I will admit upfront that there are many aspects of our current energy and climate situation that I find frustrating. I’m sure I’m not alone in that among people who comment here or merely read this site. But I feel compelled to point out one particular detail that sends me in full head-spinning mode, what I call “the vision thing”. You might be tempted to assume that I’m talking about “vision” in a metaphorical sense, as in some Senator not having a vision of where good public policy can take the US, or the CEO of some huge corporation being far too myopic. And if you made that assumption, you would be wrong, because in this instance I’m talking about vision in the most literal and mundane way, our ability (or requirement) to see things.

Specifically, we’ve all read accounts similar to this wholly fabricated one[1]:

Senator Smith has just returned from a trip to Greenland [or Glacier National Park or Alaska or Siberia or …] where he saw first hand the effects of global warming. “The amount of melting that’s taking place is simply stunning. You can’t truly appreciate the magnitude of the changes to the glaciers [or ice bergs or permafrost] until you see it in person. We have to find a way to rise to this challenge, forge international agreements to limit humanity’s CO2 emissions, and prevent this situatin from becoming much worse.”

Whenever I see or hear such a report, it takes all the willpower I have to keep from shouting at my monitor or TV screen or newspaper, “And why the hell did you have to travel thousands of miles to be convinced there’s a serious problem???”

Clearly, some non-trivial portion of these trips are purely for show to demonstrate the traveler’s environmental awareness and/or are taken simply because the person is in a position to do so on someone else’s dime. But I’m convinced that not all of them can be explained away so cynically, and at least some share of these trips really are “fact finding trips” that end of having a big impact on our hardy adventurer.

Which brings me back to my question: Why? Why, in the year 2010 with all that implies about the routinely available multimedia technology, would someone have to haul his DNA thousands of miles on an airplane to stand on a glacier and see a river of melt water roaring into a moulin before that person is able to say, “Holy shit — this really is a problem”? What Senator (or member of the House or mayor of a moderate to large city or CEO) can’t have a staff member pull together a devastating amount of visuals and reports on climate change? Why can’t he or she simply watch the Extreme Ice documentary, which should be enough to scare just about anyone spitless? Why can’t a member of the US federal government call our friends at NASA or NOAA or NSIDC and get a personal briefing?

If you’re wondering what set me off on this tangent, it was a graph in an excellent post Joe Romm made yesterday on CP, Arctic sea ice area and volume drop near record lows. While I strongly recommend you read the whole post, one graph leaped out at me:

Ignore the pretty colored boxes at the top for a moment and focus on the line graphs. In particular, notice the black line, which says that from 2007, the current year for minimum sea ice extent, and 2008, when the sea ice began to “recover”, as the deniers would have you believe, the overall volume of sea ice declined by 2,000 cubic km (16,000 to 14,000), or about 12%. That’s over 6.5 times the most recent estimates I’ve seen of the yearly volume of ice loss from Greenland (roughly 300 cubic km per year), and is equivalent in weight to about 5.4 million Empire State Buildings.[2]

Why isn’t this graph, based on the best available science, far more compelling than what a Senator or CEO can see by flying to some spot in the far north and standing on glacier for 20 minutes and observing one tiny speck of the landscape? And if we really are this tied to a “only seeing is believing” brain wiring, how can we arrange to get a few thousand of the world’s most powerful people to make this trip before it’s far too late?

[1] For a non-fabricated one, see Change of heart from climate sceptics:

Michael Hanlon the formerly ultra-sceptic science editor of Britain’s two-million-copies-a-day Daily Mail has also changed his mind after a recent trip to see a glacier in Greenland.

[2] The ESB weighs 365,000 tons, and each cubic km of ice is roughly one billion tons.

The climate blogosphere erupted yesterday with the news that Bjorn Lomborg has a new book coming out that seems to reverse his bottom-line conclusion on climate change. While I haven’t read the new book, I think a fair summary of his pre- and post-pivot positions would be:

Pre-pivot: Climate change is real but it’s not a big deal. We should spend money on a bunch of other things to help people. Don’t get your undies in a twist.

Post-pivot: WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE FROM CLIMATE CHANGE!!! TAX CARBON!!! SPEND MONEY ON R&D!!! [BillPaxtonInAliens] WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO NOW MAN??? [/BillPaxtonInAliens]

Perhaps I’ve taken some liberties here; you be the judge.

I think this situation, aside from being important because of the seriousness of climate change and all the attention Lomborg gets (for reasons that escape me), is fascinating. For years now I’ve wondered how the hard core deniers, as well as those who say climate change is real but at most a minor problem, would walk back from their positions once the evidence became so overwhelming that not even their most loyal and reality immune followers could deny it. Consider it the Dilemma of the Iraqi Information Minister, e.g.:

August 11 - The LA Times reports that the Iraqi military was itself fooled by the creative reporting of furloughed Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf (M.S.S.): “After the information minister claimed that Iraqi forces had retaken the Baghdad airport from U.S. troops, two former commanders said, Republican Guard Gen. Mohammed Daash was dispatched to check out a rumor that four or five American tanks had survived the Iraqi counterattack. Daash returned to his headquarters in a panic. “Four or five tanks!'’ the commanders quoted Daash as telling his fellow generals. “Are you out of your minds? The whole damn American Army is at the airport!'’ ”

(Please, no jumping to absurd conclusions like, “Lou is saying the deniers are equivalent to Saddam Hussein and his flunkies!” because I never said that, OK?)

In the case of the hardest of the hardcore deniers, like Fox News and the fossil fuel companies that want us to believe CO2 is “plant food” and more of it is always better (a proposition I’ve yet to see pan out in the real world regarding anything, including chocolate, sex, good wine, and, well, sex), I think they have only a couple of possible moves:

• Say absolutely nothing about it and pretend they never uttered a single word of denial. I.e. the same strategy most cats use moments after falling off a couch for no reason or doing something equally stupid.
• Go on the attack and blast the climate scientists for not making a compelling case sooner, and therefore making the situation much worse, in terms of both the expense and the degree of government intervention required, by causing decades of delay. Being around rational human beings when the deniers trot out this insanity will be like sitting in the front row of a Gallagher show, but with brain matter from Exploding Head Syndrome substituting for watermelon.

Back to Lomborg. Astute readers will remember that this isn’t his first change of direction. Last August, in fact, I wrote about how he suddenly seemed to be a fan of geoengineering and focusing on cuts in soot and methane emissions (see Bjorn again on CC). One could see this latest embrace of a carbon tax and more focused spending on decarbonizing the world economy as a continuation of that shift; publicly held opinions tend to be like ocean liners: you can redirect them, but it’s usually a wide, slow turn. In a follow-up post about a month later I talked about the geoengineering pivot, they way for deniers and minimizers to “split the difference” between their do-nothing stance and the mainstream scientific conclusion that we have to reduce our CO2 emissions a lot and very quickly (see Earth–Now, with geoengineering!).

So, Lomborg continues to help delay meaningful action on climate change, and he gets lots of juicy attention for an upcoming book, all while asymptotically approaching the view of mainstream science on what needs to be done. I’m beginning to think that Lomborg is not only just as deluded or evil as the hardcore deniers, but he’s also vastly smarter more subtle.

Related:

• Climate change: The facts of life
• Brendan DeMelle: Bjorn Lomborg Now Says Climate Change “Chief Concern,” Calls for Carbon Tax
• Lomborg: Just Kidding. We Do Need Climate Action Now

Rick Piltz, over on ClimateScienceWatch has a thought provoking piece that begins by talking about Stephen Schneider and quickly turns to the thorny question of what the proper role is for climate scientists in society. (I shouldn’t have to point out this post to you, as Piltz’s site is without question one you should be following closely via RSS feed.)

From Ehrlich on Schneider: Being a scientist doesn’t relieve one of the obligations of a citizen (emphasis added):

Andy Revkin, in his New York Times DotEarth blog, touched on this divergence in a post focused on the eminent atmospheric scientist Richard Somerville (“The Road from Climate Science to Climate Advocacy”). Revkin wrote:

Richard C. J. Somerville, a climatologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography near San Diego, is one of a growing array of scientists who have chosen to move beyond studying heat transfer and cloud physics and take on the role of activist: prodding society to move aggressively to cut greenhouse gases….

“For me, and maybe for many, I think that ‘going public’ and making a statement as an individual, who is also a climate expert, is simply a next logical step,” Dr. Somerville said.

“After all, many politicians have said that scientists should be heard from more. As long as we are always at pains to make clear that we are speaking only as individuals, not on behalf of our employers or other organizations, then I think we are just behaving as good citizens.”

But Revkin noted:

Other scientists disagree with this kind of activism, most notably Susan Solomon, who was the co-leader of the 2007 I.P.C.C. assessment of climate trends. In an email exchange on the general issue of scientists and policy debate last weekend (just before she flew to Antarctica), she said: “If we as scientists go beyond what we know into our personal opinions and values, we begin to engage in the same sort of personal speculation masquerading as authoritative that we dislike when it is done by the skeptics.”

With all due respect to Susan Solomon, who has made an incalculable scientific contribution, it seems to me insufficient to speak in terms of a simple dichotomy between “what we know,” on the one hand, and “personal opinions” and “personal speculation,” on the other, as though there were no intellectual terrain between “knowing” something with, say, 95 percent confidence, and being reduced to something like speculative, amateurish punditry. It’s as though scientists, including those who write the IPCC assesssments, have nothing to offer to an actual dialogue with policymakers in terms of policymakers’ decisionmaking jurisdiction, or to a more general public audience.

On the contrary, what policymakers and the public need from the climate science community includes scientists’ synthesis of and expert judgments about the state of knowledge in terms of its implications for policymaking and societal decisionmaking – even though that involves a necessary element of subjectivity. Policymakers need scientists to advise them in the context of assessing and managing the risks of climate change – in particular, on the implications of their decisions about adaptation and mitigation response strategies.

It will come as a surprise to no one who’s read more than about five of my posts on this site that I agree completely with Piltz. Let me burn a few words trying to explain why.

Scientists working in any area with significant public policy implications should be involved in talking to both policymakers and the general public. They are human beings first, citizens second, and scientists third. Thanks to their training and research and experience, they are not just exceptionally well qualified to speak out on whatever the topic is at hand, but they have an onus to do so. At the risk of being too flip, one could say that with great knowledge of important topics comes great responsibility.

The objections to this view are both obvious and serious. The one I hear most often is that when scientists stop restricting themselves to facts and strong conclusions established over years by the scientific process, and let themselves act based on things they “know”, in the colloquial sense, they risk not just making mistakes, but using their influence to greatly magnify the impacts of those mistakes. This is a very real problem, one we already see in action, even if in perverted form, as various organizations or media outlets cherry pick experts and pseudo-experts to take useful positions. (E.g. Michael Crichton and Christopher Monckton testifying before Congress on climate change.)

Another real danger is that if scientists take public, high-stakes positions on topics — climate change, peak oil, stem cell research, etc. — they will then become far more entrenched in those positions and less likely to change their minds when new evidence tells them to do so.

As for Susan Solomon’s concern, that scientists who become engaged in the policy process will be no better than the “skeptics”[1], well, that doesn’t bother me. If nothing else, thanks to their background they can’t be exactly like the “skeptics”. But it also assumes that at least some of them will not just engage with policymakers or the public, but do so in an exceedingly bad way.

In general all these arguments strike me as taking a slippery slope view of the situation. The danger isn’t that all scientists will automatically descend into hyper-partisanship and Internet wackaloonery, but that some tiny percentage of them will, and even that is too high a price to pay for their public service in speaking out. While I sincerely appreciate that opinion and recognize how trained scientists would tend to see the world that way (medical doctors aren’t the only ones who believe “above all else, do no harm”), I also respectfully disagree with it.

The bottom line, for me, is that if we apply our best judgment and perform a cost/benefit analysis, it’s clear that there will be some cost in the form of scientists making mistakes or becoming too emotionally tied to a given position or simply turning into Internet nutjobs, but the benefit from scientist activism far outweighs it. Look at the current world situation regarding sustainability issues and read the available reports, from the latest IPCC publication to the barrage of papers in peer reviewed journals to all the measurements taken by real-life citizens (”environment auditors”?) recording when flowers bloom and lakes ice over and dozens of other yearly events, and the signs of not just a gentle warming of the climate but a shift into a much less kind version of the world humanity has lived on for 10,000 years are almost too numerous to count. We desperately need to take action to minimize the human pain from these changes, and leaving the communicating about climate change to paid and cherry-picked mouthpieces is unfathomably irresponsible.

Once again, I go back to James Hansen talking about what it would feel like if some day his grandchildren asked him why he didn’t do everything he could to stop climate change when he knew what was happening. This is why I keep saying that all the children and grandchildren of world belong to all of us. We — as in all of us — have a moral duty to do everything possible to avoid handing them a world that’s racing to a temperature increase of 3C to 6C (or more) and has acidified oceans, dangerous high and rising sea levels, and massive droughts and floods.

[1] Can we finally drive a stake into the ground and say that from this day forward “climate skepticism” cannot be more than a transitory condition for any individual? I would expect anyone who is new to the topic of climate change or any other complex topic to be a skeptic, in the original, unsullied meaning of the word. But given the state of climate science and the freely available information about it today, anyone who stays in the skeptic category for more than a relatively short period (a few weeks? a few months?) either isn’t researching the topic or is actively refusing to learn from the material at hand. You can debate all day exactly what state those people are in, such as paid shill or ideologue or liar; I will continue to put them in the umbrella category of “denier”.

I’m still catching up after being away for three days, but I want to make sure the following post by Jeff Masters from Friday doesn’t escape your attention, Danielle a Cat 4; Earl more organized; Northwest Passage opens for 4th year in a row. The part that prompted me to post comes near the end of his comments, where Jeff turns his attention the Northwest and Northeast Passages and what they mean in a larger context:

What caused the opening of the Northwest and Northeast Passages?
The remarkable thinning of Arctic sea ice in recent years has left behind a very thin layer of mostly 1-year old ice in the Arctic, highly vulnerable to rapid melting. As I describe in detail in wunderground’s sea ice page, this thinning was mostly due to natural wind pattern in the 1990s, much warmer than average ocean waters invading the Arctic from both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, very warm air temperatures, and deposition of black soot from fires used to clear agricultural land in Europe and air pollution originating in industrialized regions of the Northern Hemisphere. This year, Canada experienced its warmest winter in history, and record warm temperatures were observed during spring over the Western Canadian Arctic. Spring 2010 was the warmest in the region since 1948; some regions of the Western Canadian Arctic were more than 6°C (11°F) above average. These warm conditions helped break the ice up early in the Northwest Passage. Warm conditions continued this summer over both the Northwest and Northeast Passages, with temperatures averaging 1 - 2°C above average over the majority of the region. As observed in previous years, contributing to this year’s melt was the presence of much warmer than average ocean waters invading the Arctic from both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and the deposition of black soot on the ice, which absorbs sunlight and heats up the ice. Lack of sunshine and natural wind patterns this summer helped counteract the melting, though, compared to the record melt year of 2007. Still, 2010 is on track come in 2nd or 3rd place for the lowest summertime Arctic sea ice extent on record. The past six years have had the six lowest Arctic ice extents on record, and this summer’s melting season took a huge toll on the amount of thick, multi-year old ice, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Modeling results from the University of Washington Polar Science Center (Figure 5) suggest that the volume of Arctic sea ice is at a record low for this time of year. The loss of so much old, thick ice this year makes it increasing likely that Arctic sea ice will suffer a record retreat that surpasses 2007’s, sometime in the next ten years. We are still on track to see the Arctic sea ice completely disappear in summer by 2030, as predicted by a number of Arctic sea ice experts.

…

But Antarctic sea ice is at a record high!
Climate change contrarians like to diminish the importance of Arctic sea ice loss by pointing out that in recent years, Antarctic sea ice extent has hit several record highs, including in July of 2010. They fail to mention, though, the fact that ocean temperatures in the Antarctic sea ice region have warmed significantly in recent decades–and faster than the global average temperature rise! So how can sea ice increase when ocean temperatures are warming so dramatically? This topic is discussed in detail by one of my favorite bloggers, physicist John Cook over at skepticalscience.com. In his words:

“There are several contributing factors. One is the drop in ozone levels over Antarctica. The hole in the ozone layer above the South Pole has caused cooling in the stratosphere (Gillet 2003). A side-effect is a strengthening of the cyclonic winds that circle the Antarctic continent (Thompson 2002). The wind pushes sea ice around, creating areas of open water known as polynyas. More polynyas leads to increased sea ice production (Turner 2009).

Another contributor is changes in ocean circulation. The Southern Ocean consists of a layer of cold water near the surface and a layer of warmer water below. Water from the warmer layer rises up to the surface, melting sea ice. However, as air temperatures warm, the amount of rain and snowfall also increases. This freshens the surface waters, leading to a surface layer less dense than the saltier, warmer water below. The layers become more stratified and mix less. Less heat is transported upwards from the deeper, warmer layer. Hence less sea ice is melted (Zhang 2007). ”

This counter-intuitive result shows how complicated our climate system is. Climate change contrarians are masters at obscuring the truth by taking counter-intuitive climate events like this out of context, and twisting them into a warped but believable non-scientific narrative. Lawmakers tend to hear a lot of these narratives, since the lobbying wings of the oil and gas industry spent $175 million last year to help convince Congress not to regulate their industry. This number does not include the tens of millions more spent by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, coal industry, and other business interests intent upon stymying legislation that might cut into profits of the oil, coal, and gas industry. For comparison, the lobbying money spent by environmental groups in 2009 was approximately $22.5 million. Spending for PR efforts aimed at influencing opinion on climate change issues probably has a similar disparity. This is a major reason why you may have heard, “Hey, Antarctic sea ice is increasing, so why worry about Arctic sea ice loss?”

Commentary
Diminishing the importance of Arctic sea ice loss by calling attention to Antarctic sea ice gain is like telling someone to ignore the fire smoldering in their attic, and instead go appreciate the coolness of the basement, because there is no fire there. Planet Earth’s attic is on fire. This fire is almost certain to grow much worse. When the summertime Arctic sea ice starts melting completely a few years or decades hence, the Arctic will warm rapidly, potentially leading to large releases of methane gas stored in permafrost and in undersea “methane ice” deposits. Methane is 20 - 25 times more potent than CO2 at warming the climate, meaning that the fire in Earth’s attic will inexorably spread to the rest of the globe. To deny that the fire exists, or that the fire is natural, or that the fire is too expensive to fight are all falsehoods. This fire requires our immediate and urgent attention. Volunteer efforts to fight the fire by burning less coal, oil, and gas are laudable, but insufficient. It’s like trying to fight a 3-alarm blaze with a garden hose. Every time you reduce your use of oil, gas, or coal, you make the price of those fuels cheaper, encouraging someone else to burn them. Global warming will not slow down until Big Government puts a price on oil, coal and gas–a price that starts out low but increases every year. This can be done via emissions trading, a “fee and dividend” approach, or other means. People are rightfully mistrustful of the ability of Big Government to solve problems, but we don’t have a choice. The alternative is to geoengineer our climate–an extremely risky solution. It is time to pay the big bucks and send out the fire engines, before the conflagration gets totally out of control. Consider the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 and the Pakistani floods of 2010 a warning. These sorts of extreme events will grow far more common in the decades to come, because of human-caused climate change.

I could not agree more strongly with everything I quoted above, particularly the “Commentary” section.

I find it astonishing that so many people still fail to understand the basic facts of our situation:

• Humanity is warming the planet and severely altering the climate with tens of billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year.
• Continuing on this path means leads inexorably to an incredibly broad and painful set of impacts on human beings.
• The only way to avoid the worst of what’s to come is through collective action, which means direct government intervention in our lives and markets to a degree not considered “possible” in recent memory in the US and many other countries.
• Those of us screaming about this do not like that answer, but we hate it less than we do the alternative. Personally, I would dearly love to see the “magical free market” solve this problem for us, but that’s a Libertarian/right-winger wet dream that has precisely zero chance of happening. Want proof? Look at the way we’re accelerating as we near the sustainability cliff, all thanks to a “free market” and the influence large economic actors can buy in a horrible twisted political system. Anyone who claims the “free market” will fix our climate change (and peak oil and food and water supply and …) problem is either lying or is so utterly at the mercy of ideology and therefore clueless that he or she should be ignored.
• The timing of this situation is one of our worst enemies. We’ve already emitted enough CO2 to trigger widespread, painful impacts in the coming decades; shutting down further emissions, meaning literally a 100% overnight reduction, would not be enough to avoid it. The best we can hope for is to keep those impacts from becoming vastly worse by taking action before they arrive. This is biggest single chance humanity will ever have to move from adolescence to adulthood.

But what the hell, it’s fun to forge an identity by making fun of the president and environmentalists and climate scientists and being loud and obnoxious and against something, all as a direct consequence of your willful blindness. And look how well it works out for teenagers who drink and drive or drop out of school or do any of the other insane things adults are always telling them not to do. How can anyone argue with that logic?

Andy Revkin, of the NY Times’ dotEarth blog, has once again proved to all of us, like me, who think we finally have figured out where he’s coming from that we’re really wrong. This time around, it’s a dE post, On Harvard Misconduct, Climate Research and Trust, that doesn’t have me shaking my head, but banging it on the nearest hard surface.

I was all set to gear up say something about Revkin’s piece, but luckily, Steve Easterbrook not only beat me to the punch but did a better job than I would have. I simply cannot recommend Steve’s post, When did ignorance become a badge of honour for journalists?, and Revkin’s original, obviously, highly enough (the strikeout plus the italics for emphasis are from the original):

Here’s an appalling article by Andy Revkin on dotEarth which epitomizes everything that is wrong with media coverage of climate change. Far from using his position to educate and influence the public by seeking the truth, journalists like Revkin now seem to have taken to just making shit up, reporting what he reads in blogs as the truth, rather than investigating for himself what scientists actually do.

Revkin kicks off by citing a Harvard cognitive scientist found guilty of academic misconduct, and connecting it with “assertions that climate research suffered far too much from group think, protective tribalism and willingness to spin findings to suit an environmental agenda”. Note the juxtaposition. On the one hand, a story of a lone scientist who turned out to be corrupt (which is rare, but does happen from time to time). On the other hand, a set of insinuations about thousands of climate scientists, with no evidence whatsoever. Groupthink? Tribalism? Spin? Can Revkin substantiate these allegations? Does he even try? Of course not. He just repeats a lot of gossip from a bunch of politically motivated blogs, and demonstrates his own total ignorance of how scientists work.

That’s just the opening salvo, and it gets much uglier for Revkin from that point onward. Considering the seriousness of the matter at hand, Steve uses Appropriately Adult Words, so anyone offended by AAWs should consider him/herself duly warned. I expect Joe Romm to comment on Revkin’s post soon enough, and he will likely be even more pyrotechnic; consider Steve’s response the warm-up act.

Rather than merely toss this incident over the wall to you as a “Yeah! What Steve said!!!” post, let me use it as a springboard to talk about something I was already planning to mention today or tomorrow.

You probably noticed the lack of posts this week. I spent the last three days near one of New York’s glorious Finger Lakes, drinking wine, eating the insanely good garlic knots from Jerlando’s in Watkins Glen, and, most important of all, talking with my college sweetheart about several deep topics. The outcome of said discussions was interesting, to say the least. I’ll skip over all the angst and navel introspection and give you the bullet-point version:

• It is clearer than ever to me that no one is telling the mainstream public what they desperately need to hear about our overall sustainability situation, including climate change, energy, water, food, biodiversity, ocean acidification, etc. There are many people doing excellent work in individual portions of that spectrum, but I’ve yet to see anyone write The Book That Needs To Be Written. I had hoped that a new edition of Limits to Growth (as the authors promised in the last update) would be that book, but one of the authors tells me that they aren’t writing it. (And it likely would have been too reserved had they written it.) I had also hoped that Bill McKibben’s Eaarth would be that book, but it turned out to be yet another example of an excellent but far too mild book in this arena. (I’ve never met Bill, but based on his writing and interviews, and the videos of his speeches I’ve encountered, I think he’s easily one of the most decent human beings in the field. That’s a very serious and nearly impossible to overcome handicap.) Many other books of late by people like Hansen, Pooley, Oreskes, et [many] al. are each, in their own ways, terrific additions to the sustainability literature that we all should read and promote. But none of them is TBTNTBW.
• The mainstreamers need to be shocked shitless by the indisputable facts as we know them and the consensus view of where we’re headed plus the technology and policy needed to avoid one hell of a collapse in the next century. As I put it to my wife during our lakeside retreat, we need the message to feel like being grabbed by the neck and repeatedly punched in the face. People have to be so desperate to stop it that they seriously examine what they and everyone else is doing, and then start to make the needed changes. The situation is so urgent, and the forces against change, including the fossil fuel companies and greedy, myopic, opportunistic right wing politicians, so determined to stop us from acting in our own best interest that nothing less will do the trick.
• You can’t be nice and repeatedly punch someone in the face. You have to be willing to piss off people, to not care if you’re seen as “too extreme” or “alarmist” or “striking the wrong tone”, even though you’re sticking to the facts. This is not a trade off we should make grudgingly (as I was until the last few days, in fact, much to my embarrassment), but one we should eagerly embrace because it will greatly increase our odds of success against the deniers and liars.
• The obvious conclusion is that I should pursue writing TBTNTBW and make whatever sacrifices that dictates in my other work. Fewer blog posts here and fewer comments on other blogs seem like a virtual certainty, for example. I am also considering killing this blog entirely and launching a new one. I plan to withdraw from much of the ridiculous back and forth over clowns like Monckton, except when I feel like ridiculing someone; there are so many people on “our side” dealing with the worst of the deniers and the infinite mysteries like Revkin that my lack of contribution there won’t be noticed, let alone missed. There is at least one very significant alternative use of my time, as detailed above.
• This is a very radical shift for me. I’ve been writing this blog, in one incarnation or another, for seven years, and during that time I’ve told myself countless times to “be nice” and “keep my emotions in check” and “don’t let myself look like an alarmist”, etc. What a colossal mistake and fucking waste of time. If ever there were an issue that deserved the most accurate, honest, and complete treatment, the tangled mess known of our sustainability challenge is it. “Being nice” is nothing less than unilateral disarmament, and at a time when we’re facing extremely well funded protectors of the business as usual path that leads directly to billions of lost lives and soul twisting levels of human suffering.
• I don’t know exactly how this will unfold in the coming weeks and months. I expect to be even more surprised than you by what happens.

I triple dog dare anyone here to say you don’t wish you could do this.

I can juggle (3 balls with two hands, 2 balls with either left or right hand, some minor flourishes), and I was about six shades of green 30 seconds into this video clip.

As always, the answer depends on semantics. If by “greenhouse” one means a completely controlled, artificial environment, operated by human beings, i.e. a big machine for maintaining an optimal growing environment for particular types of plants, then the answer is, by definition, “yes”. If you mean the warming environment, where humans have triggered climate change and now Mother Nature and Father Physics are doing whatever the hell they damn well please, then the answer is an emphatic “no”.

Which is a roundabout way of pointing out yet another nasty surprise from the world of scientific research. Instead of being iteration number 8,374 of “it’s worse than we thought”, this one goes into the category of, “we thought it was better and it’s actually worse”.

Drought Drives Decade-Long Decline in Plant Growth:

Earth has done an ecological about-face: Global plant productivity that once flourished under warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline, struck by the stress of drought.

NASA-funded researchers Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running, of the University of Montana in Missoula, discovered the global shift during an analysis of NASA satellite data. Compared with a six-percent increase spanning two earlier decades, the recent ten-year decline is slight — just one percent. The shift, however, could impact food security, biofuels, and the global carbon cycle.

“We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested that global warming might actually help plant growth around the world,” Running said.

“These results are extraordinarily significant because they show that the global net effect of climatic warming on the productivity of terrestrial vegetation need not be positive — as was documented for the 1980’s and 1990’s,” said Diane Wickland, of NASA Headquarters and manager of NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology research program.

Conventional wisdom based on previous research held that land plant productivity was on the rise. A 2003 paper in Science led by then University of Montana scientist Ramakrishna Nemani (now at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.) showed that global terrestrial plant productivity increased as much as six percent between 1982 and 1999. That’s because for nearly two decades, temperature, solar radiation and water availability — influenced by climate change — were favorable for growth.

…

“This is a pretty serious warning that warmer temperatures are not going to endlessly improve plant growth,” Running said.

…

“This past decade’s net decline in terrestrial productivity illustrates that a complex interplay between temperature, rainfall, cloudiness, and carbon dioxide, probably in combination with other factors such as nutrients and land management, will determine future patterns and trends in productivity,” Wickland said.

…

“The potential that future warming would cause additional declines does not bode well for the ability of the biosphere to support multiple societal demands for agricultural production, fiber needs, and increasingly, biofuel production,” Zhao said.

“Even if the declining trend of the past decade does not continue, managing forests and croplands for multiple benefits to include food production, biofuel harvest, and carbon storage may become exceedingly challenging in light of the possible impacts of such decadal-scale changes,” Wickland said.

The article includes this illustration:

A snapshot of Earth’s plant productivity in 2003 shows regions of increased productivity (green) and decreased productivity (red). Tracking productivity between 2000 and 2009, researchers found a global net decrease due to regional drought. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Yet again: The primary vector for the impacts of climate change on humanity will be water. Water for agriculture, personal use, and hydroelectric generation will all be threatened, thanks to shifts in rainfall patterns and the decline and disappearance of glaciers that provide summer water flows to critical parts of the world. Water will also do more damage from flooding, as seen in Pakistan, China, and parts of the US among others this year, and sea level rise that will threaten coastal cropland with salt intrusion.

The only real question is which specific effects will hit which parts of the world and in what order.

The results of this study shouldn’t be too great a surprise. We know that the Earth System is an extremely complex and highly interrelated set of subsystems, so we should expect to see cascading effects that result in opposing forces (e.g. warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons vs. drier conditions) with a net result not always to our liking. When you kick an essentially stable system as hard as we have by pushing the atmospheric CO2 level to roughly 390 ppm in such a short time (compared to that needed for species to adapt to a changing environment), you tip over a lot of dominoes, whether you know they exist or not.

In more concrete terms, this finding, assuming it’s held up by ensuing work[1], is very bad news.[2] As it becomes increasingly difficult to grow crops in some parts of the world, the impact of individual events, like the heat wave in Russia that’s expected to reduce their wheat production by one third, or about 35 million tons, will be greatly magnified. If some productive food growing areas of the world take a big hit when there’s a surplus of food worldwide, then we still have a sizable challenge to finance and deliver aid to the stricken area, but it can still be done. If that surplus is eroded by drought then our supply buffer will be reduced, possibly to dangerous levels. And at that point humanity suddenly is faced with some truly unpleasant questions.

[1] Speaking of other work, this isn’t the only very recent study that found climate change to be a less than universally favorable condition for plants and their CO2 uptake: Trees Soaking Up Less Carbon Than Expected, Study Finds

[2] Anyone here care to guess how long it will take the deniers to cherry pick the results and say that “a major study in Science found that Northern Hemisphere plants have continued to thrive” and conveniently overlook that the worldwide net plant productivity was down?

Thanks to all the (deserved) attention we’ve been paying to the floods in Pakistan, the landslides in China, the heat wave and fires in Russia, the roughly 300 hundred forest fires in British Columbia, etc., it’s no surprise that peak oil isn’t right at the top of everyone’s mind. Of course, reality doesn’t care what is or isn’t on our radar screen, and the world’s oil reserves are depleted by another 85 million barrels every day.

But it appears that some people are paying attention, says the Guardian in Peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks (emphasis added):

Speculation that [UK] government ministers are far more concerned about a future supply crunch than they have admitted has been fuelled by the revelation that they are canvassing views from industry and the scientific community about “peak oil”.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is also refusing to hand over policy documents about “peak oil” – the point at which oil production reaches its maximum and then declines – under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, despite releasing others in which it admits “secrecy around the topic is probably not good”.

Experts say they have received a letter from David Mackay, chief scientific adviser to the DECC, asking for information and advice on peak oil amid a growing campaign from industrialists such as Sir Richard Branson for the government to put contingency plans in place to deal with any future crisis.

…

Yet the note of the workshop distributed last year talks about secrecy around the topic being “probably not good”, although it also suggests officials stick to the line that the “International Energy Agency is an authoritative source in this field” and stresses how the IEA believes there is sufficient reserves to meet demand till 2030 as long as investment in new reserves is maintained.

But the Paris-based organisation has come under increasing scrutiny from a growing group of critics who believe the IEA’s optimism is misplaced. Last year the Guardian revealed that the IEA was also riven with dissent over the issue with senior staff members privately telling newspaper they thought the official numbers on future global oil supply were over-optimistic.

The IEA predicted in the 2009 World Energy Outlook published last November that oil demand would grow from 85m barrels a day today to 88m in 2015 and reach 105m in 2030. The organisation presumes the challenge of meeting that demand can equally be met by a mixture of higher Opec production and considerably more output from unconventional sources.

But an internal IEA source said: “Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible, but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources.”

First of all, the fact that such a workshop was held doesn’t prove that peak oil is real or imminent, although I would argue that both points are true. But it does show that some government officials are at least aware of the problem and consider it a serious situation. That’s a pretty small victory compared to the scale of our current sustainability challenges, but it’s better than nothing.

I suspect that post peak, by perhaps 5 or 10 years, we’ll hear a lot about the behind-the-scenes discussions at the IEA and other groups and even governments, and the overall picture will be infuriating. We’ll hear about repeated attempts by people to raise the issue with their organizational superiors, only to be shunned and silenced. We may even hear from one or two individuals who has the courage to say along the lines of, “We didn’t see peak oil because we didn’t want to see it.”

The problem here, of course, is that old bugaboo, timing. As many have pointed out before, if we’re “lucky” and the peak in world oil production really is 20 years away, that still leaves us very little time to transition away from it, given the extent of the developed world’s dependence on it and the time needed to convert country-level infrastructures. But if those who think we’re much closer to a production peak turn out to be right, then we have a problem of staggering proportions.

The one glimmer of good news is that there’s a fundamental difference between peak oil and climate change: When we de-oil some segment of an economy, it’s done and its history doesn’t matter. I.e. trade in your gasoline powered car for a Nissan Leaf and the world gets 100% of the benefit of that conversion, regardless of how much gasoline your old car burned in the years you drove it. In climate change we’re dealing with not just the CO2 we’re emitting right now, but the legacy emissions of the last 200+ years which will continue to cause warming and its attendant knock-on effects for a long time.

[PLEASE do not just skim this post and then move on to the next thing competing for your time. I normally don’t beg for eyeballs, but I’m going to do that, and more, this time, because of the severity of the situation in Pakistan.]

It’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of the tragedy that’s still unfolding in Pakistan.

Some excerpts from just two of the dozens of articles on the Pakistan floods…

Pakistan floods are a ’slow-motion tsunami’ - Ban Ki-moon (emphasis added):

The United Nations general secretary, Ban Ki-moon, has appealed for swifter aid to provide immediate relief in food, shelter and clean water for the millions affected by the worst monsoon rains on record.

“Make no mistake, this is a global disaster,” Ban told a hurriedly convened session of the UN general assembly. “Pakistan is facing a slow-motion tsunami. Its destructive powers will accumulate and grow with time,” he warned.

Weather forecasts have said there could be four more weeks of rain, which will add to the flood problems.

The UN has appealed for $460m (£295m) in aid and donors have so far given about half that figure. But the secretary-general said all of the money was needed immediately to help victims over the next three months.

…

But tonight Mitchell, who has recently visited Pakistan to inspect the effect British aid has had so far, told the UN general assembly in New York that the international community had to do more. He told the UN it was “deeply depressing” that the international community was “only now waking up to the true scale of this disaster”.

Flood Disaster May Require Largest Aid Effort in Modern History:

One of the largest humanitarian relief efforts ever attempted is now mobilizing to help Pakistan cope with what its government and U.N. agencies are calling the worst natural disaster in modern memory.

The death toll is much smaller than in past disasters: About 1,600 are believed dead so far. But experts say initial assessments show the scale of damage and human suffering left by torrential monsoon rains over the past three weeks dwarfs the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, 2005 Kashmir earthquake, 2008 Cyclone Nargis disaster in Burma, and Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti — combined.

“What we face in Pakistan today is a natural calamity of unprecedented proportions,” Pakistan’s foreign minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, said during a special U.N. session to address the crisis, held here yesterday. “These are the worst monsoon floods in living memory.”

Debate is heating up over what caused the catastrophe, with experts pointing to deforestation, intensive land-use practices or mismanagement of the Indus River as possible causes. But top U.N. and Pakistani government officials are now clearly pointing to climate change as the principal culprit.

“Climate change, with all its severity and unpredictability, has become a reality for 170 million Pakistanis,” said Qureshi in his appeal for aid. “The present situation in Pakistan reconfirms our extreme vulnerability to the adverse impacts of climate change.”

…

Officials say about 800,000 to 900,000 homes have been destroyed or made unlivable. The government believes 4.6 million have been left homeless in just two provinces, Punjab and Sindh.

Areas in the country’s north and northwest have been hardest hit, especially Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where several communities have been cut off from the outside world after floodwaters washed out key bridges. About 70 percent of bridges and roads have been destroyed here, officials report. Pakistan’s government says little transportation infrastructure remains in the Swat valley, the scene of intense fighting between the army and Islamic insurgents in 2009.

Pakistan’s agricultural economy, the source of income for about 70 percent of the population, has borne the brunt of the damage. “This is where we have been hit the most,” said Qureshi.

More than 17 million acres of farmland was inundated, Qureshi said. U.N. officials figure that more than 200,000 head of livestock have been killed in the flooding. And the nation’s cotton crop, an important source of export earnings, has largely been wiped out after 1 million acres of the crop was lost to floods in Punjab.

The flood disaster could also exacerbate global food prices, in particular wheat. The government of Pakistan says the season’s harvest is pretty much gone and 1 million metric tons of wheat that was sitting in storage is now gone. Droughts in Russia, Australia and Canada had already sent wheat prices soaring in recent weeks.

What can you do if you live in the US or Canada or Europe or Japan or any of the other developed countries comfortably detached from the tragedy in Pakistan? Simple: Give money to a worthy relief effort.

My wife and I have always been fans of the American Red Cross, thanks in no small part to the help we saw them give so many people during the 1972 floods that Pennsylvania, among other areas in the NE US. So, we are contributing through their web site. You can also give through the International Committee of the Red Cross. Their article on the Pakistan flooding is here, and there’s a contribution link at the top of that page.

Americans can check the US State Department’s page for contributions, which has two of those “text to contribute” numbers, plus links to several relief organizations.

So don’t just sit there and feel bad about the Pakistan floods for 10 seconds and then go watch YouTube videos or play some brain cell killing game on facebook. Instead, take a couple of minutes and do something that will materially help human beings who are already in dire need and will likely be in even worse shape in the coming months. No one can demand that you get on a plane and fly thousands of miles to Pakistan to help distribute food and medical supplies, but I can demand this of you. If it helps get you over the hump, imagine that for this week this site isn’t free — you have to make a contribution of whatever amount you can afford. Yes, you’re on the honor system here, but I sincerely hope that at least some of you will seize the opportunity to do some good.

I mentioned in the title of this post that we can learn from Pakistan, too. What’s there to learn?

First, you’ll learn something about yourself after you respond (or fail to respond) to my plea for contributions.

Second, look at the world as we know it in August 2010, and think about where we, as in all of us, are headed in the coming decades. You can argue until your voice cracks or your fingers bleed about the degree to which the incredible heat and fires in Russia or the flooding in Pakistan are attributable to climate change, but the bottom line is undeniable: As we continue to pour astonishing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and the climate continues to respond in wildly unpredictable ways, events like these and many more just as awful and worse will happen with rising frequency. That will mean more direct human impact, more pleas for contributions from people lucky enough not to be directly devastated (this time, at least), and endless political debates about proximal vs. root causes of tragedies, e.g. are the deaths from the latest horror due to bad development patterns or climate change.

As the evidence and the terrible costs pile up, will we learn the lesson, exhibit the basic enlightened self-interest that is the hallmark of responsible adults, and take appropriate action? Stay tuned…

It has just come to my attention that the scitizen.com repost of my recent piece on Pakistan (their version: The compounding crisis in Pakistan, my version: The compounding crisis in Pakistan) made it look as if I had plagiarized two sources, when I had not.

(I also took a snapshot of the page via WebCite: http://www.webcitation.org/5s7hcoRvR, in case someone at scitizen.com completely deletes the article in question.)

I just moments ago sent the following note to scitizen.com via their “Contact” page:

I’m the Lou Grinzo you list as a contributor. After reviewing the version of my recent posting on Pakistan you posted, I am requesting that you immediately stop using my posts on my site, The Cost of Energy.

In the Pakistan piece (http://scitizen.com/future-energies/the-compounding-crisis-in-pakistan_a-14-3565.html) some critical parts of the formatting have been lost. Specifically, my use of “quote boxes” and links to indicate when I was quoting another source was lost. This makes it look like I am plagiarizing someone else’s work, which i most clearly did not do.

A much less important but still significant point is that you simply appended the footnote at the bottom of my post as a continuation of the text itself. Someone even took the time to delete the footnote indicator in the text and at the beginning of the note itself and add a paragraph break at that point in the text.

Such treatment of my work is not acceptable.

Please stop using my material immediately.

You may reach me at [e-mail address] if you have any questions about this matter or to send me confirmation that you will stop using my work.

One site that doesn’t (yet) seem to have a large following, but certainly should, is Climate Ethics. If you sometimes tire of the verbal jousting that absorbs so much bandwidth on energy and climate blogs, and would like to find a place that has fewer, but longer and much more thoughtful posts, give CE a spin.

The latest post on CE, from Donald Brown, On The Moral Imperatives Of Speaking Publicly About the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change-And How It Must Be Done, is particularly worthwhile (emphasis added):

We believe that those who understand the ethical dimensions of climate change have a duty to speak up strongly because with knowledge comes responsibility.

Now, one important reservation needs to be made, however, at this point. We believe that identifying the ethical issues entailed by climate change arguments will lead to three possibilities and all need to acknowledge this:

One, on some issues there will be an overlapping consensus among diverse ethical theories about what should be done.

…

When it comes, however, to what is “fair” there is a reasonable debate on what justice requires. And so once one focuses on “fairness,” there may be a conflict, as there sometimes is among ethical theories, on what “fairness” requires. This is the second possibility, namely that there is a conflict about what perfect justice requires.

…

The third possibility is actually, however, the most important type of issues about which we need public engagement. That is even in cases where it is difficult to determine what perfect justice requires, there are proposals and positions on these issues that all known justice and ethical positions would condemn as being deeply ethically problematic. On these issues we may not know what justice requires but we can spot injustice.

…

In taking about what ethics requires when speaking out about climate change, however, we must speak up about the dangerous, irresponsible, and hugely harmful way in which disinformation about climate change science is being disseminated around the world. (In fact words fail us about how to articulate the immensity of the irresponsibility of what we see going on in this regard; we would call it a gross crime against humanity but realize that many of the people actually doing this believe what they are saying because they have been told it by others. We plan to write a future post about how to classify this. We invite others to help us with the appropriate metaphors for this. In some ways criminal is not strong enough, and in other ways it is inappropriate .)

All parties have a duty to: (a) defer at least initially to the peer reviewed science, (b) not make claims that are inconsistent with what has been clearly refuted, and, (c) particularly not assert that conclusions about human-induced warming have been refuted or debunked when: (1) every Academy of Science in the World, (2) the vast majority of climate scientists actually doing climate change science (above 97% according to two recent papers), and, (3) almost all of the scientific organizations in the world that have relevant expertise have supported the consensus view which has three parts:

(1) The world is warming

(2) It very likely human caused and in fact there are multiple lines of robust evidence pointing to human causation

(3) Under business-as-usual great and perhaps unimaginable harms could happen (notice we did not claim we know they will happen)

This is just a taste, hopefully enough to get you to click through, read it all, and subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed.

As for this post by Donald Brown, I think it’s fair to say he shares my very low opinion of deniers, even if he expresses it in a much classier way. (The end of his post is particularly strong in this regard.)

I realize this is a bit afield from the topics and approaches I normally write about here; I try to stick to the “feeds an’ speeds” (i.e. the numbers) and the brute force economics of making desperately needed, sweeping changes to society. I do that largely because that’s my comfort zone, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about ethical issues and intergenerational responsibility. I doubt this post marks a major change in what I’ll be writing about or how I’ll address any given topic, but I expect to come back to it once in a while.

The US Dept. of Energy issued their monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook on AUgust 10th, which includes this text:

Forecast economic growth combined with increased use of coal and natural gas is expected to contribute to increases in fossil-fuel CO2 emissions of 3.4 percent in 2010 (U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Growth Chart). Projected coal-related CO2 emissions increase by 6.0 percent in 2010 primarily a result of increased electricity sector coal usage. Higher natural gas consumption in the industrial and electric power sectors is expected to lead to a 3.9-percent increase in CO2 emissions from natural gas. Demand for petroleum in the transportation sector (motor gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel) combined with continued industrial sector fossil fuel demand growth contribute to the projected 0.8-percent increase in fossil-fuel CO2 emissions in 2011. However, even with these increases, projected CO2 emissions in 2010 and 2011 remain below their level in any year from 1999 through 2008.

and links to this graphic:

Add your own commentary. I got nothin’…

The flooding in Pakistan is a truly horrific event, and even worse could be coming:

But the biggest problem may be an escalating food shortage. According to a report issued on 14 August by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 3.2 million hectares of standing crops and 200,000 head of livestock have been lost, along with most food supplies stored in affected homes. These figures will only grow, compounded by the fact that Sindh is one of the country’s main agricultural areas.

The situation can be partly salvaged if the winter wheat crop is planted by September, but that depends on clearing the sediment dumped by the floods. “Pakistan has the largest continuously managed irrigation system in the world,” says James Wescoat of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now the system is almost certainly silted up. Clearing it will be a huge task, especially now that floods and landslides have knocked out many roads.

Even more striking than the current misery and the potential food problem mentioned above, is that Funding Lags to Aid Pakistan’s Millions of Displaced:

Nick Clegg, the UK’s deputy prime minister, has called the international response to the floods “absolutely pitiful”.

He noted that the scale of the disaster is such that the public is struggling to understand just how great the need for aid is, and that that may be why donations are low compared to the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, the January Haiti earthquake or the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

Other reasons may include the slow pace of floods, compared to more sudden and “dramatic” earthquakes and tsunamis, and the relatively low death toll of 1,600.

Britain is currently at the top of the donor list, having given around 26 million dollars in relief, closely followed by Australia, the U.S., Canada and Saudi Arabia.

There has been some criticism over India’s hesitancy in coming to Pakistan’s aid, prompting claims that a political spat may be at the root of the belated and small pledge of five million dollars, which is only a tiny fraction of India’s 500-million-dollar aid budget for the year.

Critics claim that Pakistan was quick to help India after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, which killed 25,000 people.

I don’t want to wade into the relations between India and Pakistan, which haven’t always been the best, to put it mildly, but this seems like a perfect opportunity for India to improve that situation. Nothing will change hearts and minds quicker than generosity in a time of need.

In a larger sense, the overall level of aid is indeed “absolutely pitiful.” Why might that be?

Many parts of the world are still feeling less than economically robust, which clearly reduces the contributions from individuals, although I doubt that explains more than a small portion of the anomaly.

The more cynical among us (but not me, I hasten to add) might want to point to racism, an all too common reason for many of humanity’s sins against humanity, but the examples called out in the article of events that triggered greater amounts of aid seem to kill that notion.

One potential factor that came to mind was “compassion fatigue” (or “donor fatigue”). Coming toward the end of what feels like a long season of terrible news from Russia, the Gulf of Mexico, and generally miserable heat and humidity in places like most of the US, would also tend to suppress giving. But again, that’s only private contributions, not that from governments.

Pakistan hasn’t received nearly the amount of press coverage in the US that one might expect, yet another factor putting downward pressure on private donations.

Frankly, I’m stumped.

Take a step back from current events and ask what happens in the next decade or so if such tragedies become much more routine. Coastal flooding (putting the food and water for millions in Bangladesh at risk, for example), tropical storms, crop shortfalls because of drought and heat, even a lack of water for personal consumption and use as mountain glaciers, “natures reservoirs”, continue to disappear all have the potential for major, near term human impacts as climate change sinks its fangs ever deeper into humanity.

We talk a lot about the costs of climate change impacts — with emissions X and climate change Y we’ll have impacts totaling Z dollars/year by 2050, etc. But those are very high level estimates that gloss over some thorny details, like exactly where those dollars come from, who makes the decisions to donate, and how might those donations change according to factors unrelated to each event, some of those reasons being very ugly.

How long would it take for people in “rich” countries to see one or more such “natural” tragedies every year before they would simply stop caring and stop giving, and worst of all, stop supporting decisions by their elected officials to give? Would we reach a Machiavellian point where people in the US (or Europe or Canada or Australia or …) say nothing and give nothing, while thinking, “the world already has too many people; better they go than me.”[1] I realize how blindingly offensive that thought is, and even beyond that its surface level vileness is absurdity, given how much more people in the countries I listed consume and emit than the average person on the afflicted countries.

But could it happen? Could one of the worst impacts of being pounded year after year by climate change be a change to our very nature? I’m almost afraid to find out the answer.

[1] Given some of the truly disgusting things we hear already from some of the right wingers on talk radio, it would be tempting to say we’re nearly there already. I’m making an exception for those miscreants and assuming, perhaps too generously, that they won’t really mean it when they’re the first ones to say such things publicly.

If you follow the energy and climate news you’ve probably noticed the occasional article about some big coal plant being canceled. This is usually positioned as a reason to celebrate for those of use concerned about climate change. I really hate to say this, but climb down from the table, take off that ridiculous party hat, and pay attention, because Killer Koal isn’t going anywhere, as the AP points out in, Old-style coal plants expanding (emphasis added):

An Associated Press examination of U.S. Department of Energy records and information provided by utilities and trade groups shows that more than 30 traditional coal plants have been built since 2008 or are under construction.

The construction wave stretches from Arizona to Illinois and South Carolina to Washington, and comes despite growing public wariness over the high environmental and social costs of fossil fuels, demonstrated by tragic mine disasters in West Virginia, the Gulf oil spill and wars in the Middle East.

The expansion, the industry’s largest in two decades, represents an acknowledgment that highly touted “clean coal” technology is still a long ways from becoming a reality and underscores a renewed confidence among utilities that proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail. The Senate last month scrapped the leading bill to curb carbon emissions following opposition from Republicans and coal-state Democrats.

…

Approval of the plants has come from state and federal agencies that do not factor in emissions of carbon dioxide, considered the leading culprit behind global warming. Scientists and environmentalists have tried to stop the coal rush with some success, turning back dozens of plants through lawsuits and other legal challenges.

…

As a result, current construction is far more modest than projected a few years ago when 151 new plants were forecast by federal regulators. But analysts say the projects that prevailed are more than enough to ensure coal’s continued dominance in the power industry for years to come.

Sixteen large plants have fired up since 2008 and 16 more are under construction, according to records examined by the AP.

Combined, they will produce an estimated 17,900 megawatts of electricity, sufficient to power up to 15.6 million homes — roughly the number of homes in California and Arizona combined.

They also will generate about 125 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, according to emissions figures from utilities and the Center for Global Development. That’s the equivalent of putting 22 million additional automobiles on the road.

The new plants do not capture carbon dioxide. That’s despite the stimulus spending and an additional $687 million spent by the Department of Energy on clean coal programs.

A few observations…

The AP dared to directly connect fossil fuels and “wars in the Middle East”? Wow, that’s one I don’t see often (enough).

The additional 125 million tons of CO2 emissions is about a 2% increase in all US emissions, or a 3.5% increase in emissions from electricity generation. Those sound like small amounts, but at a time when we should be struggling to cut every ton possible, any increase emissions, even if it’s “only” 125 million tons, is a big deal because it represents that much more we have to cut somewhere else.

The relevant agencies don’t take CO2 emissions into account? Let me be perhaps the millionth or so person to suggest we pass some laws to change that, along with a time machine so we can make the new rules go into effect around the mid-1970’s.

As a very round number, assume that a new coal plant will be in operation for 50 years. So these plants will be cranking out electrons and CO2 until 2060. Just wondering — what percentage of people who read this site reasonably expect to still be alive in 2060?

I don’t find the comments in the article about what assumptions the coal companies are making about legislation to be convincing. The article says it’s an acknowledgment that “clean coal” technology isn’t close. I think it’s just as likely to be proof that the plant operators think existing plants will be grandfathered in when legislation is eventually passed in another five or ten or who knows how many years. In short, they’re trying to build as many plants without emissions controls or CCS as possible now, on the assumption that they’ll be able to keep running them with only relatively affordable upgrades being forced on them. The “if you force us to spend this money, we’ll be able to convince the public service commission to let us hike rates, and the voters will send you packing in the next election” argument convinces a lot of politicians to go easy on power companies.

Overall, I think this article is one more piece of evidence that shows how insanely hard it will be for the US to get on an emissions reduction path anywhere near what’s in our own best interest.

Pete Sinclair’s latest Crock video is a must see (as they all are, frankly), even though this one features Christopher Monckton:

From Circle of Blue, Infographic: Coal and Water – A Resource Mismatch:

And trust me on this — if you haven’t seen Niagara Falls in person, you can’t really appreciate the reference to it in this graphic.

[I made a really big error in this post, in that I misread the specs page for the Clarian panels and thought the $799 price applied to the 1,000W model, which it clearly doesn’t. I will leave this post and the comments pointing out my error intact.]

If you follow the energy and climate news as obsessively as I suspect at least some of you do, you’ve no doubt seen the recent articles about the coming plug-and-play, home handyperson level solar PV panel that’s coming out soon from Clarian Technologies. A typical example is the piece, Yale Environment 360: Low-Cost Solar Array Developed for Residential Installation:

A Seattle-based company says that it has developed an inexpensive do-it-yourself solar power technology that will enable homeowners to install solar panels on their roofs and then connect them to their power supply by simply plugging a cord into a regular electrical outlet. The company, Clarian Power, is touting its Sunfish system — with prices beginning at $799 — as a major advance in reducing
the high cost of installing home solar power systems, which typically start at $10,000. Clarian says its Sunfish system does not require a dedicated control panel and has built-in circuit protection, and thus does not require an electrician for installation. Users would mount up to five solar panels anywhere on the house, and plug the device into any outlet. The system is Wi-Fi enabled, enabling users to monitor the performance with online software such as the Google PowerMeter. The largest module will be able to generate 150 kilowatt hours per month, company officials say, so it would take five to six modules to produce the roughly 900 kilowatts used by an average American home. Clarian officials say their goal is not to enable homeowners to generate excess electrical capacity, but rather to reduce their monthly energy use and lower their utility bills.

OK, this sounds like a cool idea, and a good way to get a lot of interested consumers over the “hassle hump” of home (or small business) solar PV. No contractors and their bids to deal with, no major work on your house to install it, etc. Of course, we’re talking about a much smaller unit that the typical home PV installation (about 4kW), but as long as the price/kWh generated is reasonable, that’s not too big a deal. (Pop quiz: How many homes in your neighborhood have PV panels today? How much better for everyone would it be if even a third or half of them had a small PV setup turning sunlight into a few hundred Watts? And how much better yet would it be if that became the norm for homes in most parts of the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, etc.?)

Oh yeah — cost per unit of energy produced. A quick look at the Clarian web site finds this page with some specs on the panels involved. Said page says:

• There will be two sizes of module, 200W and 1,000W.
• Expected prices are $599 to $799. (I’m assuming these are the prices for the 200W and 1,000W models, respectively; the web site is a bit vague. See link below.)
• The 200W unit produces 30kWh of energy per month, while the larger model is good for 150kWh/month.
• The units will have a “payback in 3-4 years or less”.

The big model produces five times the output of the smaller one and costs only one third more? That actually makes a certain amount of sense, when you think about the fact that you’re buying a lot more than just a bare solar panel. The stuff to invert the current (turn DC into what you want, which is AC), and tie it in to you house system, frame/mounting hardware, etc. is likely very similar, if not identical, between the units, and that fixed cost portion greatly reduces the cost ratio from 5:1 to something much lower.

The claimed outputs are reasonable, and represent 5 hours of full capacity generation/day on average. Some days you’ll do much better, some days much worse, but 5 hours seems reasonable.

The payback period is, however, a whole different sphere of bee stuff.

If you pay 12 cents/kWh for your utility electricity, then ignoring the lost opportunity or interest costs of the initial investment, and assuming you really do install it yourself, then 30kWh/month is $3.60/month in avoided electricity costs, or $43.20/year. At a purchase price of $599, that’s a payback period of 13.8 years, quite a bit more than the claimed “3-4 years or less”.

For the 1,000W model, that works out to $18/month, $216/year, and 3.7 years to pay back a $799 initial investment. So the 1,000W model clearly meets their claimed payback.

I don’t know what the tax rebate situation is for these panels, but if you assume a one-third kickback, then your payback periods shrink to about 9.1 years for the 200W model, and a scant 2.4 years for the 1,000W unit.

What’s that you say? You electricity costs more or less than 12 cents/kWh? You can then rerun the numbers, or simply multiply the payback periods I calculated by (12/(your electricity cost in cents/kWh)). I used 12 cents/kWh because it’s what I pay and it’s pretty close to the US national residential average.

And, as some of the reports have been quick to point out, you can take the panel with you when you move, making it a viable option for those expecting to change addresses in just a few years.

Bottom line: This seems to be a very interesting product aimed at nearly all homeowners. There are some obvious questions, of course. Will the pricing and availability be what the company is currently talking about? Will the quality and performance of the units be good enough? Will there be any zoning or other legal issues that crop up over people wiring these things into their home?[1][2]

So far, it sounds like something to keep an eye on.

[1] Some descriptions I’ve seen say installing one of these is about the same as replacing an electrical outlet. That puts it squarely in the home handyperson category and out of the realm of pure plug and play, which is something of a barrier to entry, but not much. I’d certainly be comfortable installing one of these in my own home, but I can think of some neighbors that I wouldn’t want to see try it.

[2] This is not to disparage Clarian, but a not-yet-available product from any company should be viewed with at least a pinch of caution.

If you have more than 60 seconds to spend on this, then click on over to the source page for the first three of these images, NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature Analysis: July 2010 — What Global Warming Looks Like. (The last one is from NOAA.)

The topic of methane popped up in the comments, and just this morning I stumbled across a related interview with some scientists looking into this particular facet of climate science.

Living on Earth: Getting to the Bottom of Methane (emphasis added):

YOUNG: So, why are we concerned about these releases of methane from the oceans?

REAGAN: Well, recently scientists have realized that vast quantity of methane that exists in the oceans and in the permafrost in various forms. And as the climate warms the oceans warm in concert and various processes may cause this methane to enter the ecosystem. First in the oceans and then possibly into the atmosphere.

YOUNG: So this most recent study looked at the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which I guess is fairly shallow water. But that’s not the only spot where scientists are finding this, right?

REAGAN: That’s correct. In fact, about a year and a half ago, an expedition in the Bering Sea Svalbard area found a series of methane plumes erupting from the shallow continental shelf west of the island of Spitsbergen. And what was interesting about these plumes was not only their existence and their size, but that we see plumes erupting out of the sea floor in some 390, 400 meters of water and reaching high up into the water column.

And, in the case of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf we also see that the methane is passing through the water column and reaching the atmosphere. Previous studies thought that much of the methane would be oxidized in the oceans and release to the atmosphere would be minor. But now we’re seeing releases that are both large enough and shallow enough to let that methane get into the atmosphere.

YOUNG: Give me a sense of how much methane we’re potentially talking about?

REAGAN: Various numbers have been thrown out, but we estimate that the quantity of methane in gas hydrates exceeds, possibly by a factor of two, all of the carbon in developed and undeveloped fossil fuel reservoirs.

…

YOUNG: So if we do get a big burp of methane all at once that might be one of what we call a — I guess a feedback loop, right?

REAGAN: That is what has been hypothesized and what scientists have been concerned about for many years. When you look at the sheer size of the methane reservoir there is a reason to be concerned. However, I don’t think we should be scared and I don’t think we should be sounding alarms just yet. What we need to do is do the work and study the situation. Scientists are just starting to quantify this.

The observations off of Spitsbergen, the recent discovery in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, these are key because they are the first real evidence that this release may be happening now, and this is motivating scientists to study the problem even harder.

Click on through for more, including downloadable versions of the interview in RealAudio and MP3 formats.

The position of the scientist interviewed, namely that we should be “concerned” but not “scared” is exactly the right one, in my opinion. You’d be hard pressed to find an area of climate science where we wish we knew a hell of a lot more than we do than methane hydrates and permafrost. Those deposits are indeed huge, and if they’ve been outgassing a little at a time for centuries, then they’re not yet a serious issue. But if they’re releasing much more methane (and, in the case of permafrost, CO2) as global warming increases, then we could have one hell of a problem. That’s about the most compelling argument one can make for vastly increasing funding for research on a particular topic.

Lake Superior reaches record temp:

Experts say the lake’s surface temperatures set a new record high this week — and the entire lake likely is warmer than ever recorded.

…

On Tuesday, the waters atop Lake Superior reached the highest temperature ever recorded. The lake-wide average surface temperature hit 68.3 degrees. The average for Aug. 10 is just 55 degrees.

…

Tom Johnson, a professor of geological science at the Large Lakes Observatory, avoids slapping blame for this year’s heat on long-term global warming.

“I don’t look at this summer and say ‘aha, we have a hot summer and therefore it proves that global warming is happening,’” he said.

At the same time, Johnson said the long-term trend is clear. Warmer winters are affecting Lake Superior and are consistent with global trends.

“I look at the last 30 years and say ‘man, we’ve had a lot of very warm years in the last 30 years.’ ” He said. “And that to me says we’re looking at a trend that is very consistent with what the climate community is predicting.”

Researchers say the trend for several decades now is clear — ice is forming later on Superior, going out earlier, and like this year, allowing the lake to warm earlier and longer.

Aside from the obvious implications this worries me for a very personal reason: I live downstream of that warm water. As it flows eastward, it will soon be in Lake Ontario (which is already running hot), about 3 miles from where I’m sitting as I type this. And this winter that warmer water could mean some truly spectacular lake effect snow storms. I’m hoping the area I live in continues to benefit from the “skip over” effect, where the big storms come in off the lake and skip over the first few miles of land before dumping their moisture. We’ve had a number of storms since my wife and I moved here in 2004 that did that, with the “snow line” usually falling somewhere around US Route 90: