In 2011, I split with McKibben and others as they were being arrested at the White House. I argued that the pipeline issue was “a distraction from the core issues involving our energy future and is largely insignificant if your concern is averting a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
Year by year, the great transition away from the world’s risky carbon-based path to progress is said to be just around the corner. This year’s Emissions Gap report from the United Nations Environment Program, aiming to energize Paris climate talks next month, was released today with this headline:
The message? You’re doing great, world, but raise your ambition some more and we’ll really get on track toward a safe climate.
You’ll be hearing the phrase “emissions gap” a lot in coming weeks. This is the difference between countries’ pledged commitments to reduce emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases after 2020 and scientifically calculated trajectories giving good odds of keeping global warming below the threshold for danger countries pledged to try to avoid in climate talks in 2010 (to “hold the increase in global average temperature below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”).
The problem is that year-by-year evaluation of tweaks in such short-term plans completely misses the monumentally harder challenge that can be seen when you look at curves out through the rest of the century. Most such pledges don’t go beyond 2030, and those from developing countries are mostly “conditional” — they’ll proceed if wealthy countries pay the cost or otherwise help.
Photo
A portion of a graphic in a United Nations Environment Program report shows the gap between commitments for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions filed with the United Nations by the world's nations (the orange band) and a track (blue) deemed safe. The gray area reflects projections with no policy. Yellow is existing policies.Credit UNEP.org
Lots of U.N. officials and climate campaigners are pressing for Paris to produce a ratchet-style mechanism that boosts the scope of such pledges every five years or the like. But there’s a lot of magical thinking in all of this when you zoom out from this myopic way of defining progress.
There are enormous assumptions in most calculations, including the assumption that “carbon negative” technologies, like capturing CO2 from power plants burning biomass, can be done at a scale remotely relevant to the climate problem (to be relevant one needs to be talking in gigatons of avoided CO2 emissions per year — each a billion tons).
I’ll be writing soon about ways some scientists have proposed (here and here) to integrate commitments for boosting basic research, development and demonstration on next-generation energy options into the treaty process. In the meantime, here are a few sobering, but valuable reactions to the latest emissions gap news: Read more…
Bill Nye, the "Science Guy," is diagnosed with "climate change grief" by Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Explorer: Bill Nye's Global Meltdown."Credit National Geographic Channels
But however well intended, such efforts often seem to empower defenders of fossil fuels as much as those seeking a low-emissions energy future, given how name calling syncs with the nation’s broader, edge-driven political polarization.
That’s why “Explorer: Bill Nye’s Global Meltdown,” premiering Sunday night* on National Geographic Channel, is so refreshing. In the program, written and directed by Chris Cassel, Nye reluctantly resolves to confront the five stages of “climate change grief” after he is diagnosed with that malady by his cigar-chomping therapist, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The program is built around the environmental equivalent of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five mental stages of dealing with death — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The conceit makes a nice structure for what is a mix of road movie and science explainer.
Spurred by his diagnosis, Nye goes on the road, exploring denial in surreal conversations with a Florida state legislator who flatly rejects any human contribution to global warming or coastal risks, and a street sampling of tuned-out citizenry, even in flood-prone Miami. A helicopter tour shows the entire city is evidently in denial given the blistering pace of construction in the face of inevitable and sustained sea level rise. In the context of warming and sea levels, Nye can’t resist pulling out a flask to show how heated water expands.
Photo
Bill Nye, depressed after meeting an ecologist foreseeing the end of the human race by 2030, goes into a tail spin in a TV program on climate change.Credit NG Studios, Chris Cassel
Nye hits his nadir in a desert meeting with an apocalyptic ecologist, Guy McPherson, who has built something of an “End of Days” following through his prediction that the human race will be gone by 2030. (For a reality check on McPherson, read Michael Tobis and Scott Johnson.)
McPherson’s deadpan pronouncements send Nye into a nihilistic tailspin, including a rare unraveling of his bow tie and a cigarette-puffing walk down the middle of a highway (Cassel said that scene was Nye’s idea), followed by a hilarious cigar-smoking session back in his therapist’s office.
It’s nice to see Nye explore various facets of denial in a way that, while including some deserved digs at Florida Republicans, is more informative than divisive.
Indeed, in a phone interview Friday, Nye said he sees a rising prospect of a Republican presidential candidate turning the corner on climate: Read more…
One thing is clear. If societies are to improve their relationship with Earth’s vital systems in ways that work for the long haul, science has to be involved (including the sciences that reveal more about how humans perceive and respond to risks).
But that leads to questions. Science has helped demonstrate that we have entered the Anthropocene, an age in which humans, through our “great acceleration,” have become a planetary force and left a signature — in fallout, carbon, plastic and more — that could mark the dawn of a geological age of our own making (if not yet our own design).
But what does science do now?
This focus led me to a role on the initial engagement committee for Future Earth, a 10-year international initiative aimed at creating a research agenda supporting sustainable human progress.
A paper laying the foundation for such an agenda has just been published online in Global Environmental Change, with some very modest input from me: Read more…
Boats in the International Sailing Regatta on Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro in August. The event used the same courses Olympic organizers plan to use next year.Credit Tasso Marcelo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Times has published an unsettling update on Brazil’s race to stanch the flow of sewage into Guanabara Bay ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics. Here’s the nut:
Although reports of Rio de Janeiro’s polluted waters are intensifying pressure on sports officials to reconsider, the provisional Olympic sailing competition schedule has three of five racecourses inside the bay, the same ones that were used in test events here in August, said the international sailing federation, known as ISAF. [Read the rest.]
After a test regatta in August, rates of intestinal infections in sailors “were much lower than would be expected,” a medical official told the reporter for The Times, Vinod Sreeharsha. I’m sure the sailing guinea pigs were pleased. Other officials said there were no problems with boats snagging flotsam — another concern.
I’m making note of this because our Pace University environmental documentary in 2014, “Green vs. Gold: Brazil’s Race to Balance its Sports-Fueled Tourism Boom,” provided an early snapshot of the pollution issues (and social concerns) surrounding Brazil’s big sports push, which that year included the World Cup.
I hope you can find time to watch. The film went beyond Rio. We saw substantial growing pains, and some hopeful signs, in two other places:
• On Ilha Grande — the third busiest island destination for tourists in South America — interviews with business owners and local environmentalists reveal a race between rising popularity, mostly via cruise ships, and the capacity of infrastructure to handle growing crowds.
• The beautifully preserved cobbled lanes and buildings of Paraty, a centuries-old port on the coast between Rio and Sao Paulo, are attracting thousands of visitors. But the city’s antiquated sanitation system is completely overwhelmed. Health and environmental officials say that a growing stream of revenue from offshore oil production is helping finance improvements. But the problems are acute, with feces dotting the canals.
And I’d postulate that things have gotten worse given how social media have expanded in the last four years. I’m teaching and finishing other writing projects, so I’ll mainly point you below to the able reality-based reporting of others, particularly Brad Plumer at Vox and Ed Yong at the Atlantic, along with the editorial board of The Times.
The bottom line? There are plenty of reasons to reduce consumption of processed and red meats — salt, fat, cruelty to livestock, methane, deforestation, water waste… A slight increase in cancer risk may be one of them, as well.
But much of the caricatured quick coverage, with help from the World Health Organization, buried any sense of nuance.
This morning, David Ropeik, a masterful analyst of risk communication, nicely captured the way this has played out: Read more…
Students from the New York Harbor School, Lola Boone and Ashia Salgado, with 100,000 oysters that spent two years in the nursery in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and were destined for a restoration site at the mouth of the Bronx River.Credit Pete Malinowski
Here’s an excerpt from a post over at Pace University’s EarthDesk blog focused on the Billion Oyster Project, an exciting effort to connect middle school classrooms around New York City with the history and future of New York Harbor through the restoration of a legendary bivalve.
A century ago, the oyster was New York’s pearl. Oystering was as integral to New York Harbor’s identity as the Statue of Liberty. The waters of the city and New Jersey boasted more than 260,000 acres of oyster beds spread throughout the harbor, its bays and estuaries, the lower Hudson and East rivers. New Yorkers ate more oyster meat than beef. The original New York “foot-longs” were Gowanus oysters, gathered from Gowanus Bay and Creek in Brooklyn and exported to Europe as a delicacy.
In present day New York, oysters are better associated with the Oyster Bar in the cellar of New York’s Grand Central Terminal, where oysters from Apalachicola Bay in Florida and Chincoteague Bay in Maryland are now the delicacy. Generations of pollution drove out New York oystering, and today the name “Gowanus” is identified less with the bay and more with the canal, a toxic federal Superfund site (hopefully on its way to a major cleanup).
But the Billion Oyster Project, the brainchild of the New York Harbor School, aims to change all that by enlisting hundreds of thousands of city school children to restore a billion oysters to city waters. “In short, students are driving the restoration of New York Harbor,” said Birney….
Here’s Cronin’s chat with Birney:
John Cronin: By the late 1800s, New York Harbor was already being lamented. Harper’s Weekly was fond of running cartoons about how fouled it was and a federal law, the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899, was enacted to control the abuse. But here we are, still talking about the harbor’s poor condition. Pairing a middle school education with its restoration is ambitious by any standard. How do the two fit together in the Billion Oyster Project?
Snapshots of negotiators who split into groups in climate talks in Bonn, Germany, to address contested details in a draft climate agreement ahead of final talks in Paris late in the year.Credit IISD.ca
Just three years after the world’s nations established the Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, a push was initiated to move from that agreement’s aspirational goals for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to hard targets and timetables for wealthier countries. That effort started in Berlin in 1995 at the first Conference of the Parties (the shorthand is COP 1) and fell apart in Copenhagen (COP 15) in 2009.
Now we’re in the final weeks ahead of COP 21, the Paris talks on a new climate accord. A softer path on emissions, dropping rigid targets to foster full participation, has raised the odds of producing something for all to sign.
But a much tougher battle for hard targets — over money — has moved into the foreground and could still do for Paris what the emissions fight did for Copenhagen. As the final preparatory weeklong round of talks in Bonn wound to a close tonight, developing countries stood firm on calls for cash, not another I.O.U.
To dig in, visit the conference website of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, which closely tracks these sessions. And of course Twitter, via the hashtag #ADP2, gives the timeliest blow by blow.
Wealthy countries, in theory, committed in Copenhagen to providing $100 billion a year in energy and climate-resilience funding by 2020. But little cash has flowed. (For the details, see the recent Eduardo Porter column asking, “Where’s the money?“)
Increasingly, in its stead, an accounting fight has broken out over what constitutes additional climate assistance on top of existing development assistance or investments. India’s Business Times summed up the source of the tensions a couple of days ago in a piece on a new analysis of climate finance by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.), representing the world’s established economic powers: Read more…
Scientists at the Scripps Institution project that the powerful El Niño condition this year, along with rising emissions, will send concentrations of carbon dioxide, even accounting for annual ups and downs, beyond 400 parts per million shortly.Credit Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Updated, Nov. 9, 7:56 p.m. | A reanalysis of data has firmed up the 400 p.p.m. forecast. The note is below.
Original post | On Tuesday, a simple but sobering note predicting an imminent end to measurements of carbon dioxide in air lower than 400 parts per million was posted by the group at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography that has been carefully measuring the rising concentration of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere since 1958.
The sawtoothed “Keeling Curve,” of these measurements, named for Charles David Keeling, the scientist who launched the project and ran it until his death in 2005, has become an icon of the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch created by humanity’s “great acceleration.”
Photo
The so-called "Keeling Curve" charting concentrations of CO2 sinc 1958, set with a longer timeline of estimates from evidence in ice cores.Credit NOAA/ Scripps Institution
There’s no surprise in the 400 p.p.m. threshold being passed soon given continuing growth in emissions of the heat-trapping gas and its long lifetime once released. This landmark has been written about extensively here and elsewhere, and the annual surge and ebb of the gas has previously crossed that 400 p.p.m line temporarily (seasonal bursts of photosynthesis account for the sawtoothed ups and downs).
This time, partially because of the impact of El Niño on precipitation and thus plant growth, the scientists foresee an accelerated rise, but an insufficient seasonal surge of photosynthesis to draw levels lower. The long lifetime of the gas, once released, and the slow response of humans in trying to constrain emissions mean it’ll almost surely take generations, at least, before numbers below 400 are revisited on the way down.
The Scripps note is worth posting simply as an artifact of our age. It is written by Ralph Keeling, who took over after death of his father, the pioneering atmospheric scientist Charles David Keeling, in leading this simple but momentous observational effort. See my 2008 “ode to the value of monitoring” for a broader look at why seemingly boring observations of important parameters, from CO2 concentrations to stream flows, get too little respect, and funding. The climate historian Spencer Weart did a fine job of tracking the budget woes of the Keelings’ work.
Update, Nov. 9, 8:00 p.m.| A reanalysis of data has firmed up the 400 p.p.m. forecast. Here’s the update:
“On Nov. 5, 2015, we made an adjustment to the Scripps Mauna Loa CO2 record that has the effect of increasing concentrations we have reported since April 2015 by 0.4 parts per million (ppm). We made the adjustment after comparing our short-term calibration gases with the long-term calibration gases, concentrations of which have been determined manometrically. Comparing short- and long-term calibration gases is a normal part of the strategy for maintaining reliable long-term measurements. The adjustment increases the likelihood that concentrations will remain above 400 ppm permanently after 2015.” – Ralph Keeling
Here’s the original Scripps post by Keeling: Read more…
European demand for wood to burn in power plants is increasing exports from forests in the southeastern United States like these near Jacksonville, Fla.Credit Andrew C. Revkin
Updated (see postscript) | Forestry, done in the right place the right way and for the right reasons, can be an important source of materials, jobs and wildlife habitat.
But are forests an appropriate fuel source for power plants? *
After five months of reporting, John Upton and others at Climate Central have put together a compelling and infuriating package on the growing flow of wood pellets from the Southeast, many from hardwood forests, to European power plants, where the result is touted as carbon-neutral energy and helps country’s meet emissions targets — at least on paper.
Through a loophole in its clean energy regulations, all wood energy is treated as if it releases no carbon dioxide. That accounting trick is allowing European national governments and their energy sectors to pump tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air every year — without accounting for it. That helps them keep that pollution off their books, but not out of the atmosphere.
