government (in Massachusetts, the aim is to acquire 80% of the land area) and turn it into places where humans go either not at all or only rarely.  Of course, the lands involved for the most part right now are the ones least subject to carbon pollution.  I would also guess that the main sticking point in the immediate future is places involved in mining, including those minerals involved in solar-power generation, not to mention installation of solar arrays in these areas.

I admit that I am fond of the human-included ecologies approach, because it seems to me more flexible than either the human-designed or no-human approaches.  That is, we make an exception to the no-humans approach where indigenous peoples have a strong track record of living sustainably on the land.  In many cases, these indigenous peoples have been strongly tainted by the modern economy and nation-state institutions, but there is clearly a case to be made that they still are the quickest way to restore a low-carbon-emissions steady state – not to mention the irony of visiting the worst consequences of a no-human-ecology approach on the worst sufferers from our previous “civilizing” emissions-hungry system.

In Which I Vote For All of the Above

I look at all of these approaches from the point of view of a climate-change person who is primarily concerned that we mitigate as fast as possible – that we reduce carbon emissions as fast as possible, with the ultimate steady state, if any, a secondary consideration for now.  Viewed in that light, I believe that each of these approaches is appropriate in a wide range of particular cases, and thus I am happy to “let a thousand flowers bloom” – i.e., encourage each of these movements.

At the same time, each time one of these movements comes into conflict with another, I think it is the right thing, not to commit to one side or another for the long term, but rather to establish rules of thumb for when a particular approach is most appropriate.  I would suggest that among these rules of thumb are:

·         When there are vested human interests in an area, pick the approach that impacts them least (but still minimizes carbon emissions)

·         Likewise, pick the approach that involves the quickest path to a healthy ecosystem (i.e., consider the needs of non-human animals and plants first)

·         Focus sustainability efforts on what seems irretrievably human-dominated – in other words, cities and their irreducible agricultural hinterland.  Since, in the foreseeable future, that comprises much more than half of humanity, but far less than a quarter of all of the land, that means both a human-designed and human-dominated ecology.

I would also bear in mind that each of these approaches, unlike mitigation, asks and tries to  answer the questions:  What do we want the world to be like if and when we cease our immature destruction of ecosystems and achieve a low-carbon-emissions world?  And, how can we ensure that we act maturely from now on and never again risk ourselves and our planet in this way?  For that reason, I would say that, while I would not prioritize any of these approaches over mitigation, they are every bit as important as adaptation to climate change’s effects.  If not more so.

The Climate Change of Our Lives: 2020

 Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

I have written almost nothing for almost all of this year because I have undergone one of those periods where whatever I think of writing seems to me to contribute nothing – someone else has already said what I might wish to say, and done it well.  However, it does seem to me with regard to climate change that, still, no one is consistently monitoring CO2 emissions and drawing conclusions about what they imply for our success or lack thereof in preventing global warming.  So this piece is a retrospective on 2020 and climate change, focusing on what’s going on in CO2 emissions as evidenced by measurements at Mauna Loa.

The 2020 chapter of our lives at Mauna Loa was marked by a pretty consistent monthly atmospheric CO2 rise of 2.5 ppm from 2019’s levels.  This is about in line with the rises of the last two years. 

To me, this is neither good news nor bad news.  I might have expected that the effects of COVID, which over the first ½ of the year apparently meant a 5-8% reduction in global CO2 emissions, would show up in the Mauna Loa figures, but an article on their website noted that it would be difficult to distinguish its effects from the “noise” of normal variation.  Likewise, I might have expected CO2 to increase more rapidly if the pandemic hadn’t happened, simply from feedback effects like increased albedo due to some regions like Siberia and the Laptev Sea melting earlier.  Perhaps the two effects cancelled each other out.

The point, I think, is that for the first year since I started worrying about this in 2010, there seem to be positive developments since the year before that at least match the negative developments.  Of course, we don’t know how much of the clawback of emissions will remain when the pandemic fades some time in 2021, probably due to comprehensive vaccination.  Still, as in Alice Through the Looking Glass, perhaps we are finally running fast enough to stay in the same place, even though we are no closer to the ultimate goal.

Of course, we should not forget those negative developments.  Here’s my own list.

Arctic Sea Ice

Every year I come back to this, because in determining the effects of climate change, what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.  And it was indeed another alarming, unprecedented year.  Both extent and volume of Arctic sea ice at minimum were either slightly lower than ever before or second lowest behind 2012, depending on your measurement.  The salient feature of this melting season was the early and unusually large melt in the Arctic Ocean above Russia, and its late remelt, so that the Northeast Passage was open perhaps from late June to early October.  When refreeze occurred, for the first time since I’ve been following things, it happened “up” from the Russian seacoast rather than “down” from the North Pole to the seacoast.  It appears also that at one point the Northwest Passage was open to quite high in the Canadian Archipelago.

What this suggests to me is that rather than reaching a point of higher stability after 2007 or 2012, two years of precipitous drops, we are now pushing against the lower bounds established in 2012.  In other words, the minimum levels in 2013-2019 do not represent a “new normal”, but rather a springback followed by a resumption of (slow) decline.  I fully expect, therefore, to see a clear new record low sometime in the next 3 years, although I will be deliriously happy to  be wrong.  And I won’t repeat, but you the reader should keep in mind, the fallout when, inevitably, the minimum goes to zero.

Disasters and Weather

Meanwhile, the fires, hurricanes, and other disasters partially attributable to global warming were certainly on a par with 2019.  I am told that the cost of these disasters set another record in 2020.  The wildfires in California were certainly notable for the record acreage consumed and for the effect being so widespread in terms of air quality throughout the state.  2020 saw a record number of hurricanes, true, but to me the important point was the continuation of unusually warm water, especially in the Caribbean, that made incipient hurricanes frequently into Level 4 or 5 ones, when in the years before 2019 those would have almost always been Level 1 or Level 2 hurricanes.  And, of course, record-matching flooding from slow-moving hurricanes happened again, as well.

Locally, it was an unusually mild winter overall, with temperatures in February and early March often in the low 50s, while snow never really stuck.  Then summer arrived with consistent 80-plus temperatures around June 20^th, earlier than I can ever remember in my 50-plus years around the Boston area.  The highs in July and August were around 95, not around 90 as in years before, and temperatures in the 80s lasted until mid-October, while the leaves didn’t finish falling until well into November – all of this was unprecedented as far as I know.  And at certain times, winds were far more violent than in the past, although not to the point of hurricane status.  I understand, also, that there’s a new weather term:  “thundersnow” – i.e., thunder and lightning plus snow.

And the New Year

When I look at 2021, I find that for the first time, the things I foresee that are matters for hope outweigh the negative things that I expect may come to pass, although the hopes are slender:

1.       It does appear that President-elect Joe Biden is serious about embedding consideration of climate change in most of the workings of the U.S. government.  I cannot say that I can clearly point to a comparable effort in any other country, if it happens.  The effects on emissions will be minimal, at best, for a few years.  But the cumulative effect of the bureaucracy and the “movement” it creates as it operates on its own momentum could be profound in the medium term.

2.       For the first time, it appears that banks may actually follow through on defunding CO2 emitters, especially in the energy sector.  Because banks are such herd animals, I view this as a potentially serious investment shift away from CO2 polluter firms that may cause far more drastic CO2 cutbacks (except in China and Russia) than we have seen before.

Bear that in mind as, in 2021, I otherwise anticipate echoing my sad findings about 2020.

And Now For Something Completely Different

 For the last week and a half, I have been reviewing and putting in book-like format a series of blog posts I did at Daily Kos 1 ½ years ago on different takes on Tolkien, and in particular on Lord of the Rings.  This morning, as I was editing one of these posts, it occurred to me that no one had ever tried looked at what Tolkien had said about which characters and species in Middle-Earth had beards (including Dwarven females), and which did not.  I imagined calling it “Barbering in Middle Earth.”

Just now, I happened upon a news release about a new “treasure trove” of Tolkien’s writings on Middle Earth, due for publication in June of 2021.  Near the end, it notes that “[t]he new collection will even touch upon which characters had beards”.

That is … eerie.

Another Year Older and Deeper in Climate Debt

As I write this, Australia is burning up.

Reports indicate that due to weeks of unprecedented 104 degree temperatures and drought, wildfires are burning across Australia, driving those who can’t evacuate into the ocean and creating toxic air in the major urban centers.  These conditions are, without doubt, due to human-caused climate change – except that Australia has a large reserve of climate-denier politicians and their allies who apparently are claiming that “if the Greenies had let us clean up the forests this wouldn’t be happening.”

In looking over the last year, therefore, I am reminded of an old coal-miner union song’s refrain:  “Sixteen tons, and what do you get?/Another day older and deeper in debt/Saint Peter don’t you call me, ‘cause I can’t come/I sold my soul to the company store.”  Another year older, and what do I get?  A world that’s deeper in climate crisis than at the start of the year, because we continue to emit not only more carbon than is needed to stop atmospheric CO2 from rising, but more than in 2018 or any year before it.  

In effect, we are creating more and more “climate debt” that will have to be paid, by the Australians, by us, and by our descendants.

Let’s go through the latest dreary numbers.

Possible But Not Clear Hope On The Ground

An enormous shift occurred in societal terms over the last year or two.  For the last nine years or so, efforts in universities, NGOs, individual businesses, and interest groups have created what might be called a “climate change technology movement” in which efforts around sustainability, regenerative economics, solar and wind technology, and the like began, and began to coordinate with each other.  What has happened over the last year has been the embedding of the movement in society, so that schools, politicians, and workers feel comfortable making climate change a major part of the discussion.

What has not happened, as of yet, is the embedding of that movement in the bureaucracy of government, business, and other institutions.  I define a bureaucracy, in one sense, as an organization that operates on its own momentum, driven not by leaders but by the implications of rules and regulations.  In that sense, there is nothing driving considerations of carbon-emission reduction and measurement on a national, much less a global scale.  Nevertheless, there are some grounds for possible hope in this development.

Another possible ground for hope is the surprisingly rapid (to some) development of solar power.  As someone who experienced the power of Moore’s Law in the computer industry at first hand, I always believed that similar technologies in the solar field could lead to reductions in solar cost per watt comparable to computers’ rapid ongoing increases in computational power per dollar.  It now seems to be at the point where, despite the cost of batteries, building and operating an electricity grid based on solar is cheaper than doing so based on coal or oil.  Although we may not yet have reached the day where we are considering replacing operating fossil-fuel systems with their sunk costs and infrastructure designed for fossil fuels only, such a day may be in sight.

But despite this fundamental shift in the culture and the economics, the numbers seem to be telling us that we are not yet clearly making a dent in “business as usual”.  I always look to CO2 measurements (Mauna Loa) as indications of what is happening that cannot be distorted by our hopes, fears, and self-interest – and there the news continues to be grim.

Over the last year, for just about every month except November (2.25 ppm), atmospheric carbon has increased by about 3 ppm since the same month in 2018.  To put this in perspective, this high a rate has only occurred, iirc, in 1998 and in three of the last four years.  In other words, there is no clear sign in the atmosphere that we have begun to deviate from “business as usual”.

If we switched to more suspect numbers, there might be some more local signs of hope:  US emissions, for example, are alleged to be more or less flat over the last few years (although the Trump administration has fueled a slight increase), thereby “decoupling” economic growth from emissions rises – meaning that while the US may not be actually reducing emissions, we at least may not be increasing them.  Some credit for that appears due to energy-efficiency efforts, and some to the solar/wind revolution, while the switch to natural gas may or may not be playing a role – there are strong indications of major methane leaks that may make natural gas just as bad as oil or coal for carbon emissions.

However, we must bear in mind (a) our local and global measurements may not capture all sources; (b) local successes may be partly due to shifting economically to countries with fewer regulations that inevitably emit more than the US or similar operation that it replaced; (c) because of feedbacks and feedback loops, areas not under our control may be emitting more carbon – e.g., the black carbon from wildfires, or carbon/methane from melting permafrost.  Point (c) is especially important:  scientists talk of “tipping points” where atmospheric carbon increases and global warming happen even if we cut our emissions to zero, and so we have to “run harder” (cut emissions more) to stay in the same place (steady increases in emissions), and even harder than that to get anywhere (start achieving smaller increases in emissions).

And therefore, I believe, that is where our one small possible hope in all this gloom lies:  that we may indeed have reached the point where we would have decreased the rate of rise of emissions (if those pesky feedbacks were not occurring).

Final Thoughts

I would, in sad adieu to 2019, like to note the malefactors who continue to drive the climate emergency to new extremes.  I would cite in particular:

1.       President Trump, of course, who has effectively taken a leadership role in driving more emissions of carbon, by letting loose the fossil fuel industry and its enablers on the US government, leading to a bureaucracy that is abetting, by its rules and regulations, both increased emissions and the pollution and food/water problems that make the effects of climate change worse.  Compared to this, trashing the Constitution is minor stuff.

2.       Murdoch and Koch, who are driving these policies into our politics.

3.       Putin, not only for committing to oil as an instrument of Russian policy but also for abetting “Mafia government” across the world that is accompanied by lessened action on climate change, climate-science censorship, and physical repression of activists.

4.       Australia’s Conservatives, who seem to be recreating the denialism of the US Republican party, in a country that is far more economically involved in coal mining and similar emissions-friendly activities than most. 

That’s it.  Maybe next year will be better.  Oh wait, I said that last year.  And the year before.  And …All right, I’ll end in the words of Flanders and Swann:
“Bloody January again!”

CLIMATE CHANGE

I dreamed a dream of golden sands
Where late the sweet birds flew
And at dune’s height a small child’s plastic shovel stood stuck
As if to bid our summer adieu

Over the crest, the lonely beach stretched endlessly
And, amid its wrack, seen only by me
Seethed the dead, the conquering sea.

REFLECTIONS ON AN AMERICAN CELEBRATION

This land is not a land
It’s an idea.

Sometimes we fear that idea,
We spit on it, we trample it.
Then we pick it up, we dust it off, we pat it on the head.
Ideas don’t mind.
People do.

Today we celebrate our land,
Tomorrow we go back to the fear, the spitting, the trampling,
Or even worse, the indifference.

But there’s a problem.

People die; land dies; countries die;
But ideas do not have to die.
But ideas must grow, or they will die.

Greatness is momentary in the flesh,
But in an idea endlessly growing,
It is immortal.

So when we celebrate our land today,
We are only picking our idea up, dusting it off, patting it on the head.
We need to do more.

We need to overcome our fear of our idea,
And right its wrongs,
And help it grow new lofty mansions,
As the seasons roll.

Else tomorrow, we may find that our idea is dead.
And when our idea is dead,
Our country might as well be dead.

For why should anyone care any more about our country or us
Than any others?
We will no longer have an idea
To protect us people somewhat
From the fear, the spitting, the trampling.

This land is not our land.
Because it’s an idea.
People don’t own ideas;
Parents don’t own children.

And so, today,
Ask not what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your idea.

Reading New Thoughts: Green and Bowles/Carlin Rethink Economics

Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.
What I am talking about here is a history of West Africa circa 1200-1850 called “A Fistful of Shells”, by Toby Green, and a white paper by Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin analyzing CORE’s “The Economy”, a new multi-sourced introductory Economics textbook.  Both seem to me to provide different and troubling new ways to view economics as a whole; your mileage may vary.

Let’s start with Green.  Imho, his argument runs something like this:  a trade in gold (sub-Saharan Africa providing, North Africa/Europe/Middle East benefiting) sprang up, supplemented and then replaced by a trade in slaves.  These slaves were a natural outgrowth of previous uses of slaves (acquired in warfare, or involving criminals and excess population) both in Africa and Europe/Middle East.  

The initial result was positive economic growth.  The single source of the gold was iirc in Senegambia, and the people there carefully protected themselves and their mining from discovery and takeover, so the rest of West Africa began to be drawn in as middlemen.  Kings with control over some aspect of the trade arose, and were able to siphon off some of the profits to establish and maintain power.  Thus the Mali and Songhay “empires”.  

However, the trade relationship was fundamentally unequal.  Cowrie shells, especially those imported from the Maldives, were used locally as currency (as well as cloth and iron bars), but the fact that cowrie shells were relatively easy to produce made any currency exchange highly unequal – there are records indicating that some kings attempting a pilgrimage to Mecca had to pay in gold along the way, finally running out and then incurring debts that eventually led to the downfall of their kingdoms.  When the need for slaves for the New World surged, it effectively acted as a replacement in the economy for the decreasing demand for gold.  And when export of slaves to the New World ended, it was replaced by slavery within the kings’ domains.  

Moreover, the new slave-based economy had its own subtle traps.  Carried to an extreme, as it soon was, it meant the impoverishment of those outside the kings’ and European traders’ political control, as they moved to isolated and protected communities to escape the slave raiders.  Even within the scope of the new polities, the proportion of those in danger of slavery went up, and hence the economic benefits, such as they were, went to relatively few compared to the situation north of the Sahara. 

Analysis of Green:  Commodity/Currency-Based Economic Inequality

Green’s conclusion is, I think, worth quoting:  “an expansion of trade on the one hand [from Europe and the Middle East] provoked less access to the wealth of capital on the other [for West Africa] … growing capital differentials [were] exacerbated by the trade of currencies that were losing economic value globally – such as cowries and cloths – for those that were either gaining or producing surplus value, such as gold and human beings … When currency imports to [West] Africa were not matched by trade goods, there was inflation of currencies used in Africa … When trade goods were also imported, these competed with local production and reduced extensive exports of African manufactures … This declining export deterred investment … in manufacturing …”  In other words, a strong degree of participation in the global economy fostered from Europe from 1400 onwards did not result in comparable or even major improvements in living standards for most, or even GNP, in West Africa.  We can say of the impoverished societies in East Asia that much of the explanation might be that they were not included in this globalization; clearly, that explanation does not hold for West Africa (and, I suspect, for some sub-Saharan East Africa as well).

This also ties in with an observation I have had in much other recent reading as well:  countries that wind up in an unequal economic relationship in which they become “one-trick ponies” dependent on things such as gold or coffee or bananas typically don’t fare as well in the long run, as the value of these is much more volatile and prone to long strings of bad luck, and often is superseded as tastes or technologies change.  So Argentina with its specialization in beef, Latin and Central America with its colonial focus on gold and silver, Puerto Rico with its history of specializing in whatever the US felt was its proper commodity, West Africa for slaves, El Salvador with switching over to coffee production and then finding it could no longer provide subsistence agriculture for its population, not to mention the great difficulty in the US before about 1815 in breaking out of its unequal “enforced commoditization” relationship with Great Britain.  We view countries like Saudi Arabia with its ability to convert oil into a thriving economy as the norm, whereas they should perhaps be viewed from a global economic point of view as an exception.

I believe that we should perhaps view this kind of almost-zero-benefit unequal relationship as a fundamental feature of capitalism – because in many of the cases cited, the workings of trade and capitalism were proceeding to some extent independent of government action.  We have congratulated ourselves on the rising tide of capitalism floating the boats of all nations willing to participate in global markets on capitalistic terms – if we are talking about countries producing computer chips, perhaps this is so; if oil, pace Venezuela, the picture is very mixed; if coffee, it seems not to be true.  And the danger of capitalism is that, once a country commits to a particular narrowing of its economy, it may become harder rather than easier to recover from having the wrong product to export.  

I find this to be a sobering thought.  It suggests that rather than demanding a country or region fit into the needs of capitalism, sustainable economics will require that capitalism fit the needs of the country: e.g., diversified, sustainable agriculture to be enforced as the cheapest long-run product.  It also suggests that a world economy that is a mix of governmental technocratic command-and-control and capitalism will actually do better in some cases than a capitalism-focused economy.  Certainly Sweden suggests so.

Analysis of Bowles/Cardin:  Economics as a Branch of Sociology

Over the last 10 years, the failures of many economists in the face of the Great Recession have led to calls to fundamentally rethink economics as a discipline and as it is taught.  The recent white paper by Bowles and Cardin represents a comprehensive way that strands of economics that are presently treated as patches to economic models can instead be viewed as the essentials of a different way of looking at economics and teaching it.

Again, it is worth quoting the abstract:  “new problems now challenge the content of our introductory courses:  these include mounting economic disparities [income and wealth inequality], climate change, concerns about the future of work, and financial instability”; to which I would add that these also challenge the effectiveness of present macro- and micro-economics in guiding the analyst and decision-maker.  What I believe the introductory textbook cited does is to place existing but under-used “tools” at the center of economic analysis – specifically, “strategic interaction, [operations of markets in cases of] limited information, principal-agent models, new [real-world] behavioral foundations [that can determine what economic models best fit real-world data], and dynamic processes including instability and path-dependence.”  

By using word-frequency analysis, Bowles/Cardin establish clear differences between this and two previous generations of economics introductory textbooks as a proxy for the economic linguae franca of our world, the two previous generations being Samuelson’s post-WW II textbook and the recent textbooks of Krugman/Wells and Mankiw.  In other words, the new textbook and the new approach to economics really are in some sense fundamentally different.  

I would argue that the differences derive mostly from this:  the tone and organization of the new textbook really treat economics as a branch of sociology.  That is, they start with an analysis of economic group behavior as it shows up in current issues, not with a model of economic processes that then attempts to shoehorn in real-world data by assumptions such as rationality and self-interest.  The result is a stance that asks where government regulation, command-and-control, operation outside the economy, and more unfettered markets are appropriate, rather than a treatment of the first four as patches to assumed (but rarely if ever achieved in the real world!) perfectly competitive “free” markets.

Here’s a (to me, startling) example of the new thinking:  “it is impossible to write enforceable contracts for worker effort in an information-scarce environment,” so “firms will set wages so that there is always a cost of job loss for workers [i.e., a little higher than they might, so that workers clearly have an incentive to work because they care about their relative income when laid off or in another job] … As a result, there is involuntary unemployment at the equilibrium of the labor market.  This is not … a deviation … caused by … wage rigidities, minimum wages, monopsony, or unions … the intersection of demand and supply functions does not exist and is [replaced] by the Nash equilibrium of strategically interacting principals (employers) … and agents (employees).”  We’re not on Wall Street anymore, are we, Toto?

Implications of Both

It seems to me that both Green and Bowles/Cardin share one suggestion about the future of economics:  It is no longer adequate to see capitalism as the answer to everything, to view it as everywhere superior to the alternatives, now and in the future.  Rather, both suggest that we are dealing with a world in which, historically and now, government, capitalism, command/control, and non-economic activity are necessary parts, all of which must be viewed as operating in more and less effective ways than the others in both the short and the long run.
In particular, I view this as a challenge from economics to that peculiar libertarian dream, of combining little or no government with “free” markets.  What Green and Bowles/Cardin are saying is that capitalism alone will lead to bad outcomes, if not to a reinstitution of (poorer) government by the capitalist in his or her own interests.  I view bitcoin/blockchain as a direct confirmation of this:  the ideal of self-regulating contracts, money, and markets simply leads to inefficiencies, greater imbalances between principal and agent, theft by hackers, and Ponzi schemes preying on the limited information of investors.  

But I also gain hope from both of these texts.  If there is a hope of sustainable economies in the future, it begins with placing the cart of capitalism behind the horse of sustainability, and accompanied by the carts of government, our own personal and societal efforts, and WW-II-like command/control of parts of the economy, at least in the short run. 

It may not be the Grand Unified Theory of Economics, to replace what was smashed in 2008.  But at least, for the first time in a long, long time, we might be beginning to say that what economics teaches us reflects fairly well what we see with our own two eyes in the real world – the altruism and its benefits, the self-centeredness and its costs, less obscured by frantic handwaving and theories.

Final note:  in rereading this, I find I have underplayed the role of innovation/technology in the “new economics”.  For those curious about this, I suggest they sample the CORE introductory economics textbook referenced above, available online.

Joe Romm’s “Climate Change - What Everyone Needs to Know”, Second Edition: Maybe the Best CC Book Right Now

Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.
Just a brief note after my previous post.  I have just finished “Climate Change”, and imho it may be the best book for the general reader trying to get up to speed with the latest science and what’s going on with climate change mitigation and adaptation. 

It’s in the format of posing questions and then answering them, which can clarify what you’re really discussing in a section, but can be a little confusing when you’re trying to follow the overall argument.  Not too confusing, tho’.

As can be seen from my previous post, the only really new things in it for me that mattered were around the latest findings on permafrost, methane, and the like.  But Room is surprisingly good on energy efficiency and hydrogen-powered vehicles (a wasted section, since it becomes clear early on in the section that they’re not worth considering in any real depth unless a technological breakthrough occurs).  Moreover, his cautionary notes on biofuels, carbon capture and storage, and nuclear power go beyond the usual discussions.

It’s not light reading; but it’s not tough slogging, either.  I suggest giving it a try.

Putting an Upper Bound on Climate Change: Permafrost

Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

When trying to figure out the most likely rate of global warming in our “business as usual” society, I always go back to that amusing quote from the movie version of Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring:  “Are you scared?  Not scared enough!”  The reason I remember this is that up to now, all of our scientific models of how climate change will play out over the next 100 years or so have consistently underestimated the rate of warming, not to mention the rate at which weather extremes have become the “new abnormal”.  And the reasons for this underestimation in the scientific community, from what I can tell, are (a) conservatism (even though the modeler may know that an effect will add to global warming, until the effect can be bounded with 95% likelihood in a positive direction it is assumed to have neither positive nor negative effect) and (b) lack of knowledge (for example, for a long time, the effect of increased cloudiness on global warming was not clearly understood).

Over time, these certainties and uncertainties in models have tended to be sorted out into the categories of Donald Rumsfeld’s pernicious classification:  knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns:

1.       The knowns are now, effectively, all those direct effects (e.g., the direct effect of CO2 and methane on global warming) and feedback or “knock-on” effects (e.g., the effect of release of black carbon by wildfires on decreasing Arctic albedo, where global warming from CO2 increase causes increased wildfires, which causes black carbon to fall on snow and ice, decreasing Arctic albedo and hence causing more Arctic warming).

2.       The known unknowns are those effects that we know will play a role, but which are not incorporated in models because we don’t know the extent of the role they will play.  Of these, perhaps the largest ones are (i) melting permafrost and (ii) methane (CH4) releases other than from permafrost melting, including methane clathrates, release of methane locked in land and ocean repositories, and release of methane from human action, including cow emissions and natural-gas processing emissions.

3.       The unknown unknowns are, obviously, effects that we probably can’t anticipate until they happen.  We can, however, take a guess at them by looking at the relationship between CO2 atmospheric emissions and global temperature during the last two major rises in CO2 – 250 million years ago (mya) and 55 mya (the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, also known as “hell and high water”).  If known unknowns turn into knowns, then the difference between what our models tell us will happen and what past experience suggests is probably due to unknown unknowns.
  

If we can turn the known unknowns into knowns, there appears to be a reasonable prospect that the revised models will track with past PETM (and other) experience, which would mean that the unknown unknowns probably don’t have a significant impact on global warming one way or the other.  In fact, the only remaining known unknown upside to be accounted for might be the fact that we are accelerating carbon emissions at a far greater pace than they have ever increased before.  The usual thinking is that this may speed up the process of actual global temperature warming, (e.g., in our case, a doubling of atmospheric carbon since 1850 should lead to a 2-2.8 degree C temperature increase in the next 100 years, and a total 4 degrees C temperature increase over the next 1000 years, rather than a 1200-year gradual doubling leading to an increase of 1.3 degrees C by 100 years from now, but with the same total 4 degrees C increase at the end), although it is possible that our rush to emit carbon will trigger unknown unknowns that will lead to an even greater rise in temperature at the end of each doubling.  In a nutshell:  with permafrost and methane accounted for, we would begin to see a plausible upper bound for the amount of long-term global warming from increased atmospheric CO2 and related greenhouse-gas emissions.

In long-ago posts, I said that research seemed to suggest that increased methane emissions would not deliver a major boost to global warming.  Without going into horrendous detail, I saw the research as suggesting that if even if methane clathrates, sea-floor methane, and permafrost methane suddenly started rising into the atmosphere a very high rates over the next 100 years, it was still unlikely that methane would achieve “saturation” in the atmosphere, which would cause methane to stay in the atmosphere much longer and therefore have a much greater warming effect – perhaps as much as 1 degree F while it lasted.  Nothing in the second edition of Joe Romm’s “Climate Change:  What Everyone Needs to Know” (summarizing findings as of early 2018) suggests that this scientific consensus has changed.

And so, I would argue, getting at the likely effect of melting all the permafrost gives us a reasonable shot at an upper bound for the most likely effects from “business as usual” increases in carbon emissions.  Or, as I like to say, we may finally know how scared is scared enough.

New Findings on Permafrost

Only nine years ago, it wasn’t clear that permafrost melting was happening yet.  Now, it’s not only clear that it’s happening, it seems to be happening faster than anticipated.   So a plausible upper bound for global warming is increasingly seeming more like a “middle bound” – the most likely case – for business-as-usual global warming.

Here’s a back-of-the-envelope SWAG at the effects of full permafrost melt.  According to “Climate Change”, there are 1.5 trillion tons of carbon locked in the world’s permafrost.  Studies cited in CC also suggest that for each 90 tons of permafrost carbon released, atmospheric carbon goes up about 60-80 ppm.  Thus, total melt means about 1000-1333 ppm of added atmospheric carbon.
 
The effect on global warming then depends on how fast it happens and what else is going on.  More specifically, if melt is fast, then most of its effect falls within the first two doublings of atmospheric carbon.  Thus, very loosely, with a 2 degree C direct effect of non-permafrost added atmospheric carbon on temperatures, we are talking about somewhere around a 4 degree C direct effect of total permafrost melt.

But direct effects of carbon are not the only effects.  A significant proportion of the carbon in permafrost will almost certainly be emitted as methane (CH4), not carbon dioxide.  While much of this will eventually turn into CO2 in the atmosphere, the rise in per-decade atmospheric methane during quick permafrost melt can add up to another degree C to warming over centuries-to-millenia time periods, because methane can be up to 86 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.  And the lack of snow cover and increased vegetation associated with the peat bogs likely to be a result of permafrost melt mean a shift in albedo that, to my mind, should significantly up global warming as well.  In sum, aggressive total permafrost melt seems to me at first glance to result in an average 4-6 degrees C of global warming for at least the next 1000 years – and, considering the unknown unknowns, that may be conservative.

It should be pointed out that if we are effective in ending business-as-usual global warming in the near future, much less of the permafrost will ultimately melt.   At another SWAG, we may have locked in melt of 5% of permafrost already (the result of non-permafrost feedbacks adding 0.5 degrees C to the temperature henceforward plus the effects of additional heating from initial permafrost melt).  The rest is still in play.

Glimpses of an Upper Bound

What strikes me about this estimate (4-6 degrees C) is that it seems to fit in more nicely both with the experience of past catastrophic global warming and with recent Hansen papers trying to set an upper bound.  In the PETM, carbon ppm started at about 1000 and apparently went up to about 2000, but the temps seem to have gone up 6 degrees C in the process, 4 degrees more than direct atmospheric carbon effects can explain.  One recently raised suggestion is that elimination of stratocumulus clouds, which should thin out as air temps get warmer, can add 8 degrees C to global warming.   But this is not likely to take effect until well beyond the 1000 ppm level, below which aggressive permafrost melt plays its major role.

In trying to square the PETM with the likely direct effects of atmospheric carbon, Hansen conjectured, iirc, that each doubling of atmospheric carbon would lead, without human interference, to a little more than 2 degrees C of direct effects plus a little less than 2 degrees C of feedback effects, for a total of 4 degrees C.  But the feedback effects he identified only seemed applicable to the first doubling (to 550-odd ppm), and the temps in the PETM seemed too high, imho, for a 2000-ppm atmospheric carbon level.  Some combination of permafrost melt and cloud thinning, with permafrost melt playing its major role before 1000 ppm (at the time of the late Cretaceous global warming 11 million years before, with loss of sea ice and therefore probably loss of permafrost) and cloud thinning after, may therefore explain some of the PETM warming (whether it played a role in the global warming/mass extinction 250 mya, which involved a super-continent with no extreme north or south land, is not clear).

This also squares with another Hansen paper (iirc). In it, he argues that using up most of our present fossil fuel reserves will lead ultimately to 16 degrees C/30 degrees F average warming, or 30 degrees C/54 degrees F average warming in the Arctic and Antarctic.

All of the above statements contain large fudge factors, of course, and can be and are argued over.  However, I do now believe it is much more probable now that something like this upper bound is in store for us, if business as usual continues indefinitely. 

Implications for Armageddon

With all of the above in mind, I like to think of the worst as four stages – horrible, catastrophic, apocalyptic, and decimating, the first three corresponding to doublings of atmospheric carbon, and the last comprising only feedback effects.  Aggressive permafrost melt gives the second and third stages, which have yet to arrive, a similar warming effect over time to our first stage.  And that arbitrary classification leads to a couple of assertions:

1.       Each stage is much worse in its effects than the previous one; and

2.       Each stage becomes harder to prevent or ameliorate than the previous one.  In a sense, each stage adds momentum and size to the downward rolling snowball, because (a) new feedback effects are triggered, like permafrost melt and Arctic/Antarctic ice melt, (b) saturation effects start occurring, like inability of the ocean to store oxygen or saturation of atmospheric methane leading to longer stays in the air, and (c) our ability to mitigate is increasingly hindered by having to undo greater  amounts of now-inappropriate fossil-fuel infrastructure and optimized-for-the-wrong-temperature energy-inefficient dwellings.

      And that is why I disagree with both the optimists and pessimists.  Yes, failure to undo business as usual is rife in the air.  Yes, we may well have effectively crossed the boundary into Stage 2, with horrible effects of climate change already locked in.  Yes, the ultimate end of Stage 4 may well be the decimation of the human race and the rest of the natural world.  But until 100 or 200 years from now, we still have the ability to break utterly the cycle of business as usual, harder though it gets as time goes by.  And therefore every setback in our quest demands not despair but a fiercer effort, more confrontation of the guilty, and greater demands for even more to be done.

It’s like a crooked poker game.  Yes, right now it’s the only game in town, and yes, right now you can’t win or fold, just keep on losing.  But the game will end, and your job is to lose as little as possible, as the stakes go up and up, so that when the game is over you may have lost your heart’s desire but you will not be an indebted slave for life, or killed because you couldn’t pay your debt.  Or most of the effects may fall on your great-great-grandchildren; but they’re still the same shattering effects.  On everybody.

Oh, and one extremely small hopeful note:  it seems to me that to avoid business as usual resurfacing at any time over the next 1000 years, we will have to change fundamentally.  To sustainability.  To a method of living that almost certainly will not destroy the remainder of humanity.  Stage 4 will be as bad as it gets.

And so, hopefully, understanding the effects of permafrost and having a likely upper bound means you are scared enough.  Absolutely, totally scared stiff.  With decimation staring you in the face.  And so, said the psychiatrist in Portnoy’s Complaint, now ve may perhaps to begin, yes?