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.

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.

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.

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?

CO2, 2018 – And Its Sad Implications

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.
The results are in for CO2 measured at Mauna Loa (more or less the real measure of how we’re doing vs. climate change) – and the answer (no surprise) is, our best efforts are not clearly making a dent in “business as usual”.  Add that to recent research suggesting that another 50 years of “business as usual” may lead to the ultimate “hell and high water”, by wiping out key cloud types shielding us from the sun (at about 1200 ppm of CO2) and thus adding another 8 or so degrees C on top of the 6 or 7 degrees we would achieve at 1200 ppm, and our task becomes ever more urgent.

The figure for 2018 is 2.86 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2.  This is the third increase above 2.6 ppm in the last four years, and the fourth (out of 5 in history) such increase in the last 7 years.  In other words, not only is the amount of rise increasing, but the percentage of rise is, as well – telling us that we are in fact accelerating our carbon “pollution.”

Nor is this year showing signs of being better than 2018.  This February is up by 3.4 ppm over last February, and March has seen several readings above 414 ppm (the “moving average” of CO2 Mauna Loa readings is now a hair’s breadth below 411 ppm).  Basically, this is a rate at which readings above 420 ppm are two years away, above 430 ppm 5 or 6 years away, and we will have almost doubled our atmospheric CO2 by 2050 from its level in the 1800s.  That in turn, could mean perhaps double or triple the rise in temperature (2 – 4 degrees C) that we have seen thus far (thus far, 1.2-1.3 degrees C).

About the only good news is that Arctic sea ice decrease seems to be taking a breather.  Ice maximum seems to be leveling off and despite the underlying ocean heat-up, melt season is cloudier and therefore ice minimum seems to be leveling off as well.

Here in New England, nothing about our unprecedented winter has surprised me, neither the lack of snow that stuck until Feb. 12^th nor the windiness nor the rapid onset of storms.  And another extremely hot, humid summer will not surprise me either.  There’s a reason they call it the “new abnormal.”

Once, when I was growing up, there was weather you could count on.  Now, our carbon pollution has put a stake in its heart.  And lit its pyre.

It’s Localized Supra-National Organizations via the United Nations That’s Working, Not the Free Market

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 many things I should be doing rather than writing this, and many things I’d rather be doing.  I’m writing this because I think it needs to be said.

There is a debate going on between, essentially, Steven Pinker on the one hand and Jason Hickel the anthropologist on the other about the nature and extent of poverty, and to what we should ascribe its effects.  To support the case for, essentially, “enlightenment” plus today’s economic system, Pinker points to a chart showing that extreme poverty has decreased from 95% of the world’s population to 10% over the 200 years from 1820 to now.  Hickel challenges that rosy view by pointing out that (a) extreme poverty is not the right metric, since people in “poverty” are also struggling to survive, and there the picture is much more mixed, (b) that because of population growth, while the percentage of people in extreme poverty has gone down drastically, the actual number of people in extreme poverty is increasing, and (c) the metric itself (money) is flawed, since a pre-monetary society may actually become worse off when switching to money, wiping out the gains accrued once the monetary society is established.

To my mind, the key takeaway from the chart is none of the above.  What it shows (and other related charts here and in Sachs’ Age of Sustainability also show) is that there is a sharp break around 1950.  Before, extreme poverty was headed towards a reduction to about 60% of the world being extremely poor by now.  Beyond that inflection point, extreme poverty, vaccinations, education, literacy, and health take a sharp dip or start climbing much more rapidly.  

So what’s causing this?  We can eliminate Pinker’s main suspect right off the bat.  It’s not the Industrial Revolution.  It’s not the free market, because that has not resulted in any faster rise in global productivity and hence GDP from 1950 to 2019 than from 1870 to 1950 – in fact, since the late 1970s productivity improvement rates in developed economies have been decreasing.  And “Unruly Waters” makes it clear that the positive effect of the Green Revolution on India’s and China’s well-being – India and China are responsible for a major chunk of the improvement in extreme poverty percentage, partially because of their population sizes – was much less than is typically portrayed.

Sachs and “Unruly Waters”, among other sources, paint a picture in which better health, more education, and potentially empowerment of women (two of which slow the growth rate of population that can undercut improvements in individual living standards) directly impact extreme poverty.  These seem to be far more persuasive immediate reasons for the dip.  But where do these improvements come from?  There have certainly been efforts at improved literacy and better global health before 1950, and free-market products that promised both, and even individual and government efforts in the same direction.

It’s the UN, NGOs, and Local Governments Working Together, Stupid

The history especially of U.S. foreign aid is very clear on this point.  US foreign aid has typically been driven both by internal political considerations and by the needs of US corporations.  Its ideas, typically born of scant knowledge of local considerations, have failed far more than not.  International economic investment mechanisms, such as the IMF and the World Bank, have a very poor record at enabling economic takeoff.  Economic self-interest in places ranging from Puerto Rico to Indonesia has resulted in over-dependence in many developing countries on commodities like coffee, which over the years has resulted in wild swings in country economic performance and hence living standards.  And, of course, the aid that is targeted at education and health has typically come with prescriptions such as “force everyone to plant this way” or “teach abstinence in sex education” that fly in the face of the evidence.  

To succeed in causing such a dip, an approach must be (a) global, (b) coordinated, (c) evidence-based and not just technology-based, and (d) able to get buy-in from a wide variety of governments and localities.  The only plausible set of actors that meet these criteria are the UN and certain NGOs.  Since 1950, but not very much before that, they have been acting on a world-wide basis to tackle these problems, and the metrics that the UN has adopted starting before 2000 are evidence of just how evidence-based these interventions are.  The UN’s modus operandi emphasizes local “driving” and modification of global prescriptions, and many NGOs have learned to follow suit.

And the contrast is especially marked in the poorest countries of all, in Africa and Southeast Asia – where despite all the handicaps there really is clear improvement in extreme poverty and all the other criteria at least since 2000, where there wasn’t before.  It is wrong to ascribe this to cell phones, because first you have to get the cell phones to people, and even local businesses and microlending can only do so much.  The extension of these services to beyond the easy targets and the smoothing of the path with local and national governments can only be done via mechanisms like the UN-NGO alliance.  

I don’t mean to overemphasize this.  It is certainly true that in both India and China, national-government efforts to pursue certain types of “directed” free markets also played a major role.  I simply want to emphasize that the evidence I see suggests that even in those cases, the positive effect of both the national-government efforts and the free market is much less than we tend to think, and the effect of non-market, non-national-government efforts aimed at health, education, and poverty much greater, partly because they were more effective.  And they were more effective because they communicated to all parties good metrics and effective strategies.

The ”stupid” here, I think, is aimed more at Pinker than Hickel.  I think Hickel is oblivious to the possibility that the population growth he appears to be worrying about can be effectively targeted, and is being targeted, not by coercive “colonialist” programs, but by empowering women financially to make their own reproductive choices and by removing the ever-present worry in extreme poverty that the next generation will not survive to adulthood, hence the added births “in case”.   But Pinker gives the impression that he does not see the role of the UN and NGOs at all, since they don’t fit neatly into his paradigm of “enlightenment” such as is exemplified by scientific organizations and market forces.

It’s Not About Crises, It’s About Long-Term Efforts

And one final point.  We emphasize too much, when looking at long-term effectiveness, war, crises, and particular “bad” governments.  I believe that what the graph referenced above, and many others, shows is that what matters in making a big positive change is the ability to target the right factors and then globally change one’s tactics and goals based on the evidence.  National governments and even global firms are almost universally bad at this, the governments because they do not “mark to market” frequently enough without input from the rest of the world, global firms because they are often too small to leverage the kind of global resources to make a dent and because they continually veer off the right factors into “making money.”  I view what is happening in climate change, with the UN and the IPCC taking the lead in sounding the alarm and most countries lagging behind their metrics, is another example of this, where we overemphasize our concerns with the UN’s effectiveness in handling wars and bad governments, and fail to adequately appreciate or support its coordinating efforts.

Let’s stop the poor economic and political theorizing that fails to realize there is a shining example of the long-term effectiveness of organizations that fit neither “economics rules all” nor “politics rules all.”  No, I’m not recommending global government; but I am certainly not recommending today’s underestimation of the effectiveness of supra-national authorities by the likes not only of Pinker but just about everyone I hear commenting about these matters.  On the contrary.

Climate Change: Being the Smart Change

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.

Increasingly, personal efforts to combat climate change by changing one’s lifestyle are in the news.  “Being the Change”, Peter Kalmus’ 2017 book, is probably the most detailed book about the subject, but others ranging from Canada’s David Suzuki to Phys.org are also weighing in.  If we just restrict the suggestions to those impacting the carbon emissions caused by one individual’s actions, suggestions include:

·         Reducing or eliminating air travel;

·         A vegetarian or almost-meat-free diet;

·         Growing one’s own food in particular ways, or just buying local, and composting;

·         Living car-free or using transportation fueled by renewable-energy-based sources (e.g., a solar/wind-based grid);

·         Implementing large gains in home efficiency, including all-LED lighting, recent advances in such areas as vacuum cleaners and washer/dryers, insulating, and unplugging appliances;

·         Supplying home electricity and heat via solar panels or utility-supplied renewable energy;

·         If you really want to get drastic, moving to a place that is likely to have the least impact on carbon emissions over the next 60 years, such as a place away from a seacoast and marshland, not in an arboreal forest or one prone to wildfires, and probably in a city or large town.

The one that comes up frequently as having by far the “biggest bang for the buck” is air travel.  But is it, really?

Flying the Uncompetitive Skies

If the effect of your stopping flying one time is that the airlines make, say, 1/30^th of a flight in fewer flights (assuming an average of 30 people per flight), then, according to Kalmus and others, the answer is a resounding yes.  Kalmus estimated that he personally was causing 10 times the amount of carbon emissions that he could achieve by implementing all the major personal carbon-reduction measures that he could bring about.  Under my assumption about the effects of stopping air travel, his cessation of air travel meant he was only causing 2 times the amount of emissions that he could achieve.  In other words, almost 90% of his personal carbon-emissions savings came about simply by quitting air travel.

The flaw in this reasoning comes when we examine the actual effect if you, the reader, stopped air travel altogether.  If you did so, and you’d been flying 30 times a year, would the airlines respond by flying one less flight?  No.  They are typically overbooked, and the loss of you as a customer would be overwhelmed over the course of a year by yearly increases in demand.  Granted, if a few more like you did so, then there might have been less of an increase in the number of flights in that year, but as long as demand from non-abstainers is increasing faster than the number of air-travel dropouts, you are not accomplishing any reductions in global carbon emissions at all – and that’s the bottom line.

Let’s try analyzing this according to economic theory and real-world implications of that theory.  Suppose that, all over the world, one-half of the individual consumers of air travel on one day suddenly stopped flying.  When the dust settled, would we see one-half the number of flights, and hence one-half the number of carbon emissions?  Clearly, demand from non-obstainers is not going to double in the next year after the market crash.

And yet, the impact is likely to be far less than we expect.  There are two key economic principles involved, it seems to me.  First, the global air-travel market is made up of hundreds of regional and national markets.  Each of these is typically effectively a monopoly or duopoly.  And so, they are charging higher prices and taking fewer customers than they could.  When the market is cut in half, they can cut prices (and they have a lot of room to do so).  Meanwhile, demand from non-abstainers rises, because in the regional markets that are the bulk of air travel (think:  New York to Washington DC) there is high cross-elasticity of demand (the second economic principle).  Lower prices means that consumer demand switches from trains to planes.

Practically speaking, of course, such a change would not happen at once.  And that means that non-abstainer demand increases more nearly match rates of abstention, so when the dust settles we may well see a 20% rather than an almost 90% decrease in carbon emissions from personal abstentions.  This is simply one of those cases where accomplishing carbon-emissions reductions by government regulation is realistically the only effective alternative.

Being the Smart Change

So, does this mean that I think the person seeking to “be the change” should give up on giving up air travel?  By no means.  Personal choices do have some effects on markets, and the more individuals do this, the more it goes viral and becomes an unstoppable trend.  I suggest two things:

1.       Go ahead and cut air travel, at least the air travel you really don’t care that much about.  But mentally, don’t think that you’ve had as great an effect as you would from all the other tactics, like energy savings or uses of renewable energy, you carry out.

2.       In choosing what to cut out, consider cutting out long-distance and overseas travel first.  Yeah, I hate to say this.  But the economics says that this is one area where airline companies’ price-cutting power and ability to attract new demand is least, and therefore it is most likely that scheduled flights (not to mention charter flights) will indeed be cut sharply with decreases in demand.  

Postscript/Addendum/Whatever

Let me call two books related to climate change that I am reading to your attention.  Rising, by Elizabeth Rush, adds the loss of marshlands with rapid sea-level rise as one more key, potentially irreversible net source of carbon emissions.  Plus, it has a superb writing style.  In Search of the Canary Tree, by Lauren Oakes, lets you inside the mind and experiences of an environmental scientist as she chronicles the ongoing destruction of yet another vital tree, and also considers to what extent we are capable of long-term adaptation to climate change.  So far, I find it riveting, although I have quirky tastes.

p.s. I have been away from this blog for a few weeks and will not be paying as much attention for a few weeks more, partly because I am posting a series of old writings about JRR Tolkien over at Daily Kos (www.dailykos.com, check the diaries).  Those who care, be warned!

Climate Change Fall 2018: Postscript to Addendum

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.

Two new factoids:

1.        The CO2 data from Mauna Loa are now showing that CO2 levels (averaged over the last ½ year plus a projection of the next six months) reached 410 ppm in Nov.  This date is a little more than three years since that measure reached 400.

2.       The estimate of carbon emissions – flat for years 2014-2016 – rose by 1.6% in 2017 and is projected to rise by 2.7% in 2018.  Primary increases were from China and India, but the US also rose – only Europe among major contributors decreased.  Although, as I have noted, this measure may well be flawed as an indicator of underlying carbon emissions rise, the very fact that it can now be monitored on a monthly basis suggests that some of the flaws have been worked out.  It is, therefore, less likely to be an underestimate of carbon emissions, and hence the rate of rise is more likely to be correct or a slight overestimate.

Let me reiterate the conclusion in my Oct. addendum more forcefully:  I am told that I have, on average, 8 ½ years more to live.  By the time I am dead, CO2 seems all but certain to reach 430 ppm, and may well be approaching 440 ppm.  By 2050, if things simply continue linearly instead of accelerating the way they have done for the past 60 years, we will be at 500 ppm, nearly doubling CO2 at the start of the Industrial Revolution.  This bakes in a global temperature rise since then of 4 degrees Centigrade, or 7 degrees Fahrenheit in the long run, according to James Hansen and others, with at least 2 degrees C since the IR in the short run, or another 2 degrees F from the way things are right now.  

Another point:  There is a clear line between recent increases in carbon emissions and the administration of President Donald Trump.  The lack of support from that administration is clearly linked not only to US increases (via a strong rise in US oil/shale/natural gas generation) but also to decreased pressure on India and China, both in unilateral relations and in the meetings regarding implementation of the Paris Agreement.

Climate Change and Economics: The Invisible Hand Never Picks Up the Check

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.

Over the past few days, I have been reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Green Earth” trilogy, an examination of possible futures and strategies in dealing with climate change thinly disguised as science fiction.  One phrase in it struck me with especial force:  “the blind hand of the market never picks up the check.”  To put it in more economic terms:

·         Firms, and therefore market economies as a whole, typically seek profit maximization, and because the path to profit from new investment is always uncertain, to focus particularly on cost minimization within a chosen, relatively conservative profit-maximization strategy.

·         To minimize costs, they may not only use new technologies (productivity enhancement), but also offload costs as far as possible onto other firms, consumers, workers, societies, and governments.  Of these, the most difficult is offloading costs onto other firms (e.g., via supply-chain management), since these are also competing to minimize their costs and therefore to offload right back.  Therefore, especially for the large, global firms that dominate today’s markets, the name of the game is to not only minimize costs from workers, consumers (consider help desks as an example), and societies/governments, but also to get “subsidies” from these (time flexibility or overtime from workers, consumers performing more of the work of [and bearing more of the risk of] the sales transaction, governments not only providing subsidies but also things such as infrastructure support, education and training of the work force, and dealing with natural disasters – now including climate change). 

Often, especially in regard to climate change, economists may refer to the process of the invisible hand never picking up the check as the “tragedy of the commons.”  The flaw of this analysis is to limit one’s gaze implicitly to tangible property.  If one uses as a broader metric money equivalents, then it is clear that it is not just “common goods” that are being raided, but personal non-goods such as worker/consumer/neither time that translates to poorer health and less ability to cope with life’s demands, sapping productivity directly as well as via its effects on the worker/consumer’s support system, not to mention the government’s ability to compensate as it is starved of money.  And all of this still does not capture the market’s ability to “game the system” by monopolizing government and the law.

Another point also struck me when I read this phrase:  macroeconomics does not even begin to measure the amount of that “cost raiding”, instead referring to it as “externalities”.  And therefore:

Economics cannot say whether market capitalism is better than other approaches, or worse, or the same.   It cannot say anything at all on the subject.

Further Thoughts About Economics and Alternatives to Market Capitalism

A further major flaw, imho, in economics’ approach to the whole subject is the idea that cost minimization should not only be a desired end but also the major goal of an enterprise.  I am specifically thinking of the case of the agile company.  As I have mentioned before, agile software development deemphasizes cost, quality, revenue, time to market, and profit in favor of constantly building in flexibility to adjust to and anticipate the changing needs of the consumer.  And yet, agile development outperforms approaches that do concentrate on these metrics by 25% at a minimum and sometimes 100%.  

If the entire economy were based on real agile firms, I would suggest that we would see a comparable improvement in the economy – permanently.  Moreover, the focus on the consumer should lead to a diminution in “cost raiding”.  The focus on being truly in tune with the consumer’s needs, for example, should diminish raiding the consumer’s time in the sales transaction and forcing them to use the help-desk bottleneck.  And I still live in hope that agile development with fewer time constraints will empower the developer with the ability to seek out and implement his or her own tools to improve processes, thereby allowing better retraining.   

Implications of Climate Change for Economics and Market Capitalism

Robinson includes a critique of market capitalism in his work, and concludes that it has to change fundamentally.  I find the critique itself problematic; but that doesn’t mean he isn’t right in his conclusion.

The fundamental question to me is, what happens when externalities go in reverse, and suddenly the things that have led to ongoing profits lead to ongoing losses?  Robinson paints a frightening picture of a world in which brownouts, blackouts, killing cold, and killing heat are common, and insurance, whether private or governmental, cannot adequately compensate, leading additional costs to settle, inexorably, on their last resort, business.  Then, implicitly, firms must cannibalize each other, with the largest being best equipped to do so.

I tend to place things in less apocalyptic terms.  According to Prof. deLong, GDP performance can be thought of as part improvement in productivity and part expansion of the workforce.  The climate change scenario necessarily implies a shrinkage of that workforce (in labor-hours) faster than productivity can climb, and therefore a constantly shrinking market.  In that case, the market’s rising need for “cost raiding” as the market shrinks simply speeds up the shrinkage of the market – not to mention the underlying societies.  And that, to me, is the fundamental flaw that needs correcting. 

Theoretically, one option is to capture things like “the social cost of carbon” in company accounting – an idea I wrote about five years ago.  Practically speaking, the uneven effects of that on companies mean real impact on the employees of coal and oil companies, a fact we have already seen a small foretaste of, and that has further revealed the ability of oil and coal companies to entirely snarl the political process to prevent adequate steps at limiting “cost raiding” – and that makes our carbon pricing efforts in real-world terms more likely than not to be inadequate to reverse the “cost raiding” trend.  

The obvious alternative, which I and others have argued for and I in fact picked up on eight years ago when I first understood the dire implications of climate change, is “World War II in America”, governmental interference in the economy comparable to that of WWII in order to “win the war on climate change”.  Only, of course, the aim is to lose the war with as little damage as possible.  So suppose we do that; what then?

The obvious answer is, “sustainability” – meaning practices that will ensure that having “won the war”, we don’t lose it again in the future by slipping back into the old carbon-guzzling, ecology-devastating, arable-land-destroying habits.  Is that enough?  Robinson says no, that despite sustainability, cost raiding will continue to increase in other areas.  And here I tend to agree with him, although I am not sure.

It appears, reverting to Prof. deLong’s point above, that it is possible with sustainability to continue to improve both human welfare and corporate profitability, by improving productivity with a more or less stable (almost certainly shrunken) population and workforce.  However, productivity improvement may well be less than in the Industrial Revolution – it has already slowed for an unduly long time.  And if that is the case, then there is no market-capitalism path forward that involves today’s increases in corporate profitability and avoids cost raiding increases.

I don’t know the answer to this.  I feel, however, that the beginnings of an answer lie not in perpetually increasing the size of the workforce by improving human welfare, while somehow not increasing population, but rather in perpetually increasing “consumer productivity”:  the value that people get out of their lives, that they can then invest in others.  More specifically, I think markets can be divided into those for carrying out daily tasks (“Do”), those for socializing and participating in society (“Socialize”) and those for learning and creating (“Learn”).  A balance must be kept between these efforts in any individual’s life, so the perpetual increases must be achieved inside each of these three sets of markets. 

I would argue that today’s market economies use “Do” to crowd out much of the other two sets of markets, and are less good at perpetually increasing the value of “Socialize” and “Learn”, although the crowding-out may mean that “Do”’s superiority is illusory.  I have no clear idea as to what to do about my conclusions, except to examine each set of markets more closely to gain clues as to how to achieve this perpetual value increase.

Just some thoughts.  And oh, by the way, Robinson is indeed worth reading.