Stark conclusions seek to empower young to sue for climate justice

December 6, 2013 — andyextance
Jim Hansen (bottom left) and his family. For their benefit, and for the next generation as a whole, he is pushing for more urgent action on global warming. Credit: James Hansen

Jim Hansen (bottom left) and his family. For their benefit, and for the next generation as a whole, he is pushing for more urgent action on global warming. Credit: JimHansen

Even limiting human-made global climate warming to 2°C above preindustrial temperatures would subject young people, future generations and nature to irreparable harm, leading scientists said on Tuesday. The team led by pioneering climate researcher Jim Hansen, now at Columbia University in New York, calls aiming for this internationally-recognised threshold ‘foolhardy’. In a paper published in PLOS ONE, they outline a case for aiming for 1°C that supports efforts to sue the US government for not doing enough.

“Governments are blatantly failing to do their job,” Jim told me. “They know that human-caused climate change is beginning and poses a huge risk to young people and future generations, and they understand that we must phase out fossil fuel emissions. Yet they go right ahead encouraging companies to go after every fossil fuel that can be found!”

As one of the first climate modellers, Jim has long warned about the greenhouse effect caused by the CO2 we emit from burning fossil fuels. On a sweltering June 23, 1988, he famously testified to the Energy and Natural Resources Committee of the US Senate on the dangers of global warming. “It’s time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here,” he told reporters at the time.

Yet Jim remains frustrated at the slow pace of action, and regularly voices it. In 2006 Mary Wood from the University of Oregon Law School saw one of his articles in the New York Review of Books and contacted him. Her work inspired the formation of a team of lawyers who are suing the US federal government, highlighting the principle that US citizens, young and old, have ‘equal protection of the laws’. “I agreed specifically to write a paper that would provide the scientific basis for legal actions against governments for not doing their job of protecting the rights of young people,” Jim recalled. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Action, Arctic, Campaigning, climate, economics, environment, Global warming, IPCC, Modelling, news, Nitrous oxide, paleoclimate, Permafrost, Politics, science. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 5 Comments »

CO2 for oil swap brings carbon capture viability closer

September 14, 2013 — andyextance
Oil and gas producer Denbury makes its case for its 300-mile plus “Green Pipeline” that transports CO2 for use in extracting more oil from old fields. University of Texas, Austin’s Carey King and colleagues have looked at the economics of using a larger network to store CO2 in underground saline aquifers.

For 314 miles from Donaldsonville, Louisiana, to Alvin, Texas a 24-inch diameter pipeline slithers under the landscape, dwarfing even the giant invasive snake species menacing the US. And while the Hastings Oil and Gas Field sits at the Texan end of the pipe, fossil fuels don’t flow along it: CO2 does. Rather than emit the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, in Louisiana, Mosaic Phosphates Company’s Faustina Plant sends it to Texas. There the pipeline’s owner, Denbury, uses the CO2 to swill more oil out of the ageing Hastings field, leaving most of the CO2 trapped underground instead.

Denbury estimates that from 2014 it could get 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a day from industrial sources. Though that sounds a lot, it pales against the roughly 15 million tonnes the whole US emits each day. But what if Texas’ coal-fired power plants were hooked up to pipelines to both produce more oil from old fields and keep CO2 locked out of the atmosphere?

A team of University of Texas at Austin scientists have been looking at the financial details of how such a network might work. Though it could trap much more CO2 than burning the oil it gets out will emit, they find that such a scheme likely could not yet support itself. “If you capture CO2 from multiple coal-fired generators to produce oil and you want to have a net storage of CO2, the costs are still greater than the revenues,” UT Austin’s Carey King told me. “But the oil revenues do pay for the majority of the costs.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Action, CCS, climate, economics, environment, Geology, Global warming, Modelling, news. Tags: , , , , . 4 Comments »

Fossil fuels are more than just a bad habit

August 24, 2013 — andyextance
The benefits fossil fuels bring make them probably the hardest addiction ever to kick. Credit: Don Hankins, via Flickr Creative Commons licence

The benefits fossil fuels bring make them probably the hardest addiction ever to kick. Credit: Don Hankins, via Flickr Creative Commons licence

I’m increasingly realising how much of a creature of habit I am. I have the same bizarre sticky brown yeast extract goo on toast for breakfast each morning. I watch films in my lounge most evenings. And I wonder: How much of my personality is just a collection of habits? What about yours, and all of ours? Could our whole society just be a giant collage of habits? And most relevant to this blog: how much of the human greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global warming come from our habits?

Recently, I’ve been keeping track of how long I spend doing things, which has been helping me swap what I think are bad habits for better ones. It’s tempting to suggest fighting climate change in a similar way. Many people talk about how we burn fossil fuels to propel our cars or run our gadgets as a bad habit, and even an addiction. But it’s more complicated than other addictions. Fossil fuels have been to our society more like food and a salary are to us individually – they’ve helped produce many of the healthiest aspects of the modern world. They’ve powered more than a century of rapid social and technological progress, and given many countries their current rich, well-fed figures.

For an article I’m writing about employment prospects in the UK’s chemical industry, I recently spotted the table below. It shows ‘gross value added’ (GVA), a measure of the money contributed to the economy, per person across the country’s different industries. It was striking to me that while bankers may get all the headlines for their wealth, the energy industry has the greatest earning power per head in the UK.

Oil and gas extraction help the "Mining and Quarry; Energy & water" sector make the largest contribution per head to the UK economy, as they employ relatively few people relative to their large economic output . Credit: Office for National Statistics

Oil and gas extraction help the “Mining and Quarry; Energy & water” sector make the largest contribution per head to the UK economy, as they employ relatively few people relative to their large economic output. The ‘total’ figure is the overall GVA for the UK, averaged across all industries. Credit: Office for National Statistics

Much like I’d quickly struggle without food or money, today sharply taking fossil fuel energy away from our societies would immediately threaten our existence. In fact, some think even the small changes already happening taste bad. Again in the UK chemical industry, there are worries that higher costs from clean energy are making it less competitive with other countries. Part of the way it would like to avoid this issue is through unconventional natural gas supplies, presumably extracted through controversial ‘fracking’ methods. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Action, agriculture, Campaigning, climate, economics, environment, Global warming, Greenland, media, news, Politics, renewable energy, science. Tags: , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Continuing the fight for CO2 monitoring

August 17, 2013 — andyextance
  • This is part two of a two-part post. Read part one here.
Dave Keeling had to balance his work measuring CO2's rise in the air and tracking its movements through the Earth's systems with fighting to get the money to fund his work. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Dave Keeling had to balance his work measuring CO2’s rise in the air and tracking its movements through the Earth’s systems with fighting to get the money to fund his work. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

By 1963, having directly measured a steady increase in CO2 levels over five years, Dave Keeling felt he had clearly shown the value of such non-stop monitoring. But that message hadn’t reached government decision makers. And so Dave swung into the first battle in the war to continue tracking the key greenhouse gas that has flared up repeatedly in the following decades.

Thanks to four new instruments called spectrophotometers, Dave had been able to use the same molecular movements that allow CO2 to absorb heat to measure it. Though his most famous site was at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, one was also installed in Antarctica. Another sailed on a ship and the final one stayed at Dave’s lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography analysing samples collected in vacuum-filled five litre flasks from aircraft and elsewhere. Thanks to funds from 1957-1958’s International Geophysical Year a team of scientists was busy collecting a “snapshot” of CO2 data that Dave’s boss at Scripps, Roger Revelle, wanted.

So in 1961, Dave moved his family to Sweden for a year to work out exactly what the measurements were showing. He took a fellowship at the Meteorological Institute, University of Stockholm working with its new director Bert Bolin, who had earlier worked on the first computerised weather forecast. With measurements ongoing, annual ‘breathing’ cycles of rising and falling CO2 and the increasing trend underlying them became ever clearer.

Together, Dave and Bert found CO2 concentrations were going up by 0.06 ppm per month on average. Bert also undertook a series of complex calculations by hand to work out CO2 movement and cycles in its levels. In doing so he was showing how oceans, plants on land, and human fossil fuel burning contributed to the patterns that would later need computer models for fuller analysis. This, Dave felt, clearly showed why non-stop CO2 monitoring was needed rather than just snapshots. But by 1963 the shipboard spectrophotometer had come home, and Dave had also called back the one in Antarctica. And with funding cuts biting at the Weather Bureau, now part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the staff at Mauna Loa fell from eight to three. And soon afterwards, a problem with Dave’s equipment proved too much for the overstretched team to fix.

“Suddenly there were no precise measurements being made of atmospheric CO2 anywhere,” he recalled. “I had seen the budget cut coming early in 1963 and had tried to prevent its terminating the CO2 program at Mauna Loa Observatory. I even went to Washington to plead for supplemental funding. This had no tangible effect, however, until the cessation of measurements actually occurred. The National Science Foundation (NSF) then found funds to pay for an additional technician at Mauna Loa. I learned a lesson that environmental time-series programs have no particular priority in the funding world, even if their main value lies in maintaining long-term continuity of measurements.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Acidification, Action, agriculture, climate, El Niño, environment, Global warming, history, Modelling, news, Oceans, Politics, science, volcanoes. Tags: , , , , , , , . 13 Comments »

Extra climate targets urge faster CO2 cuts

July 3, 2013 — andyextance
University of Bern's Marco Steinacher has helped show that setting limits on different aspects of damage from climate change will likely limit CO2 emissions more than just temperature alone. Credit: University of Bern

University of Bern’s Marco Steinacher has helped show that setting limits on different aspects of damage from climate change will likely limit CO2 emissions more than just temperature alone. Credit: University of Bern

To give the world a chance of restricting damage caused by climate change, we need more than just a single temperature target, Swiss researchers have found. Marco Steinacher and his teammates at the University of Bern worked out the chances that climate change can be kept within harmful limits in six different areas. “Considering multiple targets reduces the allowable carbon emissions compared to temperature targets alone, and thus CO2 emissions have to be reduced more quickly and strongly,” Marco told me.

In December 2009, world leaders agreed the non-binding Copenhagen Accord, which ‘recognises’ that scientists think world temperature increases beyond 2°C above the pre-industrial average from 1850-1899 would be dangerous. It also mentions sea level rise, protecting ecosystems and food production. And as climate talks have continued since the 1990s, specific new dangers of CO2 emissions have been found. One serious impact that has been realised in the last decade comes from the fact that oceans absorb CO2 from the air, which makes the seas more acidic. That can make it harder for sea creatures’ shells to form, and together with warmer seas can damage coral, and in turn reduce fish numbers available for food. “Traditional climate targets have not addressed this effect,” Marco said.

It might seem reasonable to assume that negotiating climate deals on temperature limits alone could protect against other dangers. But until recently only very simple ‘Earth system’ models were available to test this against the idea of having several targets. They couldn’t simulate regional effects on quantities such as ocean acidification or farming productions, Marco said. “Climate targets that aim at limiting such regional changes can only be investigated with a model that has a certain amount of complexity,” he explained. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Acidification, Action, agriculture, climate, environment, Global warming, Modelling, news, Oceans, Regional prediction, science, University of Bern. Tags: , , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Warming cost estimates cheat our children

September 22, 2012 — andyextance
Economic calculations saying future generations are at least as important as we are make a strong argument for replacing fossil fuel electricity generation with renewable energy sources like wind. Credit: Caveman Chuck Coker/Flickr

Economic calculations saying future generations are at least as important as we are make a strong argument for replacing fossil fuel electricity generation with renewable energy sources like wind. Credit: Caveman Chuck Coker/Flickr

The financial benefits of reducing CO2 emissions, and avoiding the climate change they would bring, is at least 2.6 times larger than the US government estimates. And, according to Laurie Johnson of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, DC, and Chris Hope at the University of Cambridge, UK, they could be much higher. Undervaluing the damages, which play a part in how the US government makes decisions about climate issues, borders on insanity, Laurie told me. “What we have to ask ourselves is what our children are going to think of us,” she said. “We’re being very self-destructive, but also deeply unethical. We’re not even trying to minimise how much worse it’s going to get. They’ll look back at all this science and how everything is changing, and see how we treated the damages so trivially and did so little.”

In 2010 some of the top departments in the US government got together to publish the first estimates of the money value of benefits from CO2 cuts. The benefits come from avoiding losses through damage caused by climate change. Called the social cost of carbon (SCC), this value is important because it affects rules on CO2 emissions, such as those from cars and power stations. Using three models that linked climate and economics, the government departments decided that the SCC was $21 per metric tonne of CO2*. Thanks to its importance for future climate rules, Laurie had watched the value being calculated closely – and was worried about what she saw.

“One of the models includes infectious disease damage estimates that are highly questionable,” she told me. “The models also estimate net gains from agriculture from now up to 2300 globally. By contrast the insurance industries appear to be estimating $25 billion dollars for crop losses in the US this year. That’s just one year for one country, and their calculation is for more than two hundred years, all countries. It also estimates a couple of billion in extreme weather damages globally over that period. Last year, in the US alone, there was over $50 billion dollars’ worth of extreme weather damage. Overall, it’s a very problematic estimate.” While the faults are plain, correcting any of these areas with more accurate values is a big problem itself. So Laurie and Chris looked at two other areas that they also felt had been worked out badly, but were simpler to tackle. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Action, climate, economics, environment, Global warming, Modelling, news, Politics, renewable energy, wind. Tags: , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

CO2-focused breeding can arm crops for food fight

August 9, 2012 — andyextance
Growth of modern farmed rice varieties rise proportionally less when CO2 levels go up than wild types. Lewis Ziska and his colleagues said that more effort needs to be made in plant breeding to make sure crops benefit from higher CO2 levels. Credit: Héctor de Pereda/Flickr

Growth of modern farmed rice varieties rise proportionally less when CO2 levels go up than wild types. Lewis Ziska and his colleagues said that more effort needs to be made in plant breeding to make sure crops benefit from higher CO2 levels. Credit: Héctor de Pereda/Flickr

While CO2 emissions from humans burning fossil fuels are wrapping the world in a worryingly warming blanket, they could also help make our crops grow faster. But more direct effort is needed to make the most of this chance, say Lewis Ziska from the US Department of Agriculture and an international team of scientists. “Plant breeders often assume that on-going breeding efforts, for example for pest or disease resistance, would by themselves lead to adaptation to any rise in background CO2 levels,” Lewis told Simple Climate. “We’ve shown that this is not the case.”

Throughout the 20th century crop breeding has been one part of a green revolution that has made farmers today able to produce much more food from their fields. But Ziska notes that these improvements in crop yields are slowing. Though climate change and the droughts it brings makes this problem even harder, the gas driving it could provide a way out.

“The gains of the green revolution with respect to population growth have ended,” Ziska said. “As agricultural scientists our goal is to ensure a safe and nutritious supply of food.  It is clear we will have to do so with fewer resources, specifically arable land, water and fertilizer. We have long recognized that CO2 is, by itself, a resource as it supplies plants with carbon, the basic building block for growth. Hence we are urging a systematic active effort in selecting cereal lines that could respond to rising CO2 levels by increasing their yields.”

This view springs from a wide range of evidence Ziska and his colleagues brought together in a paper published in the research journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B this week. This included Ziska’s own research showing how CO2 concentrations affected wheat bred during the 20th century, when CO2 rose from around 290 parts per million (ppm) to 380 ppm. That study showed that higher CO2 concentrations increased the amount of wheat produced by forms developed nearer to 1900 more than modern varieties. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Action, adaptation, agriculture, climate, Drought, environment, Global warming, news, Precipitation, science. Tags: , , , , . 5 Comments »

Developed countries duck warming responsibility

July 29, 2012 — andyextance
Beijing Normal University's John Moore, Xuefeng Cui and their collegues assessed the relative impact on future warming if developed and developing countries follow the pledges to cut CO2 emissions they made at the UN climate change conference in Cancún, Mexico, in November 2010, shown here. Credit: UNclimatechange/Flickr

Beijing Normal University’s John Moore, Xuefeng Cui and their collegues assessed the relative impact on future warming if developed and developing countries follow the pledges to cut CO2 emissions they made at the UN climate change conference in Cancún, Mexico, in November 2010, shown here. Credit: UNclimatechange/Flickr

Disputes between leaders of rich and poor countries currently mean little comes from meetings where they’re meant to draw up plans to slow and stop climate change. But developed countries’ existing promises would achieve just 1/3 of any warming slowdown, even though we’re responsible for more than 2/3 of CO2 emissions before 2005. That’s according to a team of mainly Chinese researchers who have tried to settle these fights using “earth system” models, considering both natural and human factors. “Developed countries need to take more responsibility in climate mitigation by cutting more carbon emissions and helping developing countries to control carbon emission while maintaining economic development,” said Xuefeng Cui from Beijing Normal University (BNU).

At the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in Cancún, Mexico, in November 2010, leaders agreed to try and limit the global temperature rise to 2°C higher than pre-industrial levels. They also agreed that doing this needs deep, but fair, cuts in the amount of warming-causing greenhouse gases humans emit. But they still argue about how to share those cuts. That prompted Cui and his team to make an unusual effort to use science to show what is fair.  “The arguments in the IPCC process demand some fact-based reasoning rather than just the ‘blame game’,” team member John Moore told Simple Climate. “Our study is the first interdisciplinary study by climate, social, economic, and ecological scientists and policy makers to look at the historical responsibilities and effect of future mitigation by applying state-of-art earth system models,” Xuefeng added.

Getting such a broad view meant that the team had to develop entirely new methods for their research, published online in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA on Monday. “Most scientists are interested in the real impacts rather than assigning responsibilities,” Moore said. “These are more abstract philosophical and moral points than they tend to consider.” It took a 37-strong team of scientists to develop the approach, and one of the two earth systems models, they used. Whole earth system models are needed to understand the effects plants, animals, land and oceans have on climate. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Action, Aerosols, Biological gas emissions, climate, economics, environment, Global warming, IPCC, Modelling, news, Oceans, Politics, science. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Rich versus poor obstructs climate progress

July 14, 2012 — andyextance
One of the more bizarre scenes at Rio+20 was reigning 2011 Miss Universe Leila Lopes and Executive Board Member of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) Dr. Dennis Garrity meeting to call for a goal to halt land degradation and to scale up successful community projects to combat desertification. Credit: UNCCD

One of the more bizarre scenes at Rio+20 was reigning 2011 Miss Universe Leila Lopes and Executive Board Member of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) Dr. Dennis Garrity meeting to call for a goal to halt land degradation and to scale up successful community projects to combat desertification. Credit: UNCCD

Every morning the news is full of fighting – between individuals and groups, within and between countries. When people seem to disagree over nearly everything, it’s strange to expect our leaders to come together for the good of us all, and the whole planet. But that’s exactly what they tried to do last month in Brazil at the Rio+20 UN conference on sustainable development that I recently covered hopefully here on Simple Climate. Will this meeting be remembered as fondly in 20 years’ time as the original “Earth Summit” meeting in Rio de Janeiro 20 years ago that its name refers to? If most reactions to the new agreement reached by political leaders are anything to go by, then no. While rich and poor countries’ competing priorities are largely responsible for the apparently weak wording, some hope of removing key stumbling blocks did emerge from the 45,000-person meeting.

On 22 June, world leaders signed a 49-page document called The Future We Want. As well as renewing the original Earth Summit deal, it charts a road to bringing through sustainable development goals when the UN Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015. It encourages a greener world economy, reducing consumption and improving energy systems. It calls for an international system to conserve high seas biodiversity, action to stop land being degraded and becoming desert, and support for small island developing countries. But the deal’s language lacks power, typically using “should” rather than “must”. And overall there was little about protecting the environment, and much about supporting fair economic growth – a fact that has been strongly attacked by some.

If these goals weren’t already seen as weak in the developed world, that outlook was clinched by how they were formed. The document had been agreed by civil servants even before world leaders began arriving in Rio, meaning that they instead spent their time announcing national initiatives. But the funding for these seems tiny, when the amount needed to meet the goals is estimated to be thousands of billions of dollars. The Sustainable Energy For All initiative – one of UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon’s highlights of the meeting – saw Brazil commit $4.3 billion to promote universal energy access for its citizens. The US promised $2 billion in grants and loans to support public-private energy partnerships, while businesses and investors committed more than $50 billion to the same scheme. Japan pledged $3 billion in international aid for the green economy – even though the final treaty is vague on what the green economy actually is.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Acidification, Action, climate, economics, environment, Global warming, news, Oceans, Politics, science, Stuart Brand, Trade. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Hope from a surprising source that we can control consumption

June 23, 2012 — andyextance
Members from Avaaz and 350 unfurl a giant trillion dollar bill at Copacabana Beach, calling on world leaders at Rio+20 summit to end fossil fuel subsidies and invest them in clean energy and sustainable development. Credit: Barbara Veiga taken from Hotel Othon.

Members from Avaaz and 350 unfurl a giant trillion dollar bill at Copacabana Beach, calling on world leaders at Rio+20 summit to end fossil fuel subsidies and invest them in clean energy and sustainable development. Credit: Barbara Veiga taken from Hotel Othon.

In 1992, I was 15 and had never used the internet.  The dramatic changes that have happened in my life and the surrounding world in the meantime are a good reminder of how long 20 years is. This week, politicians and organisations from around the world have gathered in Rio de Janerio, Brazil, for the “Rio+20” summit. The name refers to how many years it is since the “Earth Summit” meeting that set out a grand plan for the world to develop sustainably was held there. Much could have been done in that time – but has it?

According to the UN Environment Partnership, the number of passenger flights doubled, and energy and heat generation increased by two-thirds between the original Earth Summit and 2008. Worldwide forest area has shrunk by an area larger than Argentina, and population has increased by 1.5 billion, more than a quarter. Sustainability and climate change are intimately linked, for example with a warmer planet potentially harming wildlife and also agriculture. Since the Earth Summit, the world has warmed by 0.4°C on average, with the ten warmest years since records began in 1880 happening after 1998. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Action, agriculture, climate, economics, environment, Global warming, news, Politics, science, temperature records. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »
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