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.

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!”

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.

Climate Change Mid-2018: The Relatively Good 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.

As I have argued before, human metrics on how well we are coping with climate change can be highly misleading, usually on the side of false optimism.  Two metrics that are clearly not thus biased are:

1.       Measurements of atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, which have been recorded since 1959;

2.       Estimates of Arctic sea ice volume (with extent serving as a loose approximation), especially at minimum in September, which have been carried out since the 1980s.

Over the past few years, I have covered the drumbeat of bad news from those two metrics, indicating that we are in a “business as usual” scenario that is accelerating climate change.  In the first half of 2018, what has happened in both cases is that the metrics are not following a “worst possible case” path – hence the “relatively good” part of the title.  At the same time, there is no clearly apparent indication that we are deviating from our “business as usual” scenario – mitigation is not clearly having any effect.  It is possible, however, that we are seeing the beginnings of an effect; it’s just not possible to detect it in the statistical “noise.”  And given that scientists are now talking about a “tipping point” in the near future in which not only a frightening 2 degrees C temperature by 2100 is locked in, but also follow-on feedbacks (like permafrost melt) that take temperature rise eventually to a far more disastrous 3-4 degrees C – well, that’s the underlying, ongoing bad news.

Of course, this summer’s everlasting heat waves in the US, Europe, and the Middle East – heat waves clearly caused primarily by human-generated CO2 emissions and the resulting climate change – make the “new abnormal” obvious to those of us who are not wilfully blind.  But for anyone following the subject with an open mind, the heat waves are not a surprise.  

So let’s take a look at each metric.

The El Nino Effect Recedes

From late 2016 to around June of 2017, the El Nino effect crested, and, as it has done in the past (e.g., 1998) drove both temperatures and the rate of CO2 rise skyward.  Where 2013-2015 saw an unprecedented streak of 3 years of greater than 2 ppm atmospheric CO2 growth, 2016 and 2017 both saw record-breaking growth of around 3 ppm (hiding a brief spurt to almost 4 ppm).  1998 (2.86 ppm) was followed by a year or two of growth around 1 ppm – in fact, slower than 1996-7.  But the percentage rate of rise has also been rising over the years (it reached almost 1% in early 2017, 4 ppm over 404 ppm).  Therefore, it seemed a real possibility that 2018 would see 2.5 ppm growth.  Indeed, we saw 2.5 ppm growth as late as the first month or two of 2018.

Now, however, weekly and monthly growth has settled back to a 1.5-2 ppm rate, consistently since early 1998.  Even a 2 ppm rate gives hope that El Nino did not mean a permanent uptick in the rate of rise.  A 1.5 ppm rate would seem to indicate that 2018 is following the 1999 script – a dip in the rate of rise, possibly because of the follow-on La Nina.  It might even indicate a slight – very slight – decrease in the underlying rate of rise (i.e., the rate of rise with no El Nino or La Nina going on).  And that, as I noted above, is the first indication I have seen that things might possibly be diverging from “business as usual”.  

Of course, there’s always the background of bad news.  In this case, it lies in the fact that whereas ever since I started following CO Mauna Loa 6 or 7 years ago CO2 levels in year 201x were about 10 ppm greater than in year 200x (10 years before), right now CO2 levels are about 13.5 ppm greater than in year 2008.  So, even if the El Nino effect has ended, the underlying amount of rise may still be increasing.  

The best indicator that our efforts are making a difference would be two years of 1 ppm rise or less (CO2 Mauna Loa measures the yearly amount of rise by averaging the Nov.-Feb. monthly rises).  Alas, no such trend has shown up in the data yet.

Arctic Sea Ice:  Not In Stasis, Not in Free Fall

Over the last 2 years, the “new normal” in Arctic sea ice advance and retreat has become apparent.  It involves both unprecedented heat in winter, leading to new low extent maxima, and a cloudy and stormy July and August (key melt months), apparently negating the effects of the winter melt.  However, volume continues to follow a downward overall trend (if far more linear and closer to flat-line than the apparently exponential “free fall” until 2012, which had some predicting “ice-free in 2018”).

As Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice blog (neven1.typepad.com) continues to show, however, “ice-free in September” still appears only a matter of time (at a best guess, according to some statisticians, in the early 2030s).  Subsea temperatures (SSTs) in key parts of the Arctic like above Norway and in the Bering Sea continue to rise and impact sea ice formation in those areas.  As the ice inherited from winter thins, we are beginning to see storms that actually break up the weaker ice into pieces, encouraging increased export of ice to the south via the Fram Strait.  The ice is so thin that a few days ago an icebreaker carrying scientists had to go effectively all the way to the North Pole to find ice thick enough to support their instruments for any length of time.

So the relatively good news is that it appears highly unlikely that this year will see a new low extent, much less an ice-free moment.  The underlying, ongoing bad news is that eventually the rise in SSTs will inevitably overcome the counteracting cloudiness in July and August (and that assumes that the cloudiness will persist).  Since 1980, extent at maximum has shrunk perhaps 12%, while extent at minimum has shrunk perhaps 45% (volume shows sharper decreases).  And in this, unlike CO2 Mauna Loa, there is no trace of a hint that the process is slowing down or reversing due to CO2 emissions reductions.  Nor would we expect there to be such an indication, given that we have only gotten globally serious about emissions reduction in the last 3 years (yes, I recognize that Europe is an exception). 

The Challenge

The question the above analysis raises is:  What will it take to really make a significant impact on our carbon emissions – much less the dramatic reductions scientists have been calling for?  I see no precise answer at the moment.  What I do know is that what we are doing needs to be done even faster, far more extensively – because the last few years have also seen a great increase in understanding on the details of change, as I have tried to show in some of my Reading New Thoughts posts.  The ways are increasingly there; the will is not.  And that, I think, along with countering the disgustingly murderous role of President Trump in particular in climate change (I am thinking of Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico as an obvious example), should be the main task of the rest of 2018. 

Reading New Thoughts: Hessen’s Many Lives of Carbon and the Two Irresistible Forces of Climate 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.

Dag Hessen’s “The Many Lives of Carbon” is the best book I have been able to find on the chemical details of the carbon cycle and CO2-driven climate change (despite some odd idioms that make it difficult to understand him at times).  In particular, it goes deeply into “positive feedbacks” that exacerbate departures from atmospheric-O2 equilibrium and “negative feedbacks” that operate to revert to equilibrium.  In the long run, negative feedbacks win; but the long run can be millions of years.

More precisely, if humans weren’t involved, there are medium-term and long-term “global warmings” and coolings.  The medium-term warming/cooling is usually thought to result from the Milankovitch Cycle, in which Earth orbit unusually far from the Sun during winter (“rubber-banding” of its elliptical orbit), a more severe tilt of the Earth’s axis as it oscillates periodically, and “precession” (wobbling back and forth on its axis) combine to yield unusually low Northern-Hemisphere winter heat from the Sun, which kickstarts glaciation, which acts as a positive feedback for global cooling along with atmospheric CO2 loss.  This cooling operates slowly over most of the next 100,000 years to descend into an Ice Age, but then the opposite effect (maximum heat from the sun) kicks in and brings a sharp rise in temperatures back to its original point. 

Long-term global warming is much rarer – there are instances 55 million years ago and 250 million years ago, and indeed some indications that most of the previous 5 largest mass extinctions on Earth were associated with this type of global warming.  The apparent cause is massive volcanism, especially underwater volcanism (the clouds from on-land volcanism actually reduce temperatures significantly over several years, but then the temperatures revert to what they were before the eruption).  It also seems clear that the main if not only cause of the warming is CO2 and methane (CH4) released into the atmosphere by these eruptions – carbon infusions so persistent that the level of atmospheric CO2 did not revert to equilibrium for 50 million years or so after the last such warming.

For both medium-term and long-term global warming/cooling, “weathering” acts as a negative feedback – but only over hundreds of thousands of years.  Weathering involves water and wind wearing away at rock, exposing carbon-infused silica that are then carried to the ocean.  There, among other outcomes, they are taken up by creatures who die, forming ocean-floor limestone that “captures” the carbon and thus withdraws it from the carbon cycle circulating carbon into and out of the atmosphere.

Human-caused global warming takes the slow negative feedback of animal/plant fossils being turned into coal, oil, and natural gas below the Earth’s surface and makes it into an unprecedentedly fast direct cause of global warming, mostly by burning it for fuel (hence “fossil fuels”).   The net effect of CO2 doubling in the atmosphere is 2-2.8 degrees Centigrade land-temperature warming, but it is also accompanied by positive feedbacks (including increased cloud cover, increased atmospheric methane, and “black carbon”/soot decreases in albedo [reflectivity of the sun’s heat]) that, in a slower way, may take the net global warming associated with CO2 doubling up to 4 degrees C.  Some of this can be overcome by the negative feedback of the ocean’s slower absorption of the increased heat, as the ocean “sink” can take more carbon out of the atmosphere, but at some point soon the ocean will be in balance with the atmosphere and much of what we emit in carbon pollution will effectively stay aloft for thousands of years. 

My point in running through the implications of Hessen’s analysis is that there is a reason for scientists to fear for all of our lives:  The global warming that, in the extreme, disrupts agriculture and food webs extremely and makes it unsafe for most of us to operate outside for more than a short period of time most of the year, except in the high mountains, is a CO2-driven “irresistible force”.  There is therefore a good case to be made that “mitigation” – reducing carbon emissions (and methane and black carbon and possibly nitrous oxide) is by far the best way to avoid the kind of global warming that literally threatens humanity’s survival.  And this is a point that I have argued vociferously in past blog posts.

The Other Irresistible Force:  The Business/Legal Bureaucracy

And yet, based on my reading, I would argue that there is an apparently equally irresistible force operating on its own momentum in today’s world:  what I am calling the Business/Legal Bureaucracy.  Here, I am using the word “bureaucracy” in a particular sense:  that of an organization operating on its own momentum.  In the case of businesses, that means a large-business bureaucracy operating always under a plan to make more profit this year than last.  In the case of the law, that means a court system and mindset always to build on precedents and to support property rights.  

To see what I am talking about, consider David Owen’s “Where the Water Goes”, about what happens to all the water in the Colorado River watershed.  Today, most of that water is shipped east to fuel the farms and businesses of Colorado and its vicinity, or west, to meet the water needs of Las Vegas and Los Angeles and the like.  The rest is allocated to farmers or other property owners along the way under a peculiar legal doctrine called “prior appropriation” – instead of the more typical equal sharing among bordering property owners, it limits each portion to a single “prior claimant”, since in the old mining days there wasn’t enough water in each portion for more than one miner to be able to “wash” the gold effectively.  Each new demand for water therefore is fitted legally within this framework, ensuring that the agricultural business bureaucracy will push for more water from the same watershed, while the legal bureaucracy will accommodate this within the array of prior claimants.

To see what creates such an impression of an irresistible force about this, consider the need to cut back on water use as climate change inevitably decreases the snowpack feeding the Colorado.  As Owen points out, there is no clear way to do this.  Business-wise, no one wants to be the one to sacrifice water.  Legally, the simple solution of limiting per-owner water use can actually result in more water use from each owner, as seasonal and annual variations in water needs mean that many owners will now need to draw down and store water in off-seasons “just in case”.   The result is a system that not only resists “sustainability” but in fact can also be less profit-producing in the long run – the ecosystems shafted by this approach, such as the now-dry Mexican terminus of the Colorado, may well be those that might have been most arable in the global-warming future.  And the examples of this multiply quickly:  the wildfire book I reviewed in an earlier blog post noted the extreme difficulties in fighting wildfires with their exacerbating effect on global warming, difficulties caused by the encroachment of mining and real-estate development on northern forests, driven by Legal/Business Bureaucracy.

The primary focus of the Legal/Business Bureaucracy with respect to climate change and global warming, therefore, is after-the-fact, incremental adaptation.  It is for that reason, as well as the dangerous trajectory we are now on, that I view calling the most disastrous future climate-change scenarios “business as usual” as entirely appropriate.

Force, Meet Force

It also seems to me that reactions to the most dire predictions of climate change fall into two camps (sometimes in the same person!): 

1.       We need drastic change or few of us will survive, because no society or business system can possibly resist the upcoming “business as usual” changes:  extreme weather, loss of water for agriculture, loss/movement of arable land, large increases in the area ripe for debilitating/killing tropical diseases, extreme heat, loss of ocean food, loss of food-supporting ecosystems, loss of seacoast living areas, possible toxic emissions from the ocean. 

2.       Our business-economy-associated present system will somehow automagically “muddle through”, as it always seems to have done.  After all, there is, it seems, plenty of “slack” in the water efficiency of agriculture, plenty of ideas about how to adopt businesses and governments to encourage better adaptation and mitigation “at the margin” (e.g., solar now dominates the new-energy market in the United States, although it does not seem to have made much of a dent in the existing uses of fossil fuels), and plenty of new business-associated technologies to apply to problems (e.g., business sustainability metrics). 

An interesting example of how both beliefs can apparently coexist in the same person is Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now”, an argument that the “reason reinforced by science” approach to the world of the late 18^th century known as the Enlightenment is primarily responsible for a dramatic, continuing improvement in the overall human situation, and should be chosen as the primary impetus for further improvements.  My overall comment on this book is that Pinker has impressed me with the breadth of his reading and the general fairness of his assessments of that reading.  However, Pinker appears to have one frustrating flaw:  A belief that liberals and other proponents of change in such areas as equality, environmentalism, and climate change are primarily so ideology-driven that they are actually harmful to Enlightenment-type improvements, and likewise their proponents within the government.  Any reasonable reading of Jeffrey Sachs’ “The Age of Sustainable Development”, which I hope to discuss in a later post, puts the lie to that one. 

In any case, Pinker has an extensive section on climate change, in which he both notes the “existential threat” (i.e., threat to human existence) posed by human-caused climate change, and asserts his belief that it can be overcome by a combination of Business/Legal-Complex adaptation to the findings of Enlightenment scientists and geoengineering.  One particular assertion is that if regulations could be altered, new technologies in nuclear power can meet all our energy needs in short order, with little risk to people and little need of waste storage.  I should note that James Hansen appears to agree with him (although Hansen is far more pessimistic that regulation alteration will happen or that nuclear businesses will choose to change their models) and Joe Romm very definitely does not.  

One also often sees the second camp among experts on Business/Legal-Complex matters such as allocation of water in California in reaction to climate-change-driven droughts.  These reactions assume linear effects on water availability of what is an exponential global-warming process, and note that under these assumptions, there is plenty of room for less water use by existing agriculture, and everyone should “stop panicking.” 

So what do I think will happen when force meets force?

Flexibility Is the Enemy of Agility

One of the things that I noticed (and noted in my blog) in my past profession is that product and organizational flexibility – the ability to easily repurpose for other needs and uses – is a good thing in the short run, but often a bad thing in the long run.  How can this be?  Because the long run will often require fundamental changes to products and/or organizations, and the more that the existing product or system is “patched” to meet new needs, the greater the cultural, organizational, and experiential investment in the present system – not to mention the greater the gap between that and what’s going on elsewhere that will eventually lead to the need for a fundamental change.

There is one oncoming business strategy that reduces the need for such major, business-threatening transitions:  business agility.  Here the idea is to build both products and organizations with the ability for much more radical change, plus better antennae to the outside to stay as close as possible to changes in consumer needs.  But flexibility is in fact the enemy of agility:  patches in the existing product or organization exacerbate the “hard-coded” portions of it, making fundamental changes more unlikely and the huge costs of an entire do-over more inevitable.

As you can guess, I think that today’s global economy is extraordinarily flexible, and that is what camp 2 counts on to save the day.  But this very flexibility is the enemy of the agility that I believe we will find ourselves needing, if we are to avoid this kind of collapse of the economy and our food production.

But it’s a global economy – that’s part of its global Business/Legal-Bureaucracy flexibility.  So local or even regional collapses aren’t enough to do it.  Rather, if we fail to mitigate strongly, e.g., in an agile fashion, and create a sustainable global economy over the next 20 years, some time over the 20 years after that the average costs of increasing stresses from climate change put the global economy in permanent negative territory, and, unless fundamental change happens immediately after that, the virtuous circle of today’s economy turns into a vicious, accelerating circle of economic collapse.  And the smaller our economies become, the less we wind up spending on combating the ever-increasing effects of climate change.  At the end, we are left with less than half (and maybe 1/10^th) the food sources and arable land, much of it in new extreme-northern areas with soil of lower quality, with food being produced under much more brutal weather conditions.  Or, we could by then have collapsed governmentally to such a point that we can’t even manage that.  It’s an existential threat.

Initial Thoughts On What to Do

Succinctly, I would put my thoughts under three headings:

1.       Governmental.  Governments must drive mitigation well beyond what they have done up to now in their Paris-agreement commitments.  We, personally, should place climate change at the top of our priority lists (where possible), reward commitments and implementation politically, and demand much more.

2.       Cultural.  Businesses, other organizations, and the media should be held accountable for promoting, or failing to promote, mitigation-targeted governmental, organizational, and individual efforts.  In other words, we need to create a new lifestyle.  There’s an interesting take on what a lifestyle like that would look like in Peter Kalmus’ “Being the Change”, which I hope to write about soon.

3.       Personal.  Simply as a matter of not being hypocrites, we should start to change our carbon “consumption” for the better.  Again, Kalmus’ book offers some suggestions.

Or, as Yoda would put it, “Do or do not.  There is no try.”  Because both Forces will be against you.

Reading New Thoughts: Grinspoon’s Earth in Human Hands and Facing the Climate-Change-Driven Anthropocene Bottleneck

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.

In my mind, David Grinspoon’s “Earth In Human Hands” raises two issues of import as we try to take a long-term view of what to do about climate change:

1.        How best do we approach making the necessary political and cultural changes to tackle mitigation – what mix of business/market, national/international governmental, and individual strategies?

2.       For the even longer term, how do we tackle a “sustainable” economy and human-designed set of ecosystems?  Grinspoon claims that there are two opposing views on this – that of “eco-modernists” who say that we should design ecosystems based on our present setup, ameliorated to achieve sustainability, and those of “environmental purists” who advocate removal of humans from ecosystems completely.

First, a bit of context.  Grinspoon’s book is a broad summary of what “planetary science” (how planets work and evolve on a basic level, with our example leavened by those of Venus and Mars) has to say about Earth’s history and future.  His summary, more or less, is this:  (a) For the first time in Earth’s history, the whole planet is being altered consciously – by us – and therefore we have in the last few hundred years entered a whole new geological era called the Anthropocene; (b) That new era brings with it human-caused global warming and climate change, which form a threat to human existence, and therefore to the existence of Anthropocene-type “self-conscious” life forms on this planet, a threat that he calls the “Anthropocene bottleneck”; (c) it is likely that any other such planets with self-conscious life forms in the universe face the same Anthropocene bottleneck, and other possible threats to us pale in comparison, so that surviving the Anthropocene bottleneck is a good sign that humanity will survive for quite a while.

Tackling Mitigation

Grinspoon is very forceful in arguing that probably the only way to survive the Anthropocene bottleneck is through coordinated, pervasive global efforts:  in particular, new global institutions.  Translated, that means not “loose cannon” business/market nor individual nor even conflicting national efforts, but science-driven global governance, plus changes in cultural norms towards international cooperation.  Implicitly, I think, his model is that of the physics community he is familiar with:  one where key information, shared and tested by scientific means, informs strategies and reins in individual and institutional conflicts. 

If there is anything that history teaches us, it is that there is enormous resistance to the idea of global enforcement of anything.  I myself tend to believe that it represents one side of a two-sided conflict that plays out in any society – between those more inclined toward “hope” and those inclined toward “fear”, which in ordinary times plays out as battles between “liberals” and “conservatives.” 

Be that as it may, Grinspoon does not say there is not resistance to global enforcement.  He says, however, that global coordination, including global enforcement, is a prerequisite for surviving the Anthropocene bottleneck.  We cooperate and thereby effectively mitigate climate change, or we die.  And the rest of this century will likely be the acid test.

I don’t disagree with Grinspoon;  I just don’t think we know what degree of cooperation will be needed to deal with climate change in order to avoid facing the ultimate in global warming.   What he describes would be ideal; but we are very far from it now, as anyone watching CO2 rise over at Mauna Loa is well aware.   Rather, I think we can take his idea of scientifically-driven global mitigation as a metric and an “ideal” model, to identify key areas where we are falling down now by failing to react quickly, globally, and as part of a coherent strategy to scientific findings on the state of climate change and means of mitigation. 

Designing Sustainability

Sustainability and fighting climate change are not identical.  One of the concerns about fighting climate change is that while most steps toward sustainability are in line with the quickest path to the greatest mitigation, practically, some are not.  This is because, for example, farming almonds in California with less water than typical almond farming does indeed reduce the impact of climate-change-related water shortages, but also encourages consumption of water-greedy almonds.  I would argue, in that case, that the more direct path towards climate-change mitigation (discouraging almond growing while reducing water consumption in general) is better than the quicker path towards sustainability (focus on the water shortage).

This may seem arcane; but Grinspoon’s account of the fight between environmental traditionalists and eco-modernists suggests that the difference between climate-change-mitigation-first and sustainability-first is at least a major part of the disagreement between the two sides.  To put it another way, the traditionalists according to Grinspoon are advocating “no more people” ecosystems which effectively minimize carbon pollution, while the eco-modernists are advocating tinkering incrementally with the human-driven ecosystems that exist in order, apparently, to achieve long-term sustainability – thereby effectively putting sustainability at a higher priority than mitigation.

It may sound as if I am on the side of the traditionalists.  However, I am in fact on the side of whatever gets us to mitigation fastest – and here there is a glaring lack of mention in Grinspoon of a third alternative:  reverting to ecosystems with low-footprint human societies.  That can mean Native American, Lapp, Mongolian, or aborigine cultures, for example.  But it also means removing as far as possible the human impact exclusive of these cultures.

Let’s take a recent example:  the acquisition of Native Americans with conservationist aid of land around the Columbia River to enable restoration and sustainability (as far as can be managed with increasing temperatures) of salmon spawning.  This is a tradeoff:  In return for removal of almost all things exacerbating climate change, possibly including dams, the Native Americans get to restore their traditional culture as far as possible in toto.  They will be, as in their conceptions of themselves, stewards of the land. 

And this is not an isolated example (again, a recent book limns efforts all over the world to take the same strategy).  An examination of case studies shows that even in an impure form, it provides clear evidence of OVERALL negative impact on carbon pollution, while still providing “good enough” sustainability.  Nor do I see reflexive opposition from traditionalists on this one.

The real problem is that this approach is only going to be applicable to a minority of human habitats.  However, it does provide a track record, a constituency, and innovations useful for a far more aggressive approach towards mitigation than the one the eco-modernists appear to be reflexively taking.  In other words, it offers hope for an approach that uses human technology to design sustainable ecosystems, even in the face of climate changes, with the focus on the ecosystem first and the humans second.  The human technology can make the humans fit the ecosystem with accommodation for human present practice, not the other way around.

In summary, I would say that Grinspoon’s idea of casting how to deal with mitigation and sustainability as a debate between traditionalists and modernists misses the point.   With all the cooperation in the world, we still must push the envelope of mitigation now in order to have a better chance for sustainability in the long term.  The strategy should be pushed as far as possible toward mitigation-driven changes of today’s human ecosystems, but can be pushed toward what worked with humans in the past rather than positing an either/or humans/no-humans choice.