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!”