The flood of coverage of the Nature papers I mentioned yesterday (It’s Crunch Time) continues.

Of most interest, by far, is a longish historical look at how the climate science arrived at its current state of understanding, Climate crunch: A burden beyond bearing. The article details how we went from thinking 550ppm was the “magic number” for CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to 450ppm to (possibly) 350ppm. It also describes the areas some researchers are working on now, which I suspect will lead to some unsettling conclusions. I won’t even try to provide pull quotes for this article, and will simply ask (read: beg) you to find a few minutes to go read it all.

With just a little luck I should have copies of the two main articles soon. When that happens, I will post my own impressions of them.

A few other related news stories:

• Deep emission cuts needed to limit global warming: scientists
• Science News: A Limit For Carbon Emissions: 1 Trillion Metric Tons
• SciDev.Net: Scientists put carbon ceiling at a trillion tonnes
• Telegraph: World ‘unlikely to stop global warming reaching critical levels’
• CLIMATE CHANGE: Two-Degree Rise Ever More Likely, Scientists Warn
• guardian.co.uk: It’s not unreasonable for us to ask how today’s sacrifices will meet tomorrow’s climate change goals, says Myles Allen

Updated: See additional related story links at the end of this post.

It seems we now have a new way of measuring the urgency of the climate chaos situation.

Green Car Congress: Study Concludes That to Limit Global Warming to 2 °C, Less Than 25% of Proven Fossil Fuel Reserves Can be Burnt Between Now and 2050 (emphasis added):

Less than a quarter of the proven fossil fuel reserves can be burnt and emitted between now and 2050, if global warming is to be limited to two degrees Celsius (2 °C), according to a new study published in the journal Nature today. This issue of Nature—themed “The Climate Crunch”—features a number of related papers and commentary on greenhouse gas emissions and the difficulty of cutting back, as well as an editorial calling on commitment from “the highest levels” to make the needed changes.

The study, led by Malte Meinshausen at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), calculated how much greenhouse gas emissions can be pumped into the atmosphere between now and 2050 to have a reasonable chance of keeping warming lower than 2 °C (above pre-industrial levels)—a goal supported by more than 100 countries to prevent dangerous climate change.

The researchers, involving scientists from Germany, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, concluded that the limit is 1,000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between the years 2000 and 2050. The world has already emitted one third of that in just nine years.

…

The study used a single, efficient computer model which incorporated the effects of all greenhouse gases, aerosols and air pollutants, and the range of possible responses of the carbon cycle and earth’s climate system. This was combined with about a thousand emission pathways.

The study explicitly takes into account the uncertainties related to modeling climate change. Throughout the study, probability statements were used to summarize the current level of knowledge based on observational data. It also used a huge number of different simulation results from the latest assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In taking this comprehensive approach the researchers went a step further than previous work.

Unfortunately, I can’t access the series of articles without paying $32 for each one (and I honestly can’t afford to buy access to even a small portion of the paid-access articles that come across my screen), so I can’t read them or give you a link. (See the end of the GCC article above for DOI links to the articles’ abstracts.)

You can, however, read an editorial from that issue, Time to act:

It is not too late yet — but we may be very close. The 500 billion tonnes of carbon that humans have added to the atmosphere lie heavily on the world, and the burden swells by at least 9 billion tonnes a year (see page 1117). If present trends continue, humankind will have emitted a trillion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere well before 2050, and that could be enough to push the planet into the danger zone. And there is no reason to think that the pressure will stop then. The coal seams and tar sands of the world hold enough carbon for humankind to emit another trillion tonnes — and the apocalyptic scenarios extend from there (see page 1104).

Nations urgently need to cut their output of carbon dioxide. The difficulty of that task is manifest: emissions have continued to rise despite almost two decades of rhetoric, diplomacy and action on the matter. But that unhappy fact should not be taken as a licence for fatalism. Governments have a wide range of pollution-cutting tools at their command, most notably tradable permit regimes, taxes on fuels, regulations on power generation and energy efficiency, and subsidies for renewable energy and improved technologies. These tools can work if applied seriously — so citizens around the world must demand that seriousness from their leaders, both within their individual nations and in the international framework that will be discussed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December.

…

The latest scientific research suggests that even a complete halt to carbon pollution would not bring the world’s temperatures down substantially for several centuries. If further research reveals that a prolonged period of elevated temperatures would endanger the polar ice sheets, or otherwise destabilize the Earth system, nations may have to contemplate actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Indeed, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is already developing scenarios for the idea that long-term safety may require sucking up carbon, and various innovators and entrepreneurs are developing technologies that might be able to accomplish that feat (see page 1094). At the moment, those technologies seem ruinously expensive and technically difficult. But if the very steep learning curve can be climbed, then the benefits will be great.

…

More radical still is the possibility of cooling the planet through some kind of ‘geoengineering’ that would dim the incoming sunlight (see page 1097). The effects of such approaches are much more worrying than those of capturing carbon from the air, however. The cooling from geoengineering would not exactly balance the warming from greenhouse gases, which would cause complications even if the technology itself was feasible — something for which the evidence has been circumstantial, at best.

But discussions about the possibilities offered by geoengineering could also lull the world’s leaders into complacency — if they lead them to believe that the technology will provide an escape hatch if the climate ever does reach a tipping point. This does not mean that the discussions should be avoided, but rather that the speculations need to be backed up with a solid body of research. Moreover, geoengineering research should be framed not as a hope for deus ex machina fixes to sudden global deterioration, but as a palliative cushion for the worst excesses of the peak years that are inevitable even after emissions start to be cut. A world slightly shaded from the Sun while its carbon levels are brought down by means of active capture would be a strangely unnatural place — but not necessarily a bad one, compared with the alternatives.

A few thoughts here:

• We need more than a 50% reduction from 1990 levels by 2050? The number I’ve heard repeated (and repeated myself) endlessly is that we need 80% by 2050, so this conclusion is not a raising of the bar.
• Casting the situation as a limit on how much of the remaining fossil fuels we can burn in a given time window strikes me as extremely useful. I don’t mean to suggest that legislators and deniers around the world will suddenly slap themselves in the forehead and exclaim, “Oh! Now I get it! Let’s get to work!” But it does seem like a much more approachable way to frame the limits to our behavior than is talking about parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. (I’m assuming that the math all works out, and that the authors used reasonable, mainstream estimates for the recoverable reserves of fossil fuels.)
• I’m glad to see the notable hesitance over geo-engineering, as expressed in the editorial quoted above. On a related note, see Alex Steffen’s post on ClimateProgress about geo-engineering.
• Also worth a read is RealClimate: Hit the Brakes Hard; a couple of the authors appearing that issue of Nature are RealClimate authors.
• I would love to know more detail about how the climate model handled positive feedbacks. As I’ve pointed out countless times here in recent months, we keep finding new ones or making unpleasant discoveries about the ones we already knew about. I think there’s a better than 50/50 chance that in just a couple of years we’ll have accumulated enough new examples of of these nasty surprises to conclude that these studies were too optimistic.
• As I’ve said before, I have very little confidence that we both have and will wisely use the time before we’re at the point of a runaway climate change. In other words, I think the most likely scenario is that we’ll have no choice but to resort to one or more geo-engineering options in addition to very aggressive cuts in carbon emissions.

See also:

• Climate Progress: Must have PPT in disappointing issue of Nature devoted to “The Coming Climate Crunch”
• BBC: ‘Safe’ climate means ‘no to coal’
• New Scientist: Humanity’s carbon budget set at one trillion tonnes
• AP: To keep warming low, deeper pollution cuts needed
• Reuters: World can burn 25 percent of oil, coal safely: study
• AFP: To meet climate goal, cut fossil fuels use: study
• Scientific American: How Much Is Too Much?: Estimating Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The US Dept. of Energy/EIA has released the 2007 edition of Renewable Energy Trends:

The report, Renewable Energy Trends in Consumption and Electricity, 2007, provides an overview and tables with historical data spanning as far back as 1989 through 2007 on renewable energy consumption and electricity.

As always, you can download the whole report from the above page in one PDF or grab individual chapters, data in Excel spreadsheets, etc.

San Diego Unveils Algae Coalition To Advance “Green Gold” Research:

They call it “green gold,” and its proponents are betting that the light, sweet crude oil that can be extracted from farm-cultivated algae will help the world to cut its dependence upon dirty and increasingly expensive gasoline and diesel fuels that are extracted from fossil fuels.

And, on Tuesday, San Diego — which envisions itself as the green equivalent of the traditional oil industry’s Houston — unveiled a “broad-scale research effort” to turn that dream into a reality.

Though no dollar figures for financial support were discussed during Tuesday’s press event on the UC San Diego campus, the research effort will build upon the creation earlier this year of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology. The center was created to facilitate green fuels research being conducted by 272 scientists at UC San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute and other San Diego universities, research organizations and for-profit companies.

…

“By sharing and facilitating the interactions of these multiple researchers through this center, we hope to make sustainable algae-based fuel production and carbon-dioxide abatement a reality within the next five to 10 years,” Fox said. “This consortium will strengthen our ability to obtain grants and attract resources to the area. Algal biofuels will allow us to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and other economies, and will provide opportunities for a new economy and workforce.”

…

Algal researchers believe that cultivated algae will become an economically viable alternative to large-scale production of such resource-intensive plants as corn and cellulosic crops (including trees, non-edible parts of plants and grasses). Both corn and cellulosic crops require substantial amounts of fertile land, fresh water and petroleum-based fertilizer.

What’s more, the end product from corn and cellulosic crops — ethanol — is a lower-energy fuel than the algal hydrocarbons that can be converted directly into gasoline or diesel fuel that, proponents maintain, can be delivered to service stations through the existing refinery infrastructure.

Algae can also be used to produce hydrogen or biomass, which can then be turned into methane. Proponents also note that production of 140 billion gallons of algae-derived fuels would yield about one trillion pounds of protein that could be used to feed livestock, chickens or fish. The production process, they add, can “eat up” such environmental contaminants as wastewater.

I suspect this will be far from the last such effort to be launched in the next year or so. Obviously there’s a huge interest in developing a viable[1] biofuels technology, but there’s more to it than that. I think there’s a growing realization of how difficult (or impossible) it will be to solve the problems of other biofuels, problems that severely curtail their ability to be a broad-based petroleum replacement.

Corn ethanol simply can’t scale up to anywhere near the needed volume without devastating impacts on food production. Switching to cellulosic ethanol made from non-food crops (genetically modified poplars, switchgrass, etc.) still incurs costs associated with planting, harvesting, and transporting the biomass. And any ethanol product has distribution and usage challenges for a US-wide rollout.

Similarly, biodiesel from soybeans is still limited by being a harvested plant.

Right now, algae biodiesel seems to be the best biofuel option, and that will likely translate into a lot more startup activity–investment and government grant money, consortia, and private/public partnerships.

The next few years could be very interesting on this front, to say the least.

See also:

• It’s algae time, baby
• Late night thoughts on I-90, somewhere east of Rochester

[1] In this case, “viable” means scalable, price competitive, and without unacceptable environmental and food competition side effects.

ClimateProgress has an interesting and thoughtful piece by Bill Becker, The Age of (small) Tradeoffs:

Are green energy industries about to ruin the environment and undermine national security? Are they engaged in the ecological equivalent of mountaintop removal? Are they the new Big Oil, making us dangerously dependent on imported strategic resources?

Those questions are implied in “Clean Energy’s Dirty Little Secret”, a provocative article in the current issue of The Atlantic. Author Lisa Margonelli points out that wind turbines, hybrid cars and some other green technologies carry “their own hefty environmental price tag”, including the use of rare-earth minerals extracted from open-pit mines or imported from places like China.

…

But a larger question lurks between the lines: Should green technologies and products be held to the same environmental standards as other industries? Is a company that mines neodymium for Prius motors any less responsible than Peabody Coal for good environmental stewardship?

And behind that question lies another: When does a green end justify not-so-green means? When if ever do the multiple benefits of solar, wind, biomass or geothermal energy, for example, justify some environmental damage during their life cycles?

…

We are experiencing a gradually expanding circle of acceptability as we become more desperate for solutions to global climate change. Nuclear power, “clean coal” and geo-engineering research are supported today by environmental leaders who would not have given any of those options serious consideration a few short years ago. Today’s crazy idea becomes tomorrow’s salvation as we continue pumping gases into the atmosphere.

The Age of (small) Tradeoffs has been made much more difficult by its immediate and still evident predecessor, the Age of Stupid (apologies to the new movie of that title). Despite decades of warnings about global warming, despite our rich tradition of energy crises, we have not even begun to tap the full potential of energy efficiency and renewable energy. We haven’t even really tried. We paid far more attention to Jimmy Carter’s cardigan sweater than his insight that our energy problems were the moral equivalent of war.

We humans, with the possible exception of certain members of Congress, are endowed with the unique ability to see consequences and to learn from mistakes — the intellectual equivalent of opposable thumbs. It’s time to use that ability before it atrophies. Let’s make the necessary trade-offs; reject the really bad ones; recognize stupidity as the real weapon of mass destruction; pass a game-changing climate bill; completely rewire national energy policy; stop the taxpayer subsidies that have us paying one another to produce greenhouse gases; trade in our carbon-spewing national transportation policy before it’s as obsolete as General Motors; assemble a rescue package for our children; and get on with the job of building a new economy before we become Darwin’s biggest dropouts – the species that had all the tools to survive a changing world but made itself extinct by refusing to use them.

It’s a longish piece, very much worth your time to read it full.

I think what Becker is talking about here is something I’ve mentioned before, that we’re entering a time of living a “measured life on a managed planet”. Let me expand a bit on what I meant when I coined that phrase.

Imagine a world exactly like present-day Earth in every regard, with one exception: Humanity had never existed. All the naturally occurring flora and fauna we would recognize are present, the land masses, weather patterns, geologic history, etc. are all what we would expect for an Earth that never saw billions of human beings and their greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts.

Now, introduce a small number of human beings, perhaps a few thousand. Unless you want to assume they have a level of technology and ability to modify the environment on a level with Star Trek, there’s virtually no chance our merry band of settlers can affect the planet substantially. There’s simply far too few of them.

As they increase in numbers, whether through our initial assumption or the natural way, they can still do pretty much what they want–cut down forests, burn fossil fuels, dump nasty things into rivers, pull all of the fish out of rivers and ocean they could possibly use, etc. Again, for a very long time they have no meaningful impact on the planet; their actions are minuscule compared to the scale of their new home.

Eventually, their numbers and their accumulated changes to the planet grow large enough that they start to have not just discernible, but distinctly negative, impacts on the environment and their own well being. They exhaust some non-renewable resources and put the supply of others in peril, CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere until it provides an upwards pressure on temperatures, fresh water becomes much less plentiful in some areas, and the air, land, and water is polluted by their discharges. In other words, the fundamental, foundational assumptions of almost everything they did for thousands of years–the world is too large for them to influence, and local conditions will always be essentially what they are today–are demonstrably wrong. This situation is caused by one delay (the time it took to understand that those fundamental assumptions were wrong), and greatly exacerbated by another delay (the time lag between when the scientists and some policymakers understood the situation and when mass action could be taken) until the civilization is on the brink of disaster.

What does this world look like? Look out the nearest window.

Back to our Earth, how do we address this? We have to modify our behavior extensively, obviously, but exactly how should we change? Which actions or resource use should be curtailed, which ones traded off for others? The only rational answer is to do a cost/benefit analysis. Converting X kW of coal-fired electricity generation to concentrating solar power with thermal storage has costs Y and benefits Z. If Z is substantially larger than Y, then this option then goes into competition with other projects with net positive benefits, and we allocate things like public and private expenditures in a way that maximizes the return to society.

This is the classic economics view, of course, which means it glosses over some very substantial issues.

A critical step in the process is measuring those things that are “easily” quantifiable. How many parts per million of CO2 is in the atmosphere and how much do we add every year? How much recoverable coal or oil or natural gas is in the ground, and how quickly are we using each? What is the economic impact of sea levels rising by X cm over the next 50 years? How many people are on the planet, and how quickly is that number growing? You can add your own long list of data we’d either need or very much like to have.

Once we have those basic numbers nailed down, how do we measure the costs and benefits of a large energy project? Materials (some of them rare) are used, land is used, jobs are created during construction and possibly in the long run, CO2 emissions are reduced, water consumption patterns are changed, etc. That’s one heck of a large spreadsheet we have to fill in, and every cell is packed with assumptions, even before we deal with converting all those pluses and minuses to monetary units and the discounting issue, e.g. what is the value of an environmental benefit thirty or fifty or one hundred years from now? Making and then acting on those assumptions is where politics and the profit motive get involved, which only makes the process that much murkier and at times downright perverse, whether we’re talking about action taken by governments or corporations or other large concentrations of power.

It sounds very unpleasant, and it is. We’ve transformed our world into one in which we increasingly have to forgo the luxury of mindless consumption, as experienced by the intrepid settlers in our mind experiment. We have to instead turn to a much more rigorous process of mindful consumption. That entails far more work to keep measuring everything relevant, even as we work hard to improve our understanding how things as disparate as the climate and human psychology work. A further danger and cost is that we won’t always make the right decisions. We’ll make measurement errors and the models we base our actions on will be flawed at times, and that’s before politicians and those with financial or ideological interests get into the act.[1]

But what choice do we have? If we adopt a position of lazy, willful ignorance and reject the whole process–”let people do what they want”, “the market will sort it out”, “government (or corporations) can’t be trusted to do anything”–the problems of greenhouse gases triggering climate chaos, peak oil, peak natural gas, all the environmental horrors of coal use (beyond the CO2 emissions), fresh water scarcity, ocean acidification, overfishing, and on and on won’t go away. They will continue to get worse until enough of us decide via “the market” to do something about them, which in many cases–CO2 level of the atmosphere being a prime example–will be far too late. If we willingly live a life in which we only fix problems after we begin to feel pain, then we’re signing up for, at best, a life of rushing from one painful emergency to the next. At worst we’re surrendering our children and theirs to a catastrophic level of climate chaos and crushing resource constraints.

So, this is the only viable option we’ve left ourselves thanks to our population and how we’ve done everything from the dawn of mankind right up to today: A measured life on a managed planet.

[1] I’m among those convinced that the number one way to weaken the grip corn ethanol has in the US would be to move Iowa to about 20th in the presidential primary order.

The Brisbane Times has published a piece by Martin Flanagan that raises a very uncomfortable point.

Future generations will ask why we ignored climate change:

Last month, the chief scientific adviser to the British Government, Professor John Beddington, predicted a global catastrophe by 2030 on the simple premise that while global demand for food, water and energy is escalating, the supply of these three essentials is diminishing.

He predicted civil unrest and international conflict.

If this scenario was to come true, I can imagine a voice in the future asking us — particularly those of us who had the privilege and responsibility of a public voice — the following questions.

…

Two weeks ago, four CSIRO scientists — while stressing they did not speak for the CSIRO — appeared before the Senate inquiry into carbon emissions.

Not only did they say the Australian response was inadequate, one of their number, Dr Michael Raupach, said: “Well, I think that the scientific community as a whole, including every climate scientist that I know in CSIRO, is of the view that first, climate change is a very serious problem, and second, that global strategies at the moment are inadequate.”

And so, says the voice from a future that has seen Professor Beddington’s prediction come true, what did you do? The answer, for most of us, is pretty much nothing.

…

British law is ultimately based on the notion of the reasonable man. I think a reasonable man would conclude from the data now appearing before him from around the globe that he has serious cause for concern about the environment.

Most people, in my experience, now admit that something is “going on” with the weather. Asked if they think dramatic changes are on the way, they say: “Maybe, but not in my lifetime.”

But what sort of an attitude is that? I have a granddaughter who will be 21 in 2030. What am I going to give her for her 21st? Only this, perhaps. Before I speak on the climate change, I will remind myself that this is not a media game, that there is a high seriousness to this debate now, that I am — we all are — answerable to the future.

The first inconvenient question I have in mind is not “what will we tell the children?”, but “why do so few of us care about peak oil and climate chaos unless it’s linked to our own children or grandchildren?”

I think the answer is twofold:

First, it’s genetics. Every human being is genetically wired to protect our DNA, in the form of our descendants. The old line that a human being is DNA’s way of making more DNA is largely true, even if too cute by half. Therefore we have compassion for other people and their children, but many, perhaps the large majority of us, only get truly worked up and take action when it’s our loved ones who will suffer, when we have blood in the game. It’s far too easy for us to look the other way, dismiss the threat entirely, make an excuse for inaction, value money more than the environment, etc. right up to the instant when, as the voice-over on action film trailers says, “This time it’s personal.”

Second, we have a stunning lack of ability to visualize massive change. How many times do we hear about politicians traveling to the Arctic region and coming back aflame with commitment to Do Something about climate chaos? And why do these people have to fly thousands of miles and stand next to a melt water lake that’s disappearing into a gigantic hole in a ice sheet, or see houses that have been destroyed by melting permafrost? Can they not read about these events, talk to experts, watch a bloody documentary? If anything, I would contend that seeing it up close and personal carries far less information content than would a lunch meeting with James Hansen or Mark Serreze, just to name two experts I would want my elected representatives speaking with on a regular basis.

Part of this traveling to see it in person is simply opportunity. If I had a chance to make one of those trips on someone else’s dime, I would be very tempted. And part of it is a crash education process for a legislator who doesn’t live, eat, and breathe this stuff the way most of the people who read this site do. They’re substituting visceral impact for a whole lot of reading. Is it a good trade off? I seriously doubt it. Again, people in power typically have access to experts that you and I can only dream about, and they should use exercise that option more and make fewer trips from Washington DC to Greenland or Northern Alaska or Antarctica.

All of which leads us inexorably to the second inconvenient question: How do we get more people to give a dam?

The Asian Development Bank has released a report, The Economics of Climate Change in Southeast Asia: A Regional Review [253 page, 10MB PDF]:

This report provides a review of the economics of climate change in the Southeast Asian region. It confirms that the region is highly vulnerable to climate change and demonstrates that a wide range of adaptation measures are already being applied. The report also shows that the region has a great potential to contribute to greenhouse gas emission reduction, and that the costs to the region and globally of taking no early action against climate change could be very high. The basic policy message is that efforts must be made to apply all feasible and economically viable adaptation and mitigation measures as key elements of a sustainable development strategy for Southeast Asia. It also argues that the current global economic crisis offers Southeast Asia an opportunity to start a transition towards a climate-resilient and low-carbon economy by introducing green stimulus programs that can simultaneously shore up economies, create jobs, reduce poverty, lower carbon emissions, and prepare for the worst effects of climate change.

From the report’s Summary of Conclusions:

Climate change is happening now in Southeast Asia, and the worst is yet to come. If not addressed adequately, it could seriously hinder the region’s sustainable development and poverty eradication efforts—there is no time for delay.

The review identifies a number of factors that explain why the region is particularly vulnerable. Southeast Asia’s 563 million people are concentrated along coastlines measuring 173,251 kilometers long, leaving it exposed to rising sea levels.

At the same time, the region’s heavy reliance on agriculture for livelihoods—the sector accounted for 43% of total employment in 2004 and contributed about 11% of GDP in 2006—make it vulnerable to droughts, floods, and tropical cyclones associated with warming. Its high economic dependence on natural resources and forestry—as one of the world’s biggest providers of forest products—also puts it at risk. An increase in extreme weather events and forest fires arising from climate change jeopardizes vital export industries.

Rapid economic growth and structural transformation in Southeast Asia helped lift millions out of extreme poverty in recent decades. But poverty incidence remains high—as of 2005, about 93 million (18.8%) Southeast Asians still lived below the $1.25-a-day poverty line—and the poor are the most vulnerable to climate change.

The review has also assessed a wide range of evidence of climate change and its impact in Southeast Asia to date. It tells a clear story: mean temperature increased at 0.1–0.3°C per decade between 1951 and 2000; rainfall trended downward during 1960—2000; and sea levels have risen 1–3 millimeters per year.

Heat waves, droughts, floods, and tropical cyclones have been more intense and frequent, causing extensive damage to property, assets, and human life. Recorded floods/storms have risen dramatically, particularly in the Philippines, rising from just under 20 during 1960—1969 to nearly 120 by 2000—2008.

This report has also reviewed the existing studies that attempt to predict climate change impact in the region, all suggesting that it will intensify, with dire consequences. Modeling work undertaken under this review covering Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam confirms many of these findings. Indeed, it suggests that the region is likely to suffer more from climate change than the world average, if no action is taken.

Annual mean temperature is projected to rise 4.8°C on average by 2100 from 1990. Mean sea level is projected to rise by 70 cm during the same period, following the global trend. Indonesia, Thailand, and Viet Nam are expected to experience increasingly drier weather conditions in the next 2–3 decades, although this trend is likely to reverse by the middle of this century. Global warming is likely to cause rice yield potential to decline by up to 50% on average by 2100 compared to 1990 in the four countries; and a large part of the dominant forest/woodland could be replaced by tropical savanna and shrub with low or no carbon sequestration potential.

For the four countries covered in the modeling work, the potential economic cost of inaction is huge: if the world continues “business-as-usual” emissions trends—considering all market and non-market impacts and catastrophic risks of rising temperatures—the cost to these countries each year could equal a loss of 6.7% of their combined gross domestic product by 2100, more than twice the world average.

See the report’s web page to download individual chapters.

The other night, my wife and I went to see the Rochester Greywolves play their first game of the season on the Onondaga Reservation, near Syracuse. Being the team photographer (as I was last year), I had to be there, even though it was an 8:30PM start time out of town.

Driving home on a very dark I-90 after the game, with spectacular lightning ahead of us and to our right nearly the entire way, I had some time and the right environment to ponder some things. Few experiences are more conducive to navel staring than the unshakable feeling that you’re not just driving on a dark highway but falling through the night and being pulled ever faster by the gravity of some immense and distant object just beyond the reach of your headlights. One can only wonder how many people have received speeding tickets because of that phenomenon.

What to make of the “BYD battery”? The Chinese company is claiming a 400 km (250 mile) range using this battery in a small sedan, and a quick charge capability that can bring it up to 50% (200 km/120 mile range) in only 10 minutes. As impressive as this sounds, it is also supposedly based on “ferrous ion, which is cheap, plentiful and green. If it turns out to be as functional as the Chinese company claims, it could be the breakthrough needed to finally bring electric cars into the mainstream.” The company will soon be selling a PHEV, ala the Volt, using this battery technology with a 100 km (62 mile) electron range for $22,000.

Breakthrough, indeed. Even assuming a fair amount of marketing fudge factor in BYD’s claims, if the actual performance is reasonably close to those specs, it’s almost impossible to overestimate the impact this could have. Imagine a Scion xD-sized EV with these batteries that provided a battery range of “only” 200 miles (slightly reduced from the above figures), the option to slow charge overnight from a standard wall socket or quick charge in 10 minutes from a beefier connection, and a price of around $25,000 to $27,000. Think American drivers would line up around the block to buy something like that, knowing they would never have to deal with the price of gasoline or any of the other maintenance joys of a vehicle with an internal combustion engine? I’d bet my keyboard that a major manufacturer selling such a car would be hard pressed to keep up with demand. (And don’t underestimate the value of this dual charging option, as I pointed out in March of last year in The revolution is in the second plug.)

And what about biodiesel? I wrote about this the other day (It’s algae time, baby), but consider what it would do to the conventional wisdom, especially as it’s manifested in online discussions, where so much of conventional wisdom is formed these days. Nothing makes the economist haters lose their minds quicker than one of my fellow dismal scientists making some ridiculously broad and naive statement about how “the market will find a solution”, “something always comes along, given a large enough financial incentive”, etc. Straddling the fence, as I do, between the economics camp and the reality-endowed camp, I can see both sides of this fight. In fact, “something” in one form or another has come along quite often, and even taking into account the immense challenges involved in finding a technical solution to peak oil (and one which also addresses climate chaos), is it out of the question to say that our ingenuity, spurred by an enormous, looming threat, would once again find a solution and send the doomers sulking back to their Y2k bunkers? No, it isn’t.

But the doomers have just as solid an argument. The hurdles to “solving” this problem are breathtaking, and the potential impact of not pulling a techno-rabbit out of our hat this time are gruesome.[1] Sitting back and saying “relax, it will be OK” is just as ridiculous and useless a response to peak oil as is jumping up and down and screaming about how it will be The End Of The World As We Know It. If anything, it’s worse, because it’s counterproductive to convince people the situation is hopeless.

Which brings me back to biodiesel, especially the varieties made from naturally occurring or gengineered microbes. Imagine that three to five years from now we have several technologies for making microbe diesel that work in the lab and in small field tests, but they’re still a bit finicky and expensive to scale up and roll out. The companies pushing them are all wrestling for market share and government backing, and online factions have lined up behind different contenders. Then an article hits the world’s RSS feeds that some university or corporation has figured how to make microbe diesel at an insanely low price, perhaps $1/retail gallon, via a process and formula that scales beautifully. Investors pile in, money supporting some or nearly all of the contenders evaporates, a pilot facility is built, and it works. Sure, there are some minor glitches, but those are ironed out in short order and suddenly the questions become: How quickly can we build out this technology and start pouring the resulting fuel into the tanks of long distance trucks? How quickly can we start building diesel cars in places like the US where they’re still scarce?

What would happen then to the consensus view of our situation? I suspect it would play out like this:

The Cornucopians would smugly predict that they always knew “something” would come along, and point to this Uber Microbe Diesel as “proof that the market works”, “oil really is a renewable resource”, etc. This would be an absurd piece of spin; the market does not always provide, and there was no guarantee whatsoever that such a solution would emerge. Anyone claiming that they “knew” it would happen would be lying. The truth is that they had faith in the market and they guessed right. (We see this syndrome all the time. One any given day you can find very reasoned, detailed arguments for the economy or the stock market doing practically anything you can imagine. And a few years from now the few who scored a win in this Prognosticator’s Lottery will reap a sizable and unwarranted public relations reward. Right now, I’m sick to death of hearing from the hucksters talking about how they predicted “exactly” our current economic mess years ago.)

The Apocalypticons (Peak Oil Chapter) would be just as insufferable, as they would argue endlessly that the Uber Microbe Diesel was not, in fact, as good as it seemed, even as new plants were being built at breakneck speed and OPEC ministers were screaming in agony at the thought of no one wanting their oil. Consider this doomer persistence a replay of the Y2k fanatics refusing to give up even after 1/1/2000 and continuing to argue that the big collapse of the banking system or electricity grid or who knows what could still happen–right up to the time when even they saw the absurdity of their claims and they had no choice but to give up, take down their tent, and move their traveling act to the next most promising and appealing carnival site, peak oil[2] or bird flue or an immense meteor strike or the attempts by the New World Order to take over the planet or an obsession with day trading or who knows what.

If this microbe diesel scenario plays out as I’ve speculated[3], I think the most accurate thing we could say is: We got lucky. We were lucky in that we weren’t fatally distracted by CNG or hydrogen or corn-based ethanol or any of the other absurdities currently sucking up too much of our time and resources. We were lucky that the right team of scientists not only managed to find the magic solution, but did so just in time.

Taking the broader view of the BYD battery and microbe diesel, I’m worried that even wildly positive results would send too many people the wrong signal. The conspiracy theorists, the people who decades ago were convinced that “the government and the oil companies” had a “300 MPG carburetor” that they were keeping from the public, would consider the timing far too convenient to be coincidental; they would point to it endlessly as evidence that the technology had existed all along, likely with the assistance of little green men in Area 51. The Apocalypticons would move on, but with ever more determination to “prove to the world” that the next thing they latch onto would be the real threat to humanity, and this time they’d be right, damn it. The Cornucopians would be the most damaging, as they would manage to convince an ever greater portion of policymakers that there never was a threat or that it was real but, as always, the all seeing, all knowing, infinitely kind and loving market provided a solution.

In other words, extreme events often act as an amplifier for pre-existing tendencies, which in this case would be a very bad thing, simply because these are far from the last challenges we’ll face. If there’s one thing I can barely discern off in the distance during lightning flashes late at night on I-90, it’s the uncertainties and unforeseen events that still lurk in the shadows, just waiting for their time to become the next big threat we have to deal with as we lead our measured life on a managed planet.

[1] I’m talking here about the period not just post peak, but also after the initial round of relatively easy oil consumption reductions–a.k.a. the low hanging fruit so many people, most notably here in the US, are so reluctant to pick. We will experience peak oil in stages, the first post-peak one being an oil squeeze when we can still make relatively comfortable changes to reduce our consumption. After that comes the time when things get more than a little “interesting”, the oil crush.

[2] For those of you who are new to this site, let me make sure we’re all on the same page in terms of both Y2k and peak oil. Y2k was a very real and very serious threat. It was defused thanks to the work of many first rate project managers and programmers. The hoopla about it was nothing more or less than a severe misreading of our response to the situation, not the situation itself. Peak oil, as I’ve said countless times here, is a real, imminent, and immense problem. Because of the different nature of peak oil it will be much harder to deal with than was Y2k; we can’t simply throw a lot of money and resources at it to get us past a magic date and then largely forget about it.

[3] And I’m increasingly convinced that it’s the most likely scenario over the next five to ten years, assuming you allow me about the same latitude afforded a Chinese car company’s marketing department.

Natural Gas Year-In-Review 2008:

This report provides an overview of the natural gas industry and markets in 2008 with special focus on the first complete set of supply and disposition data for 2008 from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). All data for 2008 should be considered preliminary, and unless otherwise noted, data are derived from weekly and monthly EIA products. In certain cases data for all 12 months of 2008 are not yet available, so analysis is based on cumulative totals as indicated in the text. Final data for 2008 will be released in the Natural Gas Annual 2008, which is scheduled to be released in December 2009.

See the link above for the report and related downloads.

Of particular interest is the report linked to in a footnote, Impact of the 2008 Hurricanes on the Natural Gas Industry, which shows (Figure 2) that by the end of 2008 the US still had 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas production off line.

Yale Environment 360 has an excellent interview up their site with Bill McKibben, easily one of the top writers on environmental issues:

Bill McKibben on Building A Climate Action Movement:

Yale Environment 360: Until relatively recently you were well-known primarily through your writing on environmental issues, but in the last few years you’ve become equally well-known as an activist on the issue of climate change and raising public awareness of it. How did this come about, and why have you been doing this?

Bill McKibben: At a certain point, I just decided that after 16 or 17 years of speaking and writing, that we weren’t getting anything done, that I needed to do more. I told the story the other day at the [Yale] Divinity School of coming back from Bangladesh — where I had dengue fever and watched lots and lots and lots of people die of dengue and climate-caused disease spreading rapidly through Dhaka for the first time when I was there — and I just felt like I wanted and needed to do more.

And looking around, I was struck by the fact that we never really had a movement about climate. We had all the superstructure of a movement. We had great, inspirational leaders like Al Gore, and we had economists, and engineers, and policy people, and scientists, obviously. But the part of the movement we didn’t have was the movement part. And we started trying to build that in a small way with this sort of impulsive walk we did across Vermont, which turned out to be highly successful.

e360: And when was that?

McKibben: It was the fall of 2006. Labor Day, 2006. We walked for five days, across much of Vermont. We got to Burlington, about a thousand of us marching by the time we got there. People sleeping in fields. And we got all the candidates for Congress and the Senate in Vermont, including the conservative Republicans, to sign onto this pledge that they would support cutting carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 if they were elected. It was extremely successful. Quite, quite powerful. And it made us wonder why there wasn’t more of this going on.

So we tried to see if we could figure out how to do it on a larger scale. And when I say we, I mean, me and six undergraduates at Middlebury College. We launched a website in January of 2007. We had no real money, and certainly no organization or anything. We started sending out emails to people asking them to help, and people in organizations all across the country said they would. And, in April of 2007, three months later, we posted 1,400 simultaneous demonstrations across the country, in all 50 states. Some people called it the biggest day of grassroots environmental action since the first Earth Day.

Within days, both [Hillary] Clinton and Obama had endorsed our position of 80 percent cuts by 2050, and Obama and congressional legislation now take that as one of their often-repeated targets. That was a number that was far too radical for anyone to talk about publicly in D.C. just two years ago.

…

e360: You’ve written in fact that climate change is the biggest problem humans have ever faced…

McKibben: I think there can’t be much doubt about that.

e360: You mentioned disease, which I thought was interesting, and you started by saying that coming back from Bangladesh and dengue fever. Talk a little bit about how that is related to climate change.

McKibben: The World Health Organization has said that dengue would be the emergent disease of this century and so far they are right. Incidences are up 100, 200, 300 percent all over South America, Asia, moving in to South Texas. And, I mean, the Aedes Egypti, the mosquito that spreads it, is very sensitive to temperature and humidity, and hence digs the wetter, warmer world we’re creating.

…

e360: What do you think the costs are going to be to the public for a transition to this new kind of economy or putting a price on carbon? You hear arguments everywhere from the great opportunity of renewable energy to some numbers that have come out lately out of Washington that are really hyping big costs of a price on carbon. How do you see all that?

McKibben: The only way that it works fast enough to make a difference is if the carbon carries a cost. That’s been the problem all along. Carbon didn’t carry a cost, hence we are in the trouble we are in. The question is how do you do that in a way that doesn’t bankrupt everybody and that lets you do it politically.

The smartest answer to all of this has come in recent years from Peter Barnes and others who have proposed this cap and dividend proposal and [U.S. Rep.] Chris van Hollen just introduced this in the House. You make Exxon and Peabody Coal, or whoever, buy permits every year at auction to release CO2, right? They pay lot of money for them, and they pass the cost on you and the price [of gasoline] goes up to $4 at a pop and you abandon your Forest Ranger fantasy and decide to drive a small car or walk or whatever it is you are going to do.

The question becomes what you do with all that money that you just made off this auction of the permits. The utilities would like you to basically give the permits to them for free. That’s ridiculous. Congress would pretty much like to take the money and spend it on something, windmills in my state, or whatever. Personally, I think that for most part that is a harder argument to make, given the things Congress has spent money on in the recent past. Corn-based ethanol being exhibit A.

So the soundest proposal, probably, is to take that money, and write a check to everybody in the country every six months… Here’s your climate check. Your share of the sky. Just the way that Alaska writes everybody a check every year for their share of oil revenues in the state. So, you know, I am still getting the price at the pump to clean up my act, and I am being made whole, more or less. It’s not a perfect system, but if you game it out politically, it is probably the best chance we have.

Go read it all.

The one part of this wide-ranging interview I want to comment on is the cap and trade issue.

I realize that it’s become the parlor game du jour for environmental geeks to debate carbon tax vs. cap and trade. And it’s not a slam dunk case for either side. A carbon tax is probably significantly simpler to administer, but cap and trade avoids the dreaded t-word which makes many right wingers twitch and froth at the mouth, regardless of the details of the program.

You can also argue about what happens during an economic downturn. A carbon tax continues to put a burden on the economy at just the wrong time, while a cap and trade system will see permits plunge in value simply because economic activity has dropped. That automatic adjustment sounds like a big plus for cap and trade, but such a price drop also reduces or removes the incentive to trim CO2 emissions, something we really don’t want to do.

I strongly favor a cap and trade system, as I think it uses the market as a tool most efficiently. It places an overall cap on the economy’s emissions, and lets the markets work out all the details, including which emitters make various size cuts to get the overall emissions down to the desired level.

Another benefit is that the policy lever–setting the number of permits available each year–directly controls the thing we’re creating the system to rein in. With a carbon tax we’re basically guessing about how much of a reduction in emissions we’ll get if we price CO2 at $X per ton. And that ratio will change over time as businesses, governments, and individuals all adapt over time to long term, planned reductions in CO2 emissions. (With either a tax or a cap and trade system, we’ll likely see an uneven response over time. After the first few years the low hanging fruit will be gone, and companies will have to make much tougher, and in many cases more expensive, changes. A cap and trade system automatically adjusts the CO2 price to this inevitability.)

I agree with McKibben that refunding the money to consumers is probably the only way any kind of price on carbon gets through the US political system. That’s not a problem, in my opinion; the goal of getting CO2 emissions under control is so important that I don’t think it should be seen as a source of government revenue.

Of course, this still leaves a huge number of questions, like exactly which activities will this apply to? Obviously the direct consumption of fossil fuels would be covered, but what about industrial processes, like cement production, which was responsible for 44 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2007? Or “enteric fermentation” (i.e. farm animal burps and farts), which added up to methane equivalent to 139 million metric tons of CO2? (See table ES-2 in the 2009 U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report from the US EPA, and you can come up with your own list of questions about non-fossil fuel emissions.)

If you already thought we lived in “interesting times”, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet…

Seriously, I just have to ask–are the CNG vehicle and hydrogen fuel cell people having a contest to see which group can drive me insane first? Just when I think one of them (most recently the CNG camp) has pegged the absurdity needle with their claims about how vastly cleaner CNG is for use in vehicles and now lawn equipment(!?), all the while ignoring CO2 emissions, the hydrogen people leap back into the lead with something like the following, as reported by Green Car Congress.

Automakers Still Targeting Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles for Long Term Sustainable Mobility:

Despite the current enthusiasm for electric vehicles (EVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) will be an important component of the vehicle mix in 2050, according to panelists from Nissan, Toyota and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in a conference session at the SAE 2009 World Congress in Detroit.

Dr. Kev Adjemian, Senior Principal Engineer/Senior Manager - Fuel Cell Laboratory, Nissan; Justin Ward, Advanced Powertrain Program Manager, Toyota; and Keith Wipke, Senior Engineer, NREL all agreed that the future would see a mix of the different types of vehicles out of necessity. Tailpipe GHG emissions need to be reduced by 70% by 2050 to maintain a 550 ppm concentration according to Nissan’s calculations, Adjemian said. (Nissan bases its assessment on the AR3 analysis from the UN IPCCC.) Adjemian also noted that neither EVs or FCVs would be able to contribute to that required reduction unless the electricity or the hydrogen was sourced from renewables.

Adjemian said that Nissan’s powertrain roadmap in the short term is focused on the expansion of highly efficient internal combustion engines, with the mid- and long-term bringing expansion of its EV efforts and maintaining the competitive advantage of its core electric power trains. By 2050, Adjemian sees an approximately equal mix of ICE, HEV/PHEVs, and fuel cell vehicles.

Justin Ward said that Toyota sees market opportunity for small EVs, but that according to Toyota’s latest calculations, the fuel cell hybrid vehicle has the advantage in well-to-wheel efficiency even now.

With natural gas as the feedstock for hydrogen and power generation, Toyota currently calculates 40% WTW efficiency for a fuel cell vehicle; 33% for an EV; 34% for a hybrid (Prius); and 19% for an internal combustion engine.

Before I flip into full-bore Exorcist mode, let me start by saying there’s one part of this vision that I definitely agree with: We’re looking at a future where personal transportation is fueled by a mix of technologies and sources. Right now, we essentially have a monoculture, with almost all transportation fueled by petroleum (or petroleum substitutes, like ethanol and biodiesel). You can argue whether the split here in the US–gasoline in cars and diesel in large trucks–means it’s not truly a monoculture, but in any case it’s very close.

I fully expect to see something like a mix of EVs with increasingly longer effective ranges[1] and PHEVs/HEVs running on biofuels (most likely algae-derived biodiesel).

Why no CNG or hydrogen vehicles?

CNG vehicles reduce CO2 emissions by a negligible percent, far less than we’ll need as we respond to climate chaos. Many of us constantly highlight the problems caused by things like coal plants historically not having to pay a price for the CO2 they emit, and that’s a valid point. But it applies just as well to CNG vehicles: They’re popular now because CNG is cheaper per mile than gasoline, and the car companies and other interests pushing them are doing a brilliant job of bragging about how much “cleaner” they are than gasoline powered vehicles in terms of NOx emissions, particulate matter, etc., while never mentioning the monster under the bed, CO2 emissions.

And in this respect, I have to wonder what our friends from the car companies are thinking. 550ppm of CO2 is the goal and not 450 or even 350, which is increasingly looking like the “right” answer? Tailpipe emissions have to be reduced, and not total life cycle emissions? Talk about two examples of playing tennis without a net. They’re basing their efficiency assumptions on hydrogen reformed from natural gas? And tying us to dependency for a critical service (transportation) to yet another fossil fuel, and then having to deal with yet another CO2 source, is a good idea why, exactly?

If you assume that climate chaos is a real and serious problem, which our friends claim to believe, even if they’re making some insanely convenient assumptions, then we will need all the green electricity for end use by consumers we can find. We will continue to build out wind and solar (and possibly geothermal, wave, and tidal) at a fast clip, but we’ll still be very hard pressed to replace any significant portion of our coal and natural gas generation in just a few decades. As a result, we’ll need to use the green electricity we do have as efficiently as possible. That means either you find a way to do CCS with the emissions from hydrogen reforming from natural gas (which would minimize the electricity input to the process, albeit at a hefty energy and money cost to do the CCS), or you make the hydrogen via electrolysis and consume three times as much per mile driven as you would in fueling an EV.

Surely you must be wondering if I’m getting to the point in this post where I recommend, for perhaps the 9 millionth time, that you read Ulf Bossel’s “E21″ paper, Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense? [PDF]? Yes, I am, and yes, you should read it, if only to see how he arrives at a much higher efficiency for EVs (69%) than the 33% reported above by our friends.

CNG and hydrogen as motor vehicle fuels are both dangerous wastes of money and time and intellectual capital. I’m confident they will be abandoned eventually, but nowhere near soon enough.

[1] By “effective ranges” I mean that the localized rise of things like battery swap and quick charge filling stations will let drivers in some areas make much more use of EVs than the average driver. These islands of support would likely grow over time and even merge in places like the US Northeast or anywhere else population centers are relatively close to each other. If there happens to be a good EV support infrastructure in the Rochester area, for example, then I would not only be able to drive my Electron 5000 farther, but I would be able to buy one with a smaller battery pack, possibly knocking thousands of dollars off the initial purchase price.

One of the underappreciated aspects of our response to our energy and environmental challenges, at least underappreciated in the online portion of the infosphere, is the evolution of business models and public policy. These are critical elements in how our economy works, and they can potentially play a huge role in how quickly we develop and roll out the much sexier things like new, higher efficiency photovoltaic cells, algae biodiesel, wave and tidal generating plants, and all the other hardware we all love to obsess about. It’s truly amazing how many people forget the painfully obvious, that a breakthrough in a laboratory means precisely nothing unless and until that technology is scaled up and used in the (typically far less forgiving) real world.

One example of a non-technological breakthrough that I’ve mentioned before is the PPA (power production agreement). That’s a contract where some third-party company installs solar panels on your home or business at no cost, and you sign a long-term agreement that says you’ll buy electricity from the panels at a specified price. The company owns all the hardware, and is responsible for maintaining it. These arrangements are becoming very popular, especially in parts of the US that pay higher than average prices for electricity; the PPA price per kWh is often substantially less than the grid price, even without a price on carbon.

The PPA is a major breakthrough because it eliminates the two biggest hurdles small businesses and home owners face when considering adding solar panels: The first is the hassle factors of dealing with one or more contractors to figure out how large an installation is needed plus all the related details, all while trying not get ripped off, plus the need to file for federal and/or state rebates on the purchase price. For a lot of people who are so busy they barely remember to buy food, this is way too much bother, and pushing all the decisions off onto one company and signing one agreement greatly streamlines the process and removes the fear of making an enormous financial mistake.

The second benefit is the building owner doesn’t have to pay upfront for the hardware. Even with subsidies, a 4kw solar PV installation is still quite a chunk of change. Under a PPA there is no upfront money.

Combine PPAs with the reduction on solar PV prices from the continued roll out of thin film technology, and you have a recipe for the kind of mass adoption of PV that its supporters have dreamed of for decades.

Similarly, governments can use a feebate system to create a self-financing subsidy program to encourage the purchase of more fuel efficient vehicles. Under such a plan, vehicles that get less than X MPG pay a gas guzzler tax at purchase time, and those that get over Y MPG would get a rebate.[1]

In this context, a couple of articles I saw recently struck a hopeful note:

Affordable solar purchasing plans gather pace:

Municipalities are catching on to an innovative plan started by the City of San Diego to make solar panels more affordable to city residents, with a number of city governments expressing interest in the new financing scheme.

The San Diego Clean Generation Program, announced in December, will be the first of its kind in any major US city, according to San Diego’s Mayor, Jerry Sanders. Under the scheme, the city will pay for residential solar panels, which householders and businesses will then pay for over time through their property taxes.

The up-front capital cost of installing solar panels can total around $25,000 after installation fees, material costs and inverter equipment is paid for. This scheme gives residents the chance to pay for it over 20 years, according to the Mayor, who added that because the panels are tied to the property, the cost would pass to the new owner if a house with installed panels was sold.

Payment under the San Diego programme would amount to roughly $150 a year on top of the existing property tax bill - a fee advocates of the scheme claim will be largely offset by savings on utility bills.

I’m not sure how $3,000 spread over 20 years pays for a $25,000 system, but the general concept–institute government programs that reduce the barriers to entry for homeowners who want to do the right thing–has to make anyone reading this site smile.

(I would still much prefer to see a top-down approach to subsidies, such as a feed-in tariff, but I doubt we’ll see that mechanism used in the US except in some very localized areas.)

From War Bonds to Environment Bonds:

James Cameron, an executive director of Climate Change Capital, an investment company, is proposing creating “environment bonds” similar to bonds created by governments during the 20th century to fund efforts to fight World War II.

In a talk on Friday at Yale, Mr. Cameron said environment bonds (or climate bonds, as he has called them on other occasions) would be a straightforward way for governments to raise money to develop clean technology and build low-carbon economies.

Governments would collect money from investors who would benefit from guaranteed – but modest – rates of return. In the meantime, governments would invest in green infrastructure.

Because the bonds would offer secure returns, they should appeal to citizens and investors disillusioned by the implosion of the banking sector and worried by the grim economic outlook, according to Mr. Cameron. Additionally, the bonds could tap a vein of renewed idealism among investors who are seeking to use financial system for good causes.

“I sense that there is now will for people to put their money to productive use,” Mr. Cameron said. “There is something powerful in the idea that, ‘My money built that and it works and I use it.’ Building things for a purpose that binds investor, worker, user – and society – is a noble cause.”

I would invest some of my money in a climate/enviro bond in a heartbeat. This kind of program could be added as an option to the current savings bonds that the US Treasury Dept. sells, and would likely not incur a sizable overhead for administration.

If I were running this program, I would take it a step further and appeal to the “Prius factor”–the desire of people who do the right thing to be seen as doing the right thing. I would sell stickers for perhaps $5 a piece (but only available to those who have bought enviro bonds) that people could put in a car window, something official looking that says the person has purchased the bonds. I would even go one step further and sell T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. through some third-party outlet like Cafe Press. The cost to the government would be zero beyond the labor to create the designs, and the items could be priced at some fixed amount, like $1 or $2 above Cafe Press’ price, with the earnings going into the same fund as the bonds. I can very easily imagine a Prius with several of these stickers in the rear window parking and the driver wearing one of the shirts.

Is it a tacky appeal to the “look at me” characteristic in society? Yes. Would it raise money for a vital cause? Yes. Would I really do this? In a nanosecond.[2]

In short, I beg you not to overlook the critical role that the “boring stuff” like public policy and business arrangements can have on our future. They’re a major part of the economic conduit that will carry the breakthrough technologies we read about all the time online out into the real world where they can and will do a lot of good for everyone on the planet.

[1] Obviously there are several knobs the policymakers can use to tune such a program. X could equal Y, or there could be a gap, e.g. vehicles that get less than 24 MPG pay a guzzler fee, but only vehicles that get more than 28 MPG get a rebate. Also, the exact amount of the fee or rebate as a function of the vehicle’s MPG could be tweaked to no end. Obviously they should increase (higher fee for lower MPG, higher rebate for higher MPG), but the exact shape of those two curves would provide material for endless debates, and, no doubt, loopholes.

[2] Of course, the same nitwits who go apoplectic over the fact that Al Gore (gasp!) travels in an air plane and exhales would scream about the carbon footprint of the shirts and stickers. I couldn’t care less. They’ll find (or invent) something stupid to go apoplectic over anyway, and if the rest of us (meaning the sane people) can point to wind turbines or solar panels or mass transit subsidies paid for with the money, then putting up with their idiocy is the bargain of the century.

A couple of articles just popped up over on Scientific American that touch on a topic I’ve been meaning to write about: Biodiesel from algae.

The thing that put me on this particular line of thought is the movie Fuel, which I viewed recently. While I could argue with some of the details in Fuel, I don’t want to fall into orbit around nitpicking and risk ignoring the big picture: Go. See. It. It’s one of those rare environmental documentaries that merges more than a little passion with a conspicuous amount of skill in storytelling. Sadly, many documentaries I see that deal with energy and environmental issues are either so boring that only the hard core “members of the club” will sit through them or so dumbed down and saturated with overly cute graphics that they seem to be aimed at middle schoolers, not adults.

Fuel takes nearly two hours to tell its story, but it’s time very well spent. We get Henry Ford and his ethanol cars, Rudolf Diesel and his peanut oil, Jimmy Carter and his solar panels, war for oil, a huge dollop of biodiesel, some straight talk about the pros and cons of biofuels, the Veggie Van, a list of things you can do now (during the closing credits, no less), Willie Nelson and Neil Young, and, of course, algae-based biodiesel. It’s all presented by Josh Tickell, with some moving and not the least bit self-indulgent biographical information thrown in. It’s one of those films that brought a tear to my eye in some places and made me want to dash out and save the world in others. As busy as I am with a gargantuan reading and viewing list, I fully expect to watch this one several times, which could be the highest praise I could give any two-hour documentary.

Once again: Go. See. It.

But, back to those SciAm articles and biodiesel, starting with The Next Generation of Biofuels:

They’re not talking about ethanol from corn, however, which has already proved wasteful and environmentally damaging. Instead eyes are on a handful of high-tech labs around the U.S. that are perfecting ways to make the equivalent of gasoline and diesel from the lowest life-forms on the totem pole: yeast, algae and bacteria. The challenge is to make enough of these fuels economically and in a form compatible with today’s vehicles.

Once the next generation of biofuels becomes available, you could swing by the local energy station and fill up on a liquid that is virtually identical to gasoline. It would be made by U.S. companies, not shipped from the Middle East. And even though biofuels release carbon dioxide when they are burned, the organisms they are made from draw an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide from the air—making biofuels essentially carbon-neutral.

…

Other scientists argue that fermentation is not the best way to make fuel. Venter believes his more forward-thinking approach will prevail. The “most exciting” biofuel, he says, will be made from microbes that, when exposed to sunlight, consume carbon dioxide and turn it into energy directly—the equivalent of upgrading to a direct airline flight from one that had a long stopover. The idea might sound too good to be true, but Venter, who is known for his restless ambition, says it is possible.

The earth’s energy comes from the sun. An hour’s worth of sunlight holds enough power to meet a year’s worth of human energy needs. But less than a tenth of 1 percent of that energy is captured by plants. Venter and other scientists are experimenting with photosynthetic microbes such as algae and cyanobacteria (sometimes referred to as blue-green algae). Not only do these microbes remove carbon dioxide from the air, they also grow quickly—some forms double in just 12 hours, whereas grasses and other large plants can take weeks or months to do so. Photosynthetic microbes also store plenty of fat, which forms the basis for fuel. Biologist Willem Vermaas of Arizona State University recently engineered cyanobacteria to accumulate up to half their dry weight in fat; just by opening up the cells, he can harvest the stored fats and convert them, in a few simple steps, into biofuel. Some plants, such as soybeans, also store fats and can be used as fuel sources, but Bruce Rittmann, Vermaas’s colleague at Arizona State, argues that photosynthetic microbes produce nearly 250 times more fat per acre.

…

So which kind of microbe will save the earth? Samir Kaul, a partner at Khosla Ventures, a San Francisco Bay Area venture capital firm that backs start-ups pursuing both approaches, says the companies that survive will be the ones whose fuels can compete with oil at $40 a barrel. Venter agrees: “I think that’s going to end up being the biggest challenge: Can we build these really large facilities and do it in a cost-effective, environmentally friendly way?” It’s a high-stakes game, and even the scientists are hedging their bets; some of Venter’s projects involve cellulosic biofuels, similar to what Keasling is doing. And despite Rittmann’s allegiance to cyanobacteria, he is also working with other microbes.

Clearly I don’t care whether the bug we use is algae of bacteria or who knows what, as long as we get there. And right now, it seems that we’re a lot closer to making fuel from microbes not just work, but work economically, than we are in making cellulosic ethanol viable on a large scale. And I think the break-even goal should be quite a bit higher than $40/barrel for crude oil. With peak oil likely just a couple of years away, plus the all but certain arrival of some kind of carbon pricing (which wouldn’t apply to biodiesel or biogasoline, given their carbon neutrality), I think a much more realistic target is at least $75 per barrel, and would quickly become a moot point if oil flies past that point.

Microbes-to-liquid fuels (MTL) is quickly shaping up to be a critical technology, for the following reasons:

• It uses both land and water very sparingly.
• It has far less impact on food production than corn or soybeans or similar crops.
• It’s grown in large clear tubes, so there’s no need for farm equipment, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. and their attendant fuel use.
• It presents a surprisingly easy transition path (in terms of both economics and politics) from what we’re doing today to using these new fuels on a large scale. Even if you assume that can’t figure out how to make biogasoline right away and have to start off with “only” biodiesel, that still allows even the US, where diesel cars are very rare, to shift a good portion of its transportation fuel consumption (very roughly 25%) to a non-petroleum-based fuel at zero conversion cost for the consumer. (And if we do impose a price on carbon, biodiesel could prove to be noticeably cheaper than the petroleum variant, giving vehicle owners a further incentive to buy diesel vehicles.) This technology would work extremely well in a PHEV platform, like the Volt or the 12-mile battery range 2010 PHEV Prius.
• It could be (and likely will be) hugely important in dealing with both peak oil and climate chaos.

Think for a moment or three about the timing of this development and how well it meshes with everything we’re doing today and the changes we need to make, and it’s almost impossible not to develop a sudden warm feeling for pond scum. Unless, of course, you have a vested interest in exporting oil or seeing a collapse of modern civilization through climate chaos and/or peak oil, in which case it’s not good news at all.

The other SciAm article, is Corn Ethanol Will Not Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions, which presents yet more evidence that the future will be fueled with something other than food-based ethanol.

I mentioned a poll the other day (Despair and hope) that showed American evangelical were less convinced of the reality of global warming than the population in general. A slightly more general look at the issue of how we Americans see the issue is in American Apathy And Global Warming:

In a Gallup survey from 1989, 35% of respondents told interviewers they worried a great deal about global warming. In its March 2009 poll, nearly the same number, 34%, said they did. Further, the issue ranked dead last–20th of 20 issues–when the Pew Research Center asked respondents to list top priorities for President Obama and Congress. In an ABC/Washington Post poll on the same topic, global warming ranked 11th out of 11 issues.

How could this be, given all the media coverage and political attention global warming has received? Why aren’t Americans more concerned about it?

…

A recent poll from Yale and George Mason universities found that 79% of Americans would support a 45-mile-per-gallon fuel-efficiency standard for cars, trucks and SUVs–even if it meant a new vehicle would cost $1,000 more.

But would people really be willing to pay a $1,000 more for a car when their health care and day-to-day living costs are increasing too? I’m not sure, but I do know that abstract questions like this one are not reliable for determining public opinion.

There are other reasons that, right now, global warming isn’t a top priority. Americans don’t see it as a problem for today. Only 4% of respondents to the Yale/Mason poll strongly agreed that they had personally experienced the effects of global warming. For obvious reasons, people are much more concerned about the economy and unemployment. They also have high confidence in capabilities of American science and, as a result, they may believe efforts in that area will lead to progress.

…

To answer the question posed at the beginning of this column, Americans are concerned about global warming. They believe it’s a problem that is real and serious; they aren’t indifferent. But most may think their voices have already been heard and, as a result, they will choose to stay on the sidelines as the issue remains in the realm of intense political debate.

Please read it all for yourself. I think the author gives a pretty good overview of the situation, although I’ll add a few comments:

• Saying “Americans believe X” always risks being misinterpreted as a claim that “all Americans believe X”. I doubt you could get “all” Americans to agree that water is wet, if only because a few nitwits would answer no just to mess with the results. What can I say? We’re a nation of 12-year olds on a sugar high.
• My personal experience with people in the Rochester area and online tells me that the population is polarized regarding the reality and severity of climate chaos. Some people think it’s a Very Big Problem, some think it’s something we should get around to fixing, eventually, and some, for a variety of reasons, don’t, or refuse to, believe that climate chaos is real and serious.
• I sincerely hope that the author’s conclusion is right and most Americans are simply rationing their mental bandwidth and focusing on the immediate, personal problems of the economy, health care, education, etc., and they’re effectively delegating the work of worrying about the climate to the experts. That’s not how I read the survey results. The survey I linked to in my prior post says that only 47% of Americans think there is solid evidence that the climate is warming and it is caused by human activity, with another 18% saying that it’s warming but because of natural reasons. And 21% say that there is no solid evidence of warming at all.[1]
• The deniers tend to be driven by two things: Money and ideology. The money is easy enough to understand–they think they will be less well off if we take steps to significantly reduce our CO2 emissions, so they convince themselves that there’s no reason to do it. That defense mechanism is much more comforting than saying, “I’ve got mine and I’m going to keep it, even if it means cooking the whole freaking planet!” The ideology angle is no less absurd or revolting or counterproductive. That group includes people who are so opposed to “government intervention in free markets” that they will say, do, and make themselves believe in absolutely anything to avoid it.[2] Given the very recent track record of what happens when participants in a “free market” are too free (banking mess, housing mess, ENRON, etc.), it’s hard to believe that a sizable portion of Americans still think this way.[3]
• There’s no way to change the minds of the deniers; our only hope is to outnumber them at the polls and put people into office who will do the right thing, even if it means making some sizable percentage of the voters very angry. I don’t like that approach, but if it’s a choice between “playing nice” and doing nothing or too little to combat climate chaos on one hand and making the hard core deniers angry but seriously addressing the problem on the other hand, I’ll take the second option 10 out of 10 times.
• Just to be clear, I’m not saying that we don’t need or shouldn’t have a vigorous debate about how to address peak oil and climate chaos. I think we desperately need that, and the more people involved and the more open and frank and fact-based the discussion, the better. But at this point we don’t need to be debating if climate chaos is real or imminent; we should be focused on which set of policies and actions will best deal with it, taking into account the impacts of planetary warming on humans and the natural environment, as well as all the costs of whichever actions we choose.

And as for why so many Americans find it so ridiculously easy to indulge their inner denier that wants to flee from anything inconvenient or scary, look no further than House GOP leader Boehner on ABC: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical.” Read it at the risk of undergoing a case of exploding cranium syndrome.

[1] Excuse me for a few minutes while I step outside and scream until I lose my voice.

[2] Think I’m kidding about the level of sheer weirdness that ideology can trigger in Americans? My wife and I were coming home from a lacrosse game over the weekend, and we were driving on a highway behind an ancient Chrysler sedan with Missouri plates. The driver had about the worst lane discipline I’ve ever seen for a person I assume was sober (it was about 4PM). A bumper sticker on his car said, “The only reason some people are still alive is it’s illegal to kill them.” Any guesses how that person voted in the last few elections or views the climate chaos situation?

[3] As I’ve pointed out before, this notion that the less government intervention the better the market results is pure nonsense. We don’t want a completely free market; a market that’s 100% free has no rules, and goes by another, more familiar name: anarchy. What we want is a fair market, as close to the classic definition of perfect competition as possible, e.g. a market in which no single entity can affect the price and everyone has perfect information about what’s happening in the market. The only way you can achieve that ideal, or even get close to it (and maintain it) is via government intervention. Anyone who thinks otherwise should be given the opportunity to risk his or her life savings in a stock market with none of the rules and regulations we have in the US about things like insider trading and financial reporting, and accounting standards. Or perhaps those people would like to gamble the life of their gravely ill child on totally unregulated medicine sold by companies that value nothing other than profit.

IUFRO press release:

The critical role of forests as massive “sinks” for absorbing greenhouse gases is “at risk of being lost entirely” to climate change-induced environmental stresses that threaten to damage and even decimate forests worldwide, according to a new report released today. The report will be formally presented at the next session of the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) taking place 20 April-1 May 2009 at the UN Headquarters in New York City.

“Adaptation of Forests and People to Climate Change – A Global Assessment” was coordinated by the Vienna-based International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) through the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF), an alliance of 14 international organizations that each has substantial forestry programs.

Authored by 35 of the world’s top forestry scientists, it provides the first global assessment to date of the ability of forests to adapt to climate change and is expected to play a key role in next week’s UNFF discussions. The report presents the state of scientific knowledge regarding the current and projected future impacts of climate change on forests and people along with options for adaptation.

“We normally think of forests as putting the brakes on global warming, but in fact over the next few decades, damage induced by climate change could cause forests to release huge quantities of carbon and create a situation in which they do more to accelerate warming than to slow it down,” said Risto Seppälä, a professor at the Finnish Forest Research Institute (Metla) and Immediate Past President of IUFRO, who chaired the expert panel that produced the report.

The report is here [224 page, 3.6 MB PDF]. See the press release link above for versions in French, Spanish, German, and Finnish. That same page also has links to a policy brief, “Making forests fit for climate change”, in various languages.

Is it my imagination, or is the climate chaos impact on forests, particularly in terms of triggering yet another Big, Scary Feedback, suddenly getting a lot more attention?

Whether this is news to the world or just to me, it feels like we’ve colored in a couple more tiles in the climate mosaic. And as we’ve seen so many times in recent months, it’s not resolving into a pretty picture.

The water situation in California is very bad, by any rational measure, but it’s minuscule compared to what’s just beginning to unfold in Asia.

Melting Glaciers Threaten Asia Security as Water Supplies Fall:

China and India water supplies will decline as global warming shrinks Himalayan Mountain glaciers, increasing the likelihood of regional disputes, according to a report by the Asia Society.

Asia, with half the world’s population, has less fresh water than any continent except Antarctica, said Suzanne DiMaggio, director of social issues for the Asia Society, a New York-based nonprofit group that promotes Asian-U.S. relations. Water scarcity could trigger conflicts between villages in China and rivals India and Pakistan, and fuel water-borne disease and “large-scale” migration, according to today’s report.

Global warming from fossil fuel emissions is increasing the frequency of extreme weather, intensifying dry and wet seasons that can overwhelm crops, the report said. Lower crop yields from water shortages in China or India, the world’s most populous nations and the top producers of wheat and rice, could affect world food prices.

…

Glaciers, the primary fresh water source for many Asian countries, are melting more rapidly than in the past because of climate change, the report said. Melting Himalayan glaciers now account for up to 70 percent of the summer flow of the Ganges River and about 55 percent of Asia’s other major river systems, according to the report.

In 30 years, as the glaciers continue to retreat, the Indus and Mekong rivers could be dry during part of the year, according to the report.

The web page for the report by the Asia Society is Asia’s Next Challenge: Securing the Region’s Water Future. From there you can download the report mentioned above, Asia’s Next Challenge: Securing the Region’s Water Future [59 page, 2.1 MB PDF], or view an interactive country briefing. (Note: Parts of the briefing didn’t work properly in my browser, FireFox, as it displayed two sets of text that overlapped.)

From the executive summary of the report:

The global demand for freshwater is soaring as supply is becoming more uncertain. Today, one out of six people—more than a billion—do not have adequate access to safe water. The United Nations projects that by 2025, half of the countries worldwide will face water stress or outright shortages. By 2050, as many as three out of four people around the globe could be affected by water scarcity.

Water-related problems are particularly acute in Asia. Although Asia is home to more than half of the world’s population, it has less freshwater—3,920 cubic meters per person per year—than any continent other than Antarctica. Almost two-thirds of global population growth is occurring in Asia, where the population is expected to increase by nearly 500 million people within the next 10 years. Asia’s rural population will remain almost the same between now and 2025, but the urban population is likely to increase by a staggering 60%.

As population growth and urbanization rates in Asia rise rapidly, stress on the region’s water resources is intensifying. Climate change is expected to worsen the situation significantly. Experts agree that reduced access to freshwater will lead to a cascading set of consequences, including impaired food production, the loss of livelihood security, large-scale migration within and across borders, and increased economic and geopolitical tensions and instabilities. Over time, these effects will have a profound impact on security throughout the region.

Through this report, the Asia Society’s Leadership Group on Water Security aims to raise awareness of the importance of water as a means of security at multiple levels in Asia. We take as our immediate point of departure the Asian Water Development Outlook 2007, an assessment of Asia’s possible water future published by the Asian Development Bank in cooperation with the Asia-Pacific Water Forum1. The Outlook emphasizes that the majority of Asia’s water problems are not attributable to an actual shortage, but rather are the result of poor water governance. As such, they are solvable through more effective governance and better management practices.

Our goal is to build on the far-ranging findings presented in the Outlook by considering the security dimensions associated with decreased access to a safe, stable water supply in Asia. The term “security” is often used to connote conflict, but it has a much broader meaning for the purposes of this effort. The nexus between an essential resource such as water and security encompasses individual physical safety, livelihoods, health and human welfare, as well as a realization of the cooperative potential between nation-states and subnational jurisdictions. The report highlights the significance of water as a source of livelihoods, a vector of pathogens, a potent force behind extreme events and natural disasters, and also a mechanism for cooperation among governments and communities.

The report also draws attention to some of the most significant current and future water- related challenges facing the region—from water disputes involving hostile states such as India and Pakistan to water conflicts in China’s villages and provinces resulting from agricultural and industrial pollution, and from the alarming rise in waterborne diseases, especially among children, in Indonesia attributable to inadequate wastewater facilities to the negative impact that climate change will have on Asia’s glaciers, which for many countries are the primary freshwater source. The scope and scale of these problems demonstrate in stark relief that no matter how we approach water resources—whether it is on the basis of quality and quantity, or as the most potent manifestation of extreme climatic events—hydropolitics is likely to be a growing force in Asian security that will require a broader understanding of and strengthened institutional capacities for water governance.

This effort does not seek to “securitize” water. Indeed, the problems highlighted in this report cannot be addressed by traditional tools of national defense. However, the current approach, which views water scarcity and quality issues through a predominantly environmental lens, is not sufficient either. The U.S. National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025 report has forecasted that “cooperation to manage changing water resources is likely to become more difficult within and between states” in Asia2. The emerging picture underscores an urgent need to reframe the debate and to begin looking at these issues in a more comprehensive way that takes into account the complex national security and development challenges that countries and communities will face as water scarcity intensifies.

Solutions are well within reach, but they will require high-level political will and a sufficient amount of investment. Governments need to develop coherent national responses and policies to simultaneously address multiple problems, with the aim of reducing security risks and vulnerabilities and providing economic benefits, such as investments in infrastructure for water conservation and management. Countries should forge a regional approach in which governments and other key stakeholders, including nongovernmental organizations, civil society groups, and businesses, work together to clarify responsibilities and coordination mechanisms to address water security concerns.

The critical change in our mindset over the next few years and decades will be the realization that we’re now living what I call a “measured life on a managed planet”. The number of human beings on the planet combined with the way many of us want to (or already do) live mean that the time when we could indulge in the luxuries of ignorance and casual behavior are gone. The easy, cheap sources of fossil fuels are in their twilight, and we’re quickly saturating some of the natural sinks for our waste, most notably the atmosphere with CO2. It took us a long time (in human terms) to get here, but it’s finally happened, and the sooner we realize it and start acting like responsible adults, the better off we’ll be.

Today is way more hectic than normal, so I hope you’ll forgive me for tossing some things over the wall with minimal commentary…

Even Deep Cuts in Greenhouse Gas Emissions Will Not Stop Global Warming:

Drastic, economy-changing cuts to greenhouse gas emissions will spare the planet half the trauma expected over the next century as the Earth warms.

And that’s the good news.

…

“We can no longer avoid significant warming during this century,” NCAR scientist Warren Washington, the lead author, said in a statement. But “we could stabilize the threat of climate change and avoid catastrophe.”

…

But the emissions slash will not stem the tide: Global average temperatures would still rise by nearly 1º F, about what scientists attribute to date from industrial emissions since 1900.

Sea levels would creep up nearly six inches as a result of that extra heat, with any additional rise due to melting ice sheets unaccounted for in the study’s calculations. And they would keep rising beyond 2100, given the oceans’ thermal inertia.

“Note that despite a 70 percent reduction in emissions over the 21st century,” the authors write, “there is virtually no cooling.”

And while the cut would stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, it holds them at about 450 parts-per-million, according to the study. That’s nearly 20 percent higher than today’s concentrations and at or even above a threshold many scientists fear will trigger a series of cascading and transformative catastrophes.

And if the “magic number” to avoid the truly nightmarish flavors of climate chaos is really 350 ppm… ?

Australia’s largest river close to running dry:

Australia’s biggest river is running so low that Adelaide, the country’s fifth-largest city, could run out of water in the next two years.

The Murray river is part of a network of waterways that irrigates the south-eastern corner of Australia, but after six years of severe drought, the worst dry spell ever, its slow moving waters are now almost stagnant.

Water levels in the Murray in the first three months of this year were the lowest on record and the government agency that administers the river, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA), said the next three months could be just as grim.

With meteorologists predicting another year of below-average rainfall, the MDBA, is bracing for worse to come.

“We do need to ensure that we have a range of secure water sources for Adelaide and other towns along the Murray,” agency head, Rob Freeman said.

But the MDBA faces an uphill battle, as the drought has drained water supplies across the south-eastern corner of Australia. The Murray-Darling basin named after the two biggest rivers that join to form the south-eastern catchment area now holds just 18% of its water capacity.

Stopping climate change — and starvation:

In the summer of 2003, a heat wave hit Europe, leaving roughly 52,000 people dead and farmers across the region reeling. Stressing crops and livestock alike, the extreme heat was responsible for precipitous drops in crucial food stocks such as corn, maize and wheat compared with the year before. Indeed, in Italy alone, maize yields declined 35 percent, while France saw fruit and wheat production fall by 20 and 25 percent respectively. This scenario, while not directly attributable to global warming, serves as a preview of possibilities to come.

Examining 23 global climate models, two leading U.S. climatologists recently determined that there’s more than a 90 percent chance that by the end of the century, the average growing season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will “exceed the most extreme seasonal temperatures recorded from 1900 to 2006.” In other words, by 2100 the sweltering heat seen during the summer of 2003 could become a common occurrence - potentially causing food and water shortages for up to half of the world’s population.

This holds with a 2007 joint study by the U.S.-based Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which found overall global agricultural productivity, due to global warming, is projected to decline on average between 3 percent and 16 percent by 2080. The impact in particular countries, however, could be much worse. Indeed, according to the study, India could see a drop in crop production of as much as 30 percent to 40 percent and the Sudan could experience as much as a 56 percent reduction.

Sucking carbon dioxide from the air:

Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Then why not capture it and store it out of harms way? So says Roger Pielke, a scientist at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, US.

Pielke has recently analysed the economics of this controversial technique and has shown that it compares favourably to other ways of stabilising greenhouse gases. “This surprising result suggests, at a minimum, that air capture should receive the same detailed analysis as other approaches to mitigation,” Pielke told environmentalresearchweb.

See the article for some additional details. Sadly, the article itself is not freely available; I would love to see the entire analysis.

Is Local Food Better?:

Yes, probably-but not in the way many people think.

(Editor’s note: The local-food movement has been gaining momentum in developed countries, and in many developing countries as well, in recent years; in the United States alone, sales of locally grown foods, worth about $4 billion in 2002, could reach as much as $7 billion by 2011. Local food’s claimed benefits are driving health- and environment-conscious consumers to seek alternatives to the industrial agriculture system whose products dominate grocery-store shelves. It is also linked to the localization efforts of people who believe that rising transport costs and reaction to globalization will trigger a shortening of economic links and greater reliance on local and regional economies. This two-part series examines the potential impacts of greater localization of food, beginning with the environmental effects and then, in our July/August issue, the economic implications.)

One of the memes that’s received a lot of attention lately in online discussions is the notion that science doesn’t provide definite answers, it deals in probabilities. This is a tough concept for many lay people to accept and remember as they read about peak oil and climate chaos, not to mention all the other science-related news that they encounter during any given week. It’s not to see why this is so, given all the number and kind of decisions most mainstream consumers have to make. We live in the present, but one that’s separated from the future by an ever more blurred line; we’re constantly assessing whether to take out this loan, buy that car or house, pick a university or career path, get that tattoo, etc., all framed in the context of our expectations for the future. In other words, we build this mental structure of “how the world will work, and how the future will play out” largely out of assumptions, and then use it to help make our educated guesses. While scientists are often far more rigorous in their procedures than my neighbor who’s deciding on which pickup truck to buy, the basic model is the same.

A key difference concerns when someone making a decision or conducting research assumes that a probability is high enough to safely assume that the related event will happen, and other possible outcomes or explanations can be dismissed. You bought some new article of clothing yesterday, “knowing” that you would get to wear it in a day or two and completely discounting the possibility that you would be struck by lightning or suffer a similarly abrupt ending before then. Scientists likewise consider some things as settled, such as the greenhouse property of carbon dioxide or water vapor in the atmosphere. There’s nothing stopping a scientist from conducting experiments to determine if those facts are indeed accurate, although I suspect very few would bother. (Trying to determine the exact level of forcing triggered by those or other gases under different conditions is another matter, obviously. I’m talking here about the simple binary question of whether each one does or doesn’t trap heat.) Lay people are much more comfortable making sweeping assumptions that “get right to the bottom line”; depending on what’s at stake and other circumstances, they often upgrade their assessment that something will “likely” happen to a belief that it “will” happen at a much lower probability than a scientist would.[1] Scientists are far more cautious about crossing that conceptual line.[2]

This is why I’ve often said that more than anything I would love to be at a party where some of the world’s top experts on climate, ecology, oil, natural gas, water, etc. were present and drinking just enough to melt their inhibitions. I know what they say publicly, but what I want to know is what they really believe to be true, even if they can’t prove it with the kind of rigor one normally expects from them. Throwing legislators and heads of state into the mix would be entertaining, although I doubt any level of drinking short of alcohol poisoning would get them to speak the unvarnished truth.

All of the above is why I found the article World will not meet 2C warming target, climate change experts agree so fascinating:

Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed, a Guardian poll reveals today. An average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century is more likely, they say, given soaring carbon emissions and political constraints.

Such a change would disrupt food and water supplies, exterminate thousands of species of plants and animals and trigger massive sea level rises that would swamp the homes of hundreds of millions of people.

The poll of those who follow global warming most closely exposes a widening gulf between political rhetoric and scientific opinions on climate change. While policymakers and campaigners focus on the 2C target, 86% of the experts told the survey they did not think it would be achieved. A continued focus on an unrealistic 2C rise, which the EU defines as dangerous, could even undermine essential efforts to adapt to inevitable higher temperature rises in the coming decades, they warned.

…

The poll asked the experts whether the 2C target could still be achieved, and whether they thought that it would be met: 60% of respondents argued that, in theory, it was still technically and economically possible to meet the target, which represents an average global warming of 2C since the industrial revolution. The world has already warmed by about 0.8C since then, and another 0.5C or so is inevitable over coming decades given past greenhouse gas emissions. But 39% said the 2C target was impossible.

…

Asked what temperature rise was most likely, 84 of the 182 specialists (46%) who answered the question said it would reach 3-4C by the end of the century; 47 (26%) suggested a rise of 2-3C, while a handful said 6C or more. While 24 experts predicted a catastrophic rise of 4-5C, just 18 thought it would stay at 2C or under.

Some of those surveyed who said the 2C target would be met confessed they did so more out of hope rather than belief. “As a mother of young children I choose to believe this, and work hard toward it,” one said.

“This optimism is not primarily due to scientific facts, but to hope,” said another. Some said they thought geoengineering measures, such as seeding the ocean with iron to encourage plankton growth, would help meet the target.

Many of the experts stressed that an inability to hit the 2C target did not mean that efforts to tackle global warming should be abandoned, but that the emphasis is now on damage limitation.

Obviously, we shouldn’t leap to conclusions based on this one survey. I suspect that experienced climate scientists (and the people polled above were registered attendees at the recent conference on Copenhagen) have long personal histories in dealing with elected politicians, and therefore have a justifiably skeptical view of the ability of policymakers to get it right. Even so, this is not good news by any rational meaning of the phrase.

One question this raises is just how much do those policymakers promising action to keep the temperature rise under 2C really know. Are they simply behind the information curve, and have yet to ask the right people the right questions? Or do they know and are simply choosing to put a happy face on the situation as a way to muster support from the masses? I’ve predicted for some time that here in the US we would see virtually no top elected officials speak openly about peak oil. Instead, they would attack that problem indirectly, by clamping down on CO2 emissions and relentlessly pushing the far more palatable (and All American) goal of “achieving energy independence”.

But we can’t blame politicians for all of this growing conceptual gulf between the experts and lay people, regardless of how comforting that may be, or how much it might feed our desire to find vast, evil conspiracies in every shadow. A good part of this gulf is likely nothing more than an artifact of timing. In particular, scientists are discovering much more about how the world’s climate works (all too often lately in the form of something “happening quicker than we thought”), and it takes some time for that information to filter through the infosphere to the overwhelming majority of lay people who don’t constantly seek out this kind of news. That gulf would largely close by itself if science stopped making discoveries.

Largely, but not entirely. Even in the absence of the constant stream of new (and ever more alarming) information from climate scientists, we would still have the seemingly tireless and clearly relentless deniers who show up in one comment thread after another online, trotting out the same ridiculous, debunked talking points. This group, motivated by finances and/or ideology, has an effect, most notably here in the US. They’ve created a tug-of-war with the scientists, with the beliefs of the mainstream consumers and voters being the prize.

So, what to do? Censoring the deniers is absolutely out of the question, even if it were somehow possible. As many other free speech advocates have pointed out, the answer to bad speech isn’t censorship, but more speech. And in our situation, that speech has to begin with the scientists and the energy and environmental geeks, and spread through the web of information consumption to the lay people. That’s not a quick process, and it’s riddled with delays and frustration and chances for mistakes, but it seems to be all we’ve got as a first step in addressing the problems we’ve created for ourselves.

At least, that’s my best guess.

[1] This is probably a good thing, on the whole. Imagine a world in which we tried to make all those decisions, large and small, with the same care scientists applied to the research. We’d drive ourselves and our loved ones nuts and slow things down so much that entire economies would grind to a halt.

[2] Which reminds me of one of my favorite ways to explain this caution. Three scientists were walking near a farm, when one of them pointed to an animal and said, “Gee, I didn’t know there were black sheep around here.” The second scientist added, “Not so fast–all you’ve seen is one black sheep. It could be the only one.” The third scientist raised an eyebrow and said, “Don’t leap to conclusions–all you’ve seen is one black side of one sheep. How do you know the other side is black?”

The process of reading tea leaves, um, making projections, regarding the major energy and environmental issues is, to put it mildly, not something we should do casually. But we have little choice, given the terrifying proximity of peak oil and the growing impacts of climate chaos. The reason why is as simple as it is inescapable: Through a mix of ignorance and complacency and plain old denial we’ve used up the lead time we had to deal with these issues.

Projections, and looking for signs of where we’re headed, seem to be a stronger than normal theme in recent news items.

Some examples:

Absolute must read: Australia today offers horrific glimpse of U.S. Southwest, much of planet, post-2040, if we don’t slash emissions soon:

Drought, fires, killer heat waves, wildlife extinction and mosquito-borne illness — the things that climate change models are predicting have already arrived there, [scientists] say.

That’s the subhead on a stunning L.A. Times piece, “What will global warming look like? Scientists point to Australia” which opens starkly:

Reporting from The Murray-Darling Basin, Australia — Frank Eddy pulled off his dusty boots and slid into a chair, taking his place at the dining room table where most of the critical family issues are hashed out. Spreading hands as dry and cracked as the orchards he tends, the stout man his mates call Tank explained what damage a decade of drought has done .

“Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It’s devastation,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve got a neighbor in terrible trouble. Found him in the paddock, sitting in his [truck], crying his eyes out. Grown men — big, strong grown men. We’re holding on by the skin of our teeth. It’s desperate times.”

A result of climate change?

“You’d have to have your head in the bloody sand to think otherwise,” Eddy said.

…

And a major new study led by NOAA found that if we don’t act to reverse emissions soon, these global Dust Bowls will be irreversible for a long, long time (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe). The regions that NOAA identifies as facing permanent Dust Bowls:

• U.S. Southwest
• Southeast Asia
• Eastern South America
• Southern Europe
• Southern Africa
• Northern Africa
• Western Australia

Again, since Australia is the most sensitive and driest of the habitable continents, it’s no surprise that it is the first to see such climate change driven decadal drought,

See the related op-ed, also in the LA Times, Climate change hits Australia first, and hard - Los Angeles Times, which includes the chilling text:

If Australia serves as a harbinger of things to come for the rest of the world, its political response shows how difficult it will be to solve the problem. Progress is being made, but it’s achingly slow. A country that gets 80% of its electricity from coal (compared with 50% in the U.S.) is deeply reluctant to pay the price of switching to renewable energy sources; so far, the government has agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions just 5% by 2020. That won’t do much to reduce the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere and slow the pace of global warming.

Can the United States, where the impacts of climate change aren’t yet nearly as apparent, be expected to do better? For Australia’s sake, and our own, we must. Soon, you may not have to travel to the outback to see a desolate wasteland; it may be coming to your neighborhood.

Given the climate mechanisms at work (e.g. all the warming that’s still in the pipeline, the likely results of the sun coming out of its near-total lack of sunspot activity, etc.), it seems certain that the US and some other parts of the world are already locked into a future that includes a lot of drought-related pain. I truly wish I could argue otherwise.

Retreat of Andean Glaciers Foretells Global Water Woes:

Earlier this year, the World Bank released yet another in a seemingly endless stream of reports by global institutions and universities chronicling the melting of the world’s cryosphere, or ice zone. This latest report concerned the glaciers in the Andes and revealed the following: Bolivia’s famed Chacaltaya glacier has lost 80 percent of its surface area since 1982, and Peruvian glaciers have lost more than one-fifth of their mass in the past 35 years, reducing by 12 percent the water flow to the country’s coastal region, home to 60 percent of Peru’s population.

And if warming trends continue, the study concluded, many of the Andes’ tropical glaciers will disappear within 20 years, not only threatening the water supplies of 77 million people in the region, but also reducing hydropower production, which accounts for roughly half of the electricity generated in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador.

…

Similarly, on the opposite side of the world, two billion people rely on meltwater from the Himalayas, which have lost 21 percent of their glacial mass since 1962. Himalayan glaciers are the main source of water for five major river systems whose flow irrigates much of China, India, and Pakistan’s rice and wheat and which also supplies much of the region’s drinking water. These river basins are the Ganges, with 407 million people; the Indus, with 178 million people; the Brahmaputra, with 118 million people; the Yangtze, with 368 million people; and the Yellow, with 147 million. Scientists predict that the Himalaya’s smaller glaciers will be gone by 2035 and that many large ones will disappear by century’s end, possibly leading to famine in a region whose population continues to soar.

“The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia,” Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, wrote last year.

Studies show glaciers melting at alarming rates throughout the world, yet unlike mountains in higher latitudes, ice melts year-round off tropical glaciers, which are found on peaks close to the equator and receive the sun’s strongest rays.

The article mentions the loss of hydropower which will accompany the drop in drinking water supplies as the glaciers melt.

This is an issue I’ve been writing about for some time, and I think it’s just now starting to get the attention it deserves. Once again: The real problem with the movie The Day After Tomorrow is not the was it sensationalized climate chaos, but the fact that it focused people on the wrong threat. The danger is not a precipitous shutdown the North Atlantic conveyor that instantly coats a wide swath of Europe and the northeast US with glaciers, but a rewriting of the rules about where the fresh drinking water is. Wet places will get wetter, dryer places will get dryer, and all those millions of people who depend on glaciers to supply them with water for drinking, crop irrigation, sanitation, and electricity generation will suddenly have none. It’s not as dramatic as an ice-encrusted Statue of Liberty, but it’s infinitely worse because it’s real and it’s already starting to happen.

‘Zero Petroleum Growth’:

“Peak oil is an illusion,” Joe Petrowski, CEO of Gulf Oil/Cumberland Farms, told attendees Wednesday at the 2009 NACS State of the Industry Summit in partnership with CSP in Chicago. But the “political peak” for oil is very real, he cautioned. The end result: “Get ready for a future of zero petroleum growth,” he said. Petrowski examined world demand for petroleum products, alternative solutions and domestic implications in his closing presentation, “Meeting the Challenges of an Industry in Transition.”

The current political climate could have a profound impact on retailers who sell fuel, he said, pointing out that “96% of our transportation is fueled by petroleum-based products.” Yet, the political climate seems to encourage what he called “an all-out war” on petroleum.

…

An increase in federal taxes for gasoline is only one of many areas of concern, he noted. Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards could ultimately cost retailers $1.9 billion in retail margin, not including a loss of transactional sales.

Carbon taxes also area bad idea. “Cap and trade is asinine,” said Petrowski. “It gives speculators another toy to play with.”

…

Petrowski also stressed that ethanol “is not a green fuel, but it is important,” calling the food-versus-fuel debate “a sham.” He said that the United States has more acreage dedicated to golf courses than it does farms related to ethanol production.

Which other fuels might hold promise for retailers? Compressed natural gas is one intriguing possibility. It currently is selling for about $4, and that breaks down to the equivalent of gasoline selling for 44 cents per gallons. “It’s domestic, it’s cleaner and it delivers less range, which means more trips (to refuel). As a retailer, I’d like to see that happen,” he said.

This sounds like it was intended to be a “red meat” speech to a friendly audience, which likely explains the “war on petroleum” nonsense and the golf course non sequitur, among other incendiary details.

And of course, we have the obligatory “peak oil is an illusion” and “CNG is a cleaner fuel” canards. Ignoring the first and leaping right to the second — CNG is cleaner than gasoline? Yes. Anywhere as clean as we need a new fuel, and notably one that requires a massive and expensive infrastructure shift to use? Not even close.

Such silliness aside, the larger issue here is something I’ve seen mentioned many times online: Have we already seen the peak in world oil production? Or perhaps the peak in US oil or gasoline consumption? It’s not hard to see why some people would like to leap to that conclusion, and why. The most extreme peak oilers, which largely overlap with the doomers, can’t wait to get the show started. They have their popcorn popped, their sacks of rice and cans of tuna in the basement (assuming they didn’t expire since the Y2k days), and they’re tired of waiting so long before the whole world sees that They Were Right All Along. Many of the climate chaos people are eager for these peaks to materialize, if only to give them hope that we can reduce our carbon emissions at least somewhat faster than the dismal rate many people predict will materialize.[1]

Personally, I think it’s still a bit too premature to say that we’ve seen the peak of US oil or gasoline consumption. The ongoing recession, which likely won’t ease for at least another 8 months, will certainly keep consumption of everything at a lower level, and we’ll highly likely see a shift toward much more fuel efficient vehicles for those who have the wherewithal and the inclination to make such a purchase. But that change in the overall fuel efficiency of the rolling stock of vehicles on US roads will be very minor; we might even see a reversal if a GM bankruptcy results in that company, along with Ford, Chrysler, and Toyota continuing to dump pickup trucks at fire sale prices to people who could get along quite well with a sedan.

And lest I leave you with an insufficiently gloomy outlook, let me recommend Poor prognosis for our planet.

[1] Save your hate mail. I understand right down to my DNA the seriousness of both peak oil and climate chaos. Taking a verbal poke at the extremists doesn’t mean I dismiss their underlying concerns.

I’ve pointed out from time to time that we know perilously little about how the world’s climate works (at least in comparison to how much we now wish we knew) once it’s jostled by the tens of billions of tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases we emit every year. I think the first step in a solution, to the extent that this situation can have “a solution”, is a much greater emphasis on research, from funding current and proposed studies to reaching out to high school and college students to show them how much more there is to the field than what they see on the Discovery or Nat Geo channels. From there it’s a matter of applying what the research tells us to make better decisions, both individually and collectively, but for now let me focus on the intellectual part of the process.

Many climate scientists are doing real work right now, of course, and they’re constantly making discoveries. Two examples from yesterday’s news feeds:

Stalagmites reveal rapid sea level change (ABC News in Science) (emphasis added):

Ancient stalagmites from a submerged Italian cave have revealed sea level rises caused by global warming more than 200,000 years ago, according to a joint European-Australian study.

The finding, which appears in the journal Nature Geoscience, suggests the current melting of ice sheets may happen faster than expected.

Their publication adds weight to the release of an international report showing up to one-third of all Antarctic sea ice is likely to melt by the end of the century.

…

[Dutton] says their study shows that “the lag time between temperature change and the sea level rise may not be as long as expected”.

By comparing the dates of sea level rises with known increases in temperature, based on studies of ice cores from the Antarctic, they have shown the ice sheets respond rapidly to global warming.

It was previously believed that temperature rise preceded ice sheet melting by more than 3000 years.

“But these two variables have operated in phase for the major termination events in the past 500,000 years,” the researchers write in the paper.

Dutton says this suggests ice sheets are capable of responding quickly to increasing temperature and CO2.

Coal deposits provide a record of ancient methane emissions (emphasis added):

Changes in the amount of methane present in the Earth’s atmosphere over the last 400 million years have had a major impact on the global climate.

This is the conclusion of a new study published in American Journal of Science that uses present day coal deposits as a window into past concentrations of methane in the atmosphere.

…

Large changes in atmospheric CH4 have also been observed in Earth’s recent geologic past. Studies of air bubbles in glacial ice show CH4 concentrations at least doubled between the last glacial maximum, 21,000 years ago, and the pre-industrial era.

…

‘The key result is that although CO2 was still the dominant greenhouse gas over the Phanerozoic [the last 550 million years of Earth’s history], methane is important over periods when wetland extent and activity is high’ says Professor David Beerling of Sheffield University, lead author of the study. ‘During the Permo-Carboniferous period around 300 million years ago, when there was extensive coal swamp formation, the forcing by methane was probably greater than forcing by CO2′. The study’s authors also include scientists from Yale, Hawaii and Cambridge Universities.

Slowly, ever so slowly, we’re revealing individual tiles on a large blank wall to form a mosaic, a detailed representation of how Earth’s climate works. Are we now seeing enough of those tiles that we can make out at least some parts of the image, even if imperfectly?

Specifically, it seems we’re starting to piece together that corner of our picture that describes positive feedbacks. Here’s a list of the ones I’m aware of:

• Albedo flip: Polar ice melts away and the uncovered dark water absorbs more heat from sunlight than the more reflective ice would.
• Uncapped Arctic waters: When polar ice disappears, it lets more heat radiate from the water to the air, resulting in warmer air and more ice melting.
• Pancake ice: As polar ice thins it becomes much more susceptible to being broken up by wave action. Once the ice breaks up into large, roughly round “pancakes”, there’s dark water between the pieces, adding to albedo flip, and water can also splash up onto the pancakes, further speeding melt.
• Moulins make ice sheets quicker: The traditional way to model polar ice melt was as a giant ice cube that simply sat in place and melted from the outside in. We now know that melt water lakes form and then rush down through open holes in the ice, called moulins, and contribute to the ice breaking up into many smaller pieces which flow out into the ocean and melt quicker. (See almost any documentary about global warming from recent years, like Extreme Ice, for some truly dramatic footage of this in action. Fred Pearce, in his book With Speed and Violence (highly recommended), quotes Penn State’s Richard Alley as saying the consensus was that water would take 10,000 years to get through an ice sheet, and now it can take seconds.)
• “Unplug the pipe” glacier flow: A coastal glacier melts and disappears, opening a path for more ice to then flow to the ocean and break up. As with moulins, this leads to much quicker melting of ice than if it sat in place.
• A warming ocean absorbs less CO2: The oceans act as an enormous sink for both our CO2 emissions and the accumulating heat of a warming climate, which is probably why we haven’t cooked ourselves already. The problem is that as the top layer of the ocean warms and ocean flows shift, it becomes less able to absorb CO2.
• Permaforst/tundra release of CO2 and/or CH4: This is part 1 of the “time bomb” that (justifiably) scares so many people. A warmer Arctic area (and it’s warming much quicker than the rest of the planet) means permaforst and tundra defrost, releasing some of the massive amount of carbon stored there.
• Methane hydrate deposits: So-called burning ice is a weird amalgam of ice and methane, and is part 2 of the climate change time bomb. As David Archer points out in The Long Thaw (page 131), the undersea methane hydrate deposits contain trillions of tons of carbon. If even a small portion of those deposits (or those in the still-permaforst) are disturbed and they reach the atmosphere, it would highly likely kick climate chaos into overdrive. The one small piece of good news is that it’s not clear when this feedback will become active, although there is some speculation that the recent uptick in atmospheric methane is traceable to the “time bomb”.
• Drought-caused wildfires: Climate chaos means shifts in precipitation patterns, which can in turn mean more large scale wildfires that release massive amounts of CO2. These releases, which included well over 550 million of tons of CO2 from recent Australian fires and about 6 billion tons in Southeast Asia in 1997, risk converting the world’s forests from a net carbon sink to a source. To put these numbers into context, the world currently emits about 28 billion tons of CO2 per year from consumption of energy, with the US accounting for about 5.9 billion. See also U.S. Fires Release Large Amounts of Carbon Dioxide, New Study Shows.

Notice how many of the above items have to do with ice dynamics, an area that got relatively little attention until recently, and how many of them are also relatively newly recognized or understood.

I’m sure there are other feedbacks I’m overlooking, but this list should be enough to make the point: Thanks to decade after decade of rising greenhouse gas emissions we’ve set many mechanisms in the global climate in motion, mechanisms that we really don’t understand but are having negative effects on the habitability of the planet. This is neatly summarized in the abstract of a 2007 paper by James Hansen, et al., Climate change and trace gases:

Paleoclimate data show that the Earth’s climate is remarkably sensitive to global forcings. Positive feedbacks predominate. This allows the entire planet to be whipsawed between climate states. One feedback, the “albedo flip” property of water substance, provides a powerful trigger mechanism. A climate forcing that “flips” the albedo of a sufficient portion of an ice sheet can spark a cataclysm. Ice sheet and ocean inertia provides only moderate delay to ice sheet disintegration and a burst of added global warming. Recent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of our control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the largest human-made climate forcing, but other trace constituents are important. Only intense simultaneous efforts to slow CO2 emissions and reduce non-CO2 forcings can keep climate within or near the range of the past million years. The most important of the non-CO2 forcings is methane (CH4), as it causes the 2nd largest human-made GHG climate forcing and is the principal cause of increased tropospheric ozone (O3), which is the 3rd largest GHG forcing. Nitrous oxide (N2O) should also be a focus of climate mitigation efforts. Black carbon (”black soot”) has a high global warming potential (~2000, 500, and 200 for 20, 100 and 500 years, respectively) and deserves greater attention. Some forcings are especially effective at high latitudes, so concerted efforts to reduce their emissions could still “save the Arctic”, while also having major benefits for human health, agricultural productivity, and the global environment.

As serious as all this sounds, I think most worrisome is that we don’t know how all these mechanisms interact or what other surprises lie under the next few mosaic tiles we’re about to reveal, yet we’re still pouring another 3.2 million metric tons of CO2 from energy use into the atmosphere every hour.