Heat drives Pakistani migration

February 1, 2014 — andyextance
Shahdadpur, Sanghar district, Pakistan: Residents collecting their belongings on a higher ground outside village during floods. Though they may be displaced temporarily, Valerie Mueller from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington DC and her team find high temperatures are more likely to drive permanent migration. Image credit: Oxfam International

Shahdadpur, Sanghar district, Pakistan: Residents collecting their belongings on a higher ground outside village during floods. Though they may be displaced temporarily, Valerie Mueller from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington DC and her team find high temperatures are more likely to drive permanent migration. Image credit: Oxfam International

Excessive rainfall rarely drives Pakistanis to permanently leave their villages, even when it causes hardship like the flooding that hit around a fifth of the country in 2010. Yet they do consistently move in response to extreme temperatures, Valerie Mueller from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington DC and her colleagues have found. She says the finding is a first stage in establishing if, how, and why people’s choices are affected by climate and climate change. “This is a useful step in order to be able to predict migration flows and inform local governments how might they better prepare in terms of the delivery of resources and investing in infrastructure given the occurrence of extreme weather events,” she told me.

There are few efforts collecting information about who has migrated and why over long periods of time, especially in areas where extreme weather occurs. But IFPRI has a long history of evaluating questions linked to food security in countries across the world, including Pakistan. From 1986-1991 its Pakistan Rural Household Survey questioned 800 households about how they lived and farmed, and it has tracked those households ever since. “Local collaborators found the original households in 2001 and 2012 and asked the head of household or an otherwise knowledgeable person what happened to each household member who resided with them in 1991,” Valerie said. “Our study is one of the first to quantify long-term migration patterns over a long period of time.”

The follow-ups recorded the long-term movements and fortunes of 4,428 people from 583 households. The researchers combined these answers with temperature and rainfall data in one ‘logit’ and one ‘multinomial logit’ model designed to let them measure the odds that people moved. “The first model allows us to answer: What are the odds of a person moving out of the household in response to extreme temperature or rainfall?” Valerie explained. “The second model allows us to distinguish moves by location and allows us to answer the following questions: What are the odds of a person moving out of the household but within the village in response to extreme temperature or rainfall? What are the odds of a person moving out of the household but out of the village in response to extreme temperature or rainfall?” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in adaptation, agriculture, climate, Drought, economics, environment, floods, Global warming, Mitigation, news, Precipitation, Regional prediction, science, temperature records. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 7 Comments »

Planners must be alert to CO2 impact on water supplies

January 25, 2014 — andyextance
The River Exe submerges the end of a pub beer garden by the Miller's Crossing bridge in Exeter. Nigel Arnell from the University of Reading and his team have predicted some increases in high river flow levels as climate change continues, but even larger decreases in low flow levels.

The River Exe submerges the end of a pub beer garden by the Miller’s Crossing bridge in Exeter. Nigel Arnell from the University of Reading and his team have predicted some increases in high river flow levels as climate change continues, but even larger decreases in low flow levels.

Although the river that slices through Exeter, UK, where I live, is today full from weeks of heavy rain there has been little reported harm from flooding. In the past, most notably in 1960, similar downpours swelled the river Exe until it engulfed the surrounding streets – and so we now have a flood defence system. But shifts in rainfall patterns are potentially the most serious climate changes that we’re facing as a result of the CO2 we emit. They pose a particular threat in a nation like China, where many ‘face severe water distress’, and where this month forestry officials warned about the country’s shrinking wetlands. Drought or deluge, what we do about climate change could have big effects on water supplies.

UK planners already include climate change in their water resource schemes, the University of Reading’s Nigel Arnell told me. But Nigel and his colleagues have also shown they’ll still need to be watchful if we stick to the non-binding Copenhagen Accord on climate change. “We can’t assume that if we adopt a stringent climate mitigation policy then we don’t have to worry about potential effects of climate change on water resource availability over the next few decades,” he told me. “This isn’t actually a surprise, because we know that impacts will continue even if we manage to hit a 2°C target.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in adaptation, climate, economics, environment, floods, Global warming, Mitigation, Modelling, news, Precipitation, science. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

New tests seek peace in climate conflict blame game

January 18, 2014 — andyextance
Researchers are hoping to work out how climate change affects risk of conflicts, such as the one in Somalia in which this tank was destroyed. Image credit: Carl Montgomery, via Flickr Creative Commons license

Researchers are hoping to work out how climate change affects risk of conflicts, such as the one in Somalia in which this tank was destroyed. Image credit: Carl Montgomery, via Flickr Creative Commons license

After researchers last year went through every paper linking climate changes and human violence, finding a strong connection, new findings suggest that one rare study disagreeing used the wrong maths. Kyle Meng from Princeton University in New Jersey and Solomon Hsiang from the University of California, Berkeley, now hope they’ve settled previous conflicts over the climate-conflict link. “We think this allows the community to move forward onto what I believe are the next set of important questions,” Kyle told me. “Why exactly does climatic change affect violence and what can we do to lessen the effects of climate on violence?”

In last year’s paper, Solomon and his Berkeley colleagues Ted Miguel and Marshall Burke brought together 45 sets of evidence spanning 10,000 years. Reanalysing worldwide measurements from scratch they found that 2°C global temperature rise could make conflicts like civil wars more than 50% more common in many parts of the world.

One paper that didn’t fit with their findings had been published in 2010 by Halvard Buhaug at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, Norway. Halvard’s study used the same data as a 2009 paper that found a climate-conflict link in Africa, written in 2009 by a team including Ted and Marshall. However, Halvard used different models indicating that political and economic factors were more important and that climate was ‘not to blame’.

Halvard’s argument revolves around a mathematical ‘robustness check’ into the statistics used by the 2009 paper. Such checks are common in social science, Kyle explained. “However, it is important to note that not all robustness checks are valid,” he said. “In general, robustness checks are designed to examine whether, given a particular outcome, a statistical model may be producing biased results, such as when improper comparisons are being made amongst observations.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Africa, climate, economics, environment, Global warming, news, Politics, science, war. Tags: , , , , , . 4 Comments »

The warrior who gave his life to climate change

January 11, 2014 — andyextance
Steve Schneider juggled with the dilemma of conveying the urgency of climate change, while conveying how we can be confident about that when the evidence is sometimes uncertain Credit: L.A. Cicero, Stanford University News.

Steve Schneider juggled with the dilemma of conveying the urgency of climate change, while conveying how we can be confident about that when the evidence is sometimes uncertain Credit: L.A. Cicero, Stanford University News.

  • This is part three of this profile. You can also read part one and two.

“Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” Those are words – seemingly advising his colleagues to lie to shape public opinion – credited to climate scientist Stephen Schneider in a 1989 Discover magazine article. Because of that quote, Steve was told, a number of US congressional hearings chose not to invite him as an expert witness.

With extreme irony, it came from an interview where Steve was expressing frustration after having been misrepresented in the media. He later argued that he was trying to explain how to succeed faced with the “double ethical bind” of being effective and honest in conveying both uncertainty and urgency. Even in the original article he adds, “I hope that means being both” – something often overlooked in scandalised reactions to his words. But perhaps the trouble this caused Steve in fact reflects the strangeness of the idea he dedicated much of his career to getting across. How can scientific projections with an element of uncertainty lead to the conclusion that we must act on climate change urgently?

We’re instinctively uncomfortable with uncertainty, and so Steve wanted clearer ways to get it across in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s second climate change assessment report. At a meeting in 1994 he pushed for their estimates to come as probability distributions showing the odds for each in a range of different values. This could be done, he argued, for everything from damage likely to be caused by global warming to values for numbers central to natural processes, like climate sensitivity.

With no-one backing Steve, ambiguity crept into the report. Did everyone think that saying they had “high confidence” in a statement meant the same thing? After the second report, returning to his recently-appointed post at Stanford University in California, he was determined to hammer out any doubt. Together with the IPCC’s Richard Moss, Steve found 100 examples of inconsistent use of such terms. Armed with that shocking finding they persuaded the IPCC’s working group I, which discusses the physics of climate change, to define clear scales.

The result would be a double strategy, with verbal scales both for the probability of a forecast and for the reliability of the underlying science. For probabilities, low confidence meant a less than 1-in-3 chance, medium between 1-in-3 and 2-in-3 and high 2-in-3 and above. Very high confidence meant a 19-in-20 chance, and very low confidence 1-in-20. There were four grades for the quality of science, ranging from ‘speculative’ to ‘well established’. Reading through thousands of draft pages ensuring consistency in the run-up to the IPCC’s third report, published in 2001, Richard and Steve became known as the ‘uncertainty police’. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Action, Campaigning, climate, Climategate, CRU, environment, Global warming, IPCC, media, Michael Mann, news, Politics, science. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , . 6 Comments »

When the climate change fight got ugly

January 4, 2014 — andyextance
  • Steve Schneider talks about climate and energy with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show in 1977, early on in his efforts to bring human-caused climate change to the public's notice.

    Steve Schneider talks about climate and energy with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show in 1977, early on in his efforts to bring human-caused climate change to the public’s notice.

    This is part two of this profile. Read part one here.

“How many of you think the world is cooling?” That’s what Steve Schneider asked the studio audience of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in September 1977. And when the majority put their hands up, he explained that the recent cooling trend had only been short-term. Though the unscripted poll meant Steve wasn’t invited back to the programme, through the summer of that year he had brought climate science to US national TV. The appearances typified Steve’s efforts to bring climate change to the world’s notice – efforts that would later draw attention of a less desirable sort.

Building on his earlier high profile research, Steve had just published ‘The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival’, predicting ‘demonstrable climate change’ by the end of the century. Whether human pollution would cause warming or cooling, he argued governments should copy the biblical story where Joseph told Pharoah to prepare for lean years ahead. In a decade already torn by rocketing food and oil prices, the advice resonated with many who wanted to head off any further crises.

Some scientists criticised Steve and those like him for speaking straight to the public. In particular, climate science uncertainties were so great that they feared confusion – like that over whether temperatures were rising or falling – was inevitable. That dispute grew from a basic question about science’s place in society. Should researchers concentrate on questions they can comfortably answer using their existing methods? Or should they tackle questions the world needs answered, even if the results that follow are less definite?

At a meeting to discuss climate and modelling research within the Global Atmospheric Research Programme (GARP) in 1974 near Stockholm, Sweden, Steve pushed for the second approach. Given the food problems the world was struggling with at the time, it seemed obvious that climate change impacts like droughts, floods and extreme temperatures would bring famines. “I stood alone in arguing that we had to consider the implications of what we were researching,” Steve later wrote. While some attacked him angrily, saying they weren’t ready to address these problems, conference organiser Bert Bolin agreed that socially important questions must be answered.

The suggestion was also controversial because it meant blurring the lines between climate science and other subjects, such as agriculture, ecology and even economics. The director at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, where Steve worked, warned that crossing subject boundaries might cost him promotion. But he responded with characteristic wilfulness, founding a journal doing exactly what he was warned not to. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in climate, Drought, economics, environment, Global warming, history, IPCC, media, Mitigation, Modelling, news, paleoclimate, Politics, Scepticism, science. Tags: , , , , , , , . 12 Comments »

The ice-age U-turn that set the stage for the climate debate

December 28, 2013 — andyextance
Steve Schneider (left), Jim Hansen (centre), and S. Ichtiaque Rasool (right) at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, circa 1971. Image copyright: Stephen H. Schneider

Steve Schneider (left), Jim Hansen (centre), and S. Ichtiaque Rasool (right) at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, circa 1971. Image copyright: Stephen H. Schneider

On 13 July 1971, world-leading researchers gathered in Stockholm, Sweden, concluded their presentations about human influence on climate, and opened the meeting to questions from the press. But rather than asking about the most important climate meeting yet, the assembled reporters first looked to the meeting’s 26-year old secretary. “Where is Dr. Schneider? When is the ice age coming?” they asked.

The journalists sought out Stephen Schneider about a paper by him and his NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) boss, S. Ichtiaque Rasool, published just four days before. Using early computer models, they warned of a scenario where enough dusty aerosol pollution could be ‘sufficient to trigger an ice age’. For Steve, this would be the first encounter of many with the media’s interest in climate, leading him ultimately to help define how scientists influence the wider world.

As a PhD student at Columbia University in New York in the late 1960s, Steve came into contact with some of the world’s leading experts on climate. Wally Broecker, who at that time was helping establish the timing of the ice ages, lectured him on oceanography. A talk by Joe Smagorinsky from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who was establishing some of the first computer climate models with Suki Manabe, played on Steve’s childhood fascination with hurricanes. And when he took a seminar by Ichtiaque talking about planets’ atmospheres – why Mars was too cold, Venus too hot, and Earth just right – he was hooked.

While writing up his PhD thesis he got a part-time job with Ichtiaque, tackling a key question at the time. Burning fossil fuels creates two types of pollution that influence climate – warming CO2 and cooling aerosols. But which one would win out? On the advice of fellow GISS scientist Jim Hansen, Steve used a method partly developed by astronomer Carl Sagan to calculate the aerosol effect. He put this into a model of warming from CO2 Ichtiaque gave him. They found that doubling CO2 levels in the air would raise temperatures by about 0.7°C – much lower than Suki’s earlier estimate of 2°C for this ‘climate sensitivity’ figure. But models where aerosols were spread everywhere experienced 3-5°C cooling, prompting Ichtiaque to write the ice age comment, referring to other controversial research of the time.

Ichtiaque had asked Steve to handle criticism of the study, but in the meantime Steve had managed to get an invite to the Stockholm gathering of leading climate scientists. Being a ‘rapporteur’ he was supposed to only be taking notes at the three week Study of Man’s Impact on Climate (SMIC) meeting, organised by Bert Bolin. But Steve couldn’t resist showing Suki some of his modelling work on clouds’ role in climate – and then the aerosol study was published. Ichtiaque had mischievously told a reporter that Steve was presenting the work at SMIC, forcing his young colleague to give a brief seminar, and face the press. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Action, Aerosols, Campaigning, climate, environment, Global warming, history, media, Modelling, news, Politics, science. Tags: , , , , , . 10 Comments »

Give those we love the climate they deserve

December 21, 2013 — andyextance
Residents in Azaz, Syria on 16 August 2012 clear up after their buildings were bombed during the country's civil war, for which one of the many causes was a drought that has been linked to climate change.

Residents in Azaz, Syria on 16 August 2012 clear up after their buildings were bombed during the country’s civil war, for which one of the many causes was a drought that has been linked to climate change.

Over the next week I hope to be spending time with those I love the most. But this week I’ve been reading the latest newsletter from Medecins Sans Frontiers/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) about the horrible situation in Syria. The country’s civil war has been ongoing since 2011, with a toll that puts the good fortune me and my family enjoy into chilling context.

It’s estimated that there have been 120,000 deaths with over 4.5 million – in a country of just 22.5 million – having to leave their homes. Though that’s a lot of people, I am increasingly numb to the numbers, like many of you might be. But the stories from MSF really hit home. Yes, Syria had serious problems before the war, but it had a comparatively good health system. Now, if you have asthma, diabetes, or appendicitis, it can be life threatening. Ever more children are being born with severe defects, possibly due to the mothers not getting enough folic acid in their diet.

Though there are many factors behind the conflict, an important one is a drought that hit the country’s poorest areas in early 2011. Commentators have highlighted that droughts in Syria have become more common in recent years, linking this to climate change. Earlier this month, US scientists reported that a recent three year drought in Syria was too unusual to be a natural event. All of us who use fossil fuel energy likely bear some responsibility.

While it’s always hard to be certain about such links, they’re backed up by what University of California, Berkeley’s Ted Miguel told me in August. “Many global climate models project global temperature increases of at least 2°C over the next half century,” Ted told me. “Our findings suggest that global temperature rise of 2°C could increase the rate of intergroup conflicts, such as civil wars, by over 50% in many parts of the world, especially in tropical regions where such conflicts are most common.”

Earlier this month, Jim Hansen from Columbia University in New York and his team warned that even world average temperatures 1°C above pre-industrial levels would be dangerous. The Earth has already warmed 0.8°C in the past 100 years, meaning that threshold is near. And many other researchers I’ve spoken to this year have found evidence that shows the dangers. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Action, Africa, Campaigning, Charity, climate, Drought, economics, environment, floods, Global warming, Greenland, Ice sheets, Modelling, news, piracy, Politics, renewable energy, science. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Carbon prices alone won’t keep warming below 2°C

December 14, 2013 — andyextance
Annela Anger-Kraavi from the University of East Anglia. Image credit: University of East Anglia

Annela Anger-Kraavi from the University of East Anglia. Image credit: University of East Anglia

It’s possible to cut emissions of the greenhouse gas CO2 enough to keep global warming below 2°C, while maintaining growth in the world’s industrial production. But the ‘decarbonisation scenario’ developed by UK researchers needs more than just the carbon price relied on by most economists looking at how to reduce our fossil fuel use. “There are no magic measures,” Annela Anger-Kraavi from the University of East Anglia told me. “You need regulations, a carbon price, and investment. And all industries need to be considered simultaneously – you cannot leave anything out if you want to achieve the best results.”

Seeing temperatures 2°C higher than the ‘pre-industrial’ average from 1850-1899 as the danger level for climate change, governments have agreed to keep warming below this limit. Scientists have calculated that 450 CO2 molecules are allowable in every million air molecules to give us better than a 3/5 chance of keeping temperature rises below 2°C. But few economists have modelled scenarios that might keep CO2 levels below this 450 parts per million (ppm) threshold, as many think it’s clearly too expensive. In the report released by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, for example, just six out of 177  studies summarised looked at this range.

Since then there have been more studies, still finding the costs too high. But they use ‘neoclassical’ economic theories  – something Annela and her teammates wanted to avoid, because models based on such theories failed to predict the recent financial crisis. They also mainly rely on charging for the right to emit CO2 to cut emissions, through a carbon tax, or emission permits that companies must pay for. In the New Economics of Decarbonising the Global Economy (NewEDGE) project the University of Cambridge’s Terry Barker developed a model that links 43 sectors across the world economy. It avoids some central Keynesian ideas, such as that prices will always change everywhere at the same time, and that everything supplied is always bought. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in climate, economics, environment, Global warming, IPCC, Modelling, news, science. Tags: , , , , , . 4 Comments »

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 »

Fighting for useful climate models

November 30, 2013 — andyextance
  • This is part two of a two-part post. Read part one here.
Princeton University's Suki Manabe published his latest paper in March this year, 58 years after his first one. Credit: Princeton University

Princeton University’s Suki Manabe published his latest paper in March this year, 58 years after his first one. Credit: Princeton University

When Princeton University’s Syukuro Manabe first studied global warming with general circulation models (GCMs), few other researchers approved. It was the 1970s, computing power was scarce, and the GCMs had grown out of mathematical weather forecasting to become the most complex models available. “Most people thought that it was premature to use a GCM,” ‘Suki’ Manabe told interviewer Paul Edwards in 1998. But over following decades Suki would exploit GCMs widely to examine climate changes ancient and modern, helping make them the vital research tool they are today.

In the 1970s, the world’s weather and climate scientists were building international research links, meeting up to share the latest knowledge and plan their next experiments. Suki’s computer modelling work at Princeton’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) had made his mark on this community, including two notably big steps. He had used dramatically simplified GCMs to simulate the greenhouse effect for the first time, and developed the first such models linking the atmosphere and ocean. And when pioneering climate research organiser Bert Bolin invited Suki to a meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1974, he had already brought these successes together.

Suki and his GFDL teammate Richard Weatherald had worked out how to push their global warming study onto whole world-scale ocean-coupled GCMs. They could now consider geographical differences and indirect effects, for example those due to changes of the distribution of snow and sea ice. Though the oceans in the world they simulated resembled a swamp, shallow and unmoving, they got a reasonably realistic picture of the difference between land and sea temperatures. Their model predicted the Earth’s surface would warm 2.9°C if the amount of CO2 in the air doubled, a figure known as climate sensitivity. That’s right in the middle of today’s very latest 1.5-4.5°C range estimate.

Comparison between the measured sea surface temperature in degrees C calculated by the GFDL ocean-coupled GCM, from a 1975 GARP report chapter Suki wrote - see below for reference.

Comparison between the measured sea surface temperature in degrees C calculated by the GFDL ocean-coupled GCM, from a 1975 GARP report chapter Suki wrote – see below for reference.

At the time no-one else had the computer facilities to run this GCM, and so they focussed on simpler models, and fine details within them. Scientists model climate by splitting Earth’s surface into 3D, grids reaching up into the air. They can then calculate what happens inside each cube and how it affects the surrounding cubes. But some processes are too complex or happen on scales that are too small to simulate completely, and must be replaced by ‘parameterisations’ based on measured data. To get his GCMs to work Suki had made some very simple parameterisations, and that was another worry for other scientists. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in climate, clouds, Drought, environment, Glaciers, Global warming, history, ice ages, IPCC, lakes, Mitigation, Modelling, news, Oceans, radiative forcing, satellites, science. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 13 Comments »
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