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

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

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

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

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

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

But Revkin noted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

Flood Disaster May Require Largest Aid Effort in Modern History:

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lake Mead’s Water Level Plunges as 11-Year Drought Lingers:

Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir of Colorado River water that hydrates Arizona, Nevada, California and northern Mexico, is receding to a level not seen since it was first being filled in the 1930s, stoking existential fears about water supply in the parched Southwest.

…

In the 75 years since the workers began to hold back the Colorado River behind the Hoover Dam, the lake’s water has taken two precipitous plunges: first during the prolonged drought of the 1950s, which ranks second only to the current dry spell, and again in the mid-1960s, when water managers began filling Mead’s cousin 250 miles upstream, Lake Powell.

Neither dip was as severe or prolonged as that of the past decade. Nearly full in 1999, Mead has shrunken to 40 percent capacity, causing the ominous, bleach-white bathtub ring on the surrounding mountainsides to grow taller by the year. In the past five months, the lake steadily shed another 15 feet, to about 1,087 feet above sea level today. Four more feet and the lake surface will hit what would be the lowest mark since 1937 — something the government projects will happen in October.

…

Mead’s disappearing act highlights the Southwest’s chronic overuse of Colorado River water. Trouble originated with the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which estimated the river’s water flow at 16.4 million acre-feet per year and divided that up among seven states and Mexico. Today, scientists believe the compact overestimated the flow by as much as 2 million to 3 million acre-feet, because flow measurements taken during the 20th century were skewed — it was the wettest century of the last 500 to 1,200 years, according to recent paleoclimate studies of tree rings.

Climate change threatens to stretch the river’s water even further. Over the last decade, the Southwest has suffered the sharpest temperature increase on the continent, declining late-season snowpack, loss of vegetation and rampant wildfires — all while growing faster than any other region in the United States. Eight studies completed from 1991 to 2007 predict that climate change will reduce the snowpack runoff that feeds the Colorado River anywhere from 6 percent to 45 percent over the next half-century.

…

“We need to be making major policy changes to Western water,” Udall said. “And a lot of people aren’t willing to do it until you have a full-fledged crisis on your hands.”

…

Greater cutbacks and impacts follow as Mead’s surface plunges further. When the 28.5-million-acre-foot reservoir’s surface hits 1,050 feet, or about 26 percent capacity, deliveries get slashed by 417,000 acre-feet, Las Vegas shuts down one of its two intakes and Hoover Dam’s massive turbines lose the hydraulic pressure needed to generate electricity. The maximum cutback of 500,000 acre-feet kicks in when Mead’s surface hits 1,025 feet, or about 20 percent capacity.

Even holding back the maximum 500,000 acre-feet of water — enough to serve 2 million residents for a year — accounts for less than a third of the reservoir’s current deficit, which is expected to grow as temperatures increase an estimated 2 to 4 degrees Celsius by 2050, as studies predict.

It’s hard to find a more immediate large-scale example of the energy/water/climate nexus in action than the US Southwest and the Colorado River. Rising temps, rising population, reduced water input, and potentially reduced hydroelectric generation, with a steaming pile of political gridlock and inadequate action thrown in for good measure.

A few more specific observations:

The article above also details some other, pricey, steps that are being taken to ensure that Las Vegas, which gets 90% of its water from Lake Powell, won’t run out of water. This is one of those utterly boring yet terrifying aspects of our energy and climate challenges: Even in those cases where we can “fix” a situation to alleviate the impacts through mitigation or adaptation, it can be very expensive. Similar to the peak oil situation, which is not a case so much of running out of oil (at first) as it is one of running out of cheap oil, we’re entering an age when many things we implicitly assumed would “always be cheap”, like water and basic food supplies (ask anyone counting on this year’s Russian wheat harvest), are about to become much more expensive. Tat will likely be true even in those cases where we take the right steps once we get around to recognizing and responding to the problems.

In a way, the worst thing about the Colorado River situation is that it will teach us the wrong lesson. I’d guess that Las Vegas won’t run dry any time soon, although we might have to spend billions to keep those taps flowing. The problem here is that we’ll see what happens here — wait for a growing mess to turn into a true emergency before acting and then save ourselves with a big, heroic effort — and assume we can apply that to other situations, like climate change in general. As I’ve pointed out so many times that frequent readers of this site must be spontaneously bleeding from the eyes at the merest mention of it, climate change is an extremely perverse situation because of the timing involved. A significant portion of the CO2 we emit tends to hang around in the atmosphere essentially forever, in human terms. It’s not something we can throttle up and down more or less at will, but a ratchet that goes up quickly (thanks to our current emissions rate) or at a more moderate rate (under any emissions rate one can reasonably expect us to achieve), but barring any technological miracle it will continue to rise throughout the lifetime of everyone reading this.

That’s still not the perverse part, though. The impacts that CO2 creates on human beings don’t appear instantly; many of them, like unfortunate shifts in water availability and sea level rise, take from years to multiple decades to creep into our consciousness, even though we’re continually adding to the atmosphere’s CO2 level during that time lag. And let us not forget those nasty feedbacks triggered by the warming from our CO2 emissions, such as the albedo flip in the Arctic from shrinking ice cover and everyone’s two favorite monsters under the bed, methane hydrate deposits and the already defrosting permafrost. Oh yeah — and there’s ocean acidification and the 40% die off of phytoplankton in the last 50 years. Got a good solution for either of those in a spreadsheet sitting in your desktop folder?

My point here is not to retrace the hall of horrors we’ve constructed for ourselves, but to point out that a business as usual approach to problem solving once we’ve recognized the danger is just as bad as the BAU practices in our economics and industrial processes and politics that helped create the mess in the first place. We’ll probably avoid a disaster in the Colorado River basin through the semi-panicked spending of large sums of money and possibly a little luck, but I fear that experience will only reinforce the wrong mindset for dealing with the problems of the next few decades to centuries.

I really hate stories like the one linked below, because I have to choose between not saying anything about them or expressing myself and then having to explain (especially for newcomers to this site) that I’m Really A Greenie, Honest.

This time around, the story is not about anything that’s actually being done, but is simply an idea a few people are pondering.

What If Gas Receipts Had Warning Labels?:

Cigarette packs have the Surgeon General’s warning. Heavy machinery has a word of caution about operating while intoxicated. Doritos tell us their saturated fat content. What would happen if our gasoline receipts had disclaimers too?

…

The idea comes from a conference speaker Lisa Margonelli, the director of the New America Foundation’s energy initiative and the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank. In a New York Times op-ed awhile back, in the aftermath of the Gulf spill, she noted that every gallon of gas is indeed a gallon of risks, and that the spill is a unique opportunity to harness our political will to get “behind a sweeping commitment to use less gas — build cars that use less oil (or none at all) and figure out better ways to transport Americans.”

Now, I don’t think even she really believes her gas receipt warning label will actually come to pass. But it’s an interesting thought experiment. Most of the time, Americans live in a state of willful ignorance about the risks of oil. Before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there was an oil spill practically every day in places like Nigeria. And as the coverage of the oil spill fades, and as this summer of weather chaos fades into the background, the urgency of those dangers will diminish — as it always does (just look at what happened after Hurricane Katrina.)

…

Just as calorie counts inform us what we are putting into our bodies, a gas receipt warning label wouldn’t let us forget what we were really doing to our planet.

There’s no nice way to say this, so I won’t even try: This idea exemplifies precisely what’s wrong with the “environmental movement”, most notably in the US. We keep trying to come up with ever more creative and gentle ways to appeal to the better angels of consumers’ natures to coax them into making long-lived behavior changes. And, of course, it doesn’t work, for one blindingly simple and obvious reason: If you want all or nearly all people in a large and diverse group to do something they don’t want to do, you have to force them. That can be via law or by buying them off with a sufficiently large economic incentive, but be prepared to wield a carrot and/or a stick, because trying to reason with them just won’t cut it.

If we tried this gentle reminder thing on motor fuel receipts, I’m sure the overwhelming majority of Americans would not notice them at all or would see them and get pissed off that “someone was trying to tell them what they do with their own money”. In the latter case, it would likely make people dig even further into their entrenched position.

One slightly more interesting angle would be to really get in the consumer’s face. Instead of printing a static message or one chosen randomly from a static list, why not print something like, “The X gallons of gasoline you just purchased will add Y pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and add Z dollars to America’s trade deficit.” You could get even more creative and calculate the costs of adaptation to rising sea levels and other impacts, or who knows what.

Oh, there I go again — thinking that even an in-your-face version of a gentle nudge will convince a significant number of people to downsize their vehicle and/or drive less and/or hypermile when they do drive.

Silly me.

I hasten to add (he said, typing as quickly as possible) that I don’t like reaching these conclusions, so please don’t fall into the standard, hyper-polarized blogosphere trap of assuming that when someone says “X is true” he or she is pleased that X is true or stands to benefit from it in some way. In many cases all you should conclude is that your friendly neighborhood blogger thinks that X is true. I realize what a stunning notion that is, given the kinds of knock down, drag out knife fights over truly obscure minutia we see on almost any site about energy or environmental issues, but it’s true, dear reader.

On a related note, I highly recommend Dave Roberts’ Grist post, ‘Environmentalism’ can never address climate change.

The news about what’s going on Russia, especially in and around Moscow, is heartbreaking. I’ve been struggling over the last few days as I tried to figure out what I could say about it that actually added something of value to the online conversation.

Do I point out the painfully obvious (obvious, that is, to the enviro-cogniscenti, like my readers) that this one event doesn’t “prove” that “climate change is real” or anything of equal and simplistic absurdity, but that it’s a very good example of the kind of events which will be much more common in an increasingly warmer world? No, there’s nothing to add there.

How about pointing out, yet one more time, that the proper name for what we’re unleashing on ourselves via a couple of centuries of rampant environmental neglect should be called “climate chaos”, and not simply “climate change” or the ever so cozy sounding “global warming”? After all, who saw this particular event coming? Who even hinted at a scenario where Russia was baked by unrelenting heat and smothered by smoke and carbon monoxide from massive fires? If asked, I’d wager that if you could get experts to take a wild guess at some extreme weather events for 2010, they would have looked to the Gulf of Mexico and hurricanes or perhaps yet another crushing heat wave in Europe. But daily highs 30F above normal in Moscow???

To me, the most interesting question is: What happens next. We’ve already seen the reports of the dramatic change of attitude about anthropogenic climate chaos among Russia’s leaders, but we’re left wondering, When the Smoke Clears in Russia, Will Climate Policy Change?:

“I don’t know what it would take to produce an active stance on climate change in Russia, but I hope this is enough,” said Samuel Charap, a senior fellow for the Center for American Progress who studies Russian climate and energy policy.

Recent comments made by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev link climate change and the wildfires, stoking speculation about what Russia may bring to the table in the next round of international climate talks. But once the wildfires’ smoke clears, they may not amount to much, according to Alexey Kokorin, the Moscow-based climate negotiator for the World Wildlife Fund.

Medvedev said in a public speech last week, “Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions,” according to a published transcript of the speech. “This means that we need to change the way we work, and change the methods that we used in the past,” he said.

In another speech, Medvedev said these events must act as a “wake-up call” for heads of state and social organizations, “in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate,” as reported by TIME.

(Please click through and read the entire article. It’s worth your time.)

In one sense, leaders in Russia are no different than leaders in the US or China or India or anywhere else. They all have the famous American political observation that “all politics is local” encoded in their DNA. If forced to bet, I would say that once the smoke clears in Russia and a little time has elapsed, almost nothing will have changed. The leaders will convinced themselves that this was purely a weather fluke, regardless of what scientists tell them about loading the dice for such outcomes as we load the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and therefore is not deserving of any meaningful action. They will also revert to myopia masquerading as pragmatism and convince themselves and their citizens that any large scale action is “too expensive” or “not justified”. Politicians are better at talking themselves out of meaningful action on long-term problems than they are at taking campaign contributions, bribes, and other mind-altering gifts from fossil fuel special interests, not that I mean to imply the two are completely unrelated in this context.

I know how cynical this sounds — Russia has been thrust into the role of being the fingertip that we use to touch the hot stove, and I’m saying that even they won’t learn a long-term lesson from this very painful experience. Looking at human history, I think that prediction is on very solid ground. This topic will come up repeatedly in the years and decades to comes. Next time it could be China or the US or India or Europe or just about anywhere there are large number of human beings that “randomly” takes the localized hit for our history of global actions.

There’s been a small tidal wave of news items lately (e.g. Study finds black carbon implicated in global warming and Best hope for saving Arctic sea ice is cutting soot emissions, says Stanford researcher) about two papers addressing the possibility of reducing black soot emissions from various forms of combustion as a relatively quick and easy way to lesson climate change.

The abstract of the Nature Geosciences paper, Warming influenced by the ratio of black carbon to sulphate and the black-carbon source:

Black carbon is generated by fossil-fuel combustion and biomass burning. Black-carbon aerosols absorb solar radiation, and are probably a major source of global warming. However, the extent of black-carbon-induced warming is dependent on the concentration of sulphate and organic aerosols—which reflect solar radiation and cool the surface—and the origin of the black carbon. Here we examined the impact of black-carbon-to-sulphate ratios on net warming in China, using surface and aircraft measurements of aerosol plumes from Beijing, Shanghai and the Yellow Sea. The Beijing plumes had the highest ratio of black carbon to sulphate, and exerted a strong positive influence on the net warming. Compiling all the data, we show that solar-absorption efficiency was positively correlated with the ratio of black carbon to sulphate. Furthermore, we show that fossil-fuel-dominated black-carbon plumes were approximately 100% more efficient warming agents than biomass-burning-dominated plumes. We suggest that climate-change-mitigation policies should aim at reducing fossil-fuel black-carbon emissions, together with the atmospheric ratio of black carbon to sulphate.

The other paper, Short‐term effects of controlling fossil‐fuel soot, biofuel soot and gases, and methane on climate, Arctic ice, and air pollution health, was published by the Journal of Geophysical Research:

This study examines the short‐term (∼15 year) effects of controlling fossil‐fuel soot (FS) (black carbon (BC), primary organic matter (POM), and S(IV) (H2SO4(aq), HSO4−, and SO42−)), solid‐biofuel soot and gases (BSG) (BC, POM, S(IV), K+, Na+, Ca2+, Mg2+, NH4+, NO3−, Cl− and several dozen gases, including CO2 and CH4), and methane on global and Arctic temperatures, cloudiness, precipitation, and atmospheric composition. Climate response simulations were run with GATOR‐GCMOM, accounting for both microphysical (indirect) and radiative effects of aerosols on clouds and precipitation. The model treated discrete size‐resolved aging and internal mixing of aerosol soot, discrete size‐resolved evolution of clouds/precipitation from externally and internally mixed aerosol particles, and soot absorption in aerosols, clouds/precipitation, and snow/sea ice. Eliminating FS, FS+BSG (FSBSG), and CH4 in isolation were found to reduce global surface air temperatures by a statistically significant 0.3–0.5 K, 0.4–0.7 K, and 0.2–0.4 K, respectively, averaged over 15 years. As net global warming (0.7–0.8 K) is due mostly to gross pollutant warming from fossil‐fuel greenhouse gases (2–2.4 K), and FSBSG (0.4–0.7 K) offset by cooling due to non‐FSBSG aerosol particles (−1.7 to −2.3 K), removing FS and FSBSG may reduce 13–16% and 17–23%, respectively, of gross warming to date. Reducing FS, FSBSG, and CH4 in isolation may reduce warming above the Arctic Circle by up to ∼1.2 K, ∼1.7 K, and ∼0.9 K, respectively. Both FS and BSG contribute to warming, but FS is a stronger contributor per unit mass emission. However, BSG may cause 8 times more mortality than FS. The global e‐folding lifetime of emitted BC (from all fossil sources) against internal mixing by coagulation was ∼3 h, similar to data, and that of all BC against dry plus wet removal was ∼4.7 days. About 90% of emitted FS BC mass was lost to internal mixing by coagulation, ∼7% to wet removal, ∼3% to dry removal, and a residual remaining airborne. Of all emitted plus internally mixed BC, ∼92% was wet removed and ∼8% dry removed, with a residual remaining airborne. The 20 and 100 year surface temperature response per unit continuous emissions (STRE) (similar to global warming potentials (GWPs)) of BC in FS were 4500–7200 and 2900–4600, respectively; those of BC in BSG were 2100–4000 and 1060–2020, respectively; and those of CH4 were 52–92 and 29–63, respectively. Thus, FSBSG may be the second leading cause of warming after CO2. Controlling FS and BSG may be a faster method of reducing Arctic ice loss and global warming than other options, including controlling CH4 or CO2, although all controls are needed.

All of which seems to make perfect sense — black soot (or black carbon) is known to contribute to warming, and because it has such a short atmospheric lifetime compared to CO2, cutting it should yield a nearly instantaneous payback. (Questions of how to reduce the black carbon from millions of households in Africa and Asia that burn wood or animal dung for fuel, not to mention hundreds of coal plants, is another issue entirely.)

But… there’s a problem. Remember that report published by the National Research Council that I’ve mentioned here? Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts over Decades to Millenia? On page 59, it says:

The climate effects of short-lived radiative forcing agents are thus more reversible than those of CO2, and therefore actions reducing emissions of short-lived agents have different implications for Earth’s climate future than actions that affect CO2 emissions. Insofar as it is perceived that control of methane or black carbon may be technically easier or less economically disruptive than controlling CO2 emissions, mitigation of the short-lived warming influences has sometimes been thought of as a way of “buying time” to put CO2 emission controls into place. This is a fallacy. While one does buy a rapid reduction by reducing methane or black carbon emissions, this has little or no effect on the long term climate, which is essentially controlled by CO2 emissions, because of the persistence of CO2 in the atmosphere. The situation is illustrated schematically in Figure 2.8. The time course of warming produced by CO2 emissions alone is given schematically by the black line. If one adds short-lived radiative forcing agents with an aggregate warming effect into the mix, the effect will be to add to the temperature increase until such time as the emissions are brought under control, where after the temperature will quickly drop back to the CO2-only curve (the blue and red solid lines on the curve, representing early or delayed mitigation of short lived forcing agents). The effect of mitigation of, methane and black carbon is thus to trim the peak warming rather than limit the long-term warming to which the Earth is subjected. If the early action to mitigate methane emissions were done instead of actions that could have reduced net cumulative carbon emissions, the long term CO2 concentration would be increased as a consequence. Peak trimming in that case would come at the expense of an increased warming that will persist for millennia. Carbon emission control and short term forcing agent control are two separate control knobs that affect entirely distinct aspects of the Earth’s climate, and should not be viewed as substituting for one another.

It would be unrealistic to contemplate policies which would reduce black carbon emissions while leaving reflecting aerosol emissions intact, given that the diverse sources of emission yield an interlinked stew of absorbing and reflecting aerosols (Ramanathan et al 2008). The green curve in Figure 2.8 shows what happens if the aggregate of all aerosols brought under control sums to a cooling effect before mitigation; the mitigation in this case accelerates the approach to the CO2-only curve, as the masking effect of the aerosols is eliminated. If the long term situation instead includes a recalcitrant methane emission rate which is stabilized but not brought to zero, then the long term warming is brought above the CO2-only case for a period as long as the methane emissions continue.

FIGURE 2.8 Qualitative sketch of the time-course of future temperature under various scenarios for control of emission of short-lived radiative forcing agents. The time axis is given as time since the beginning of significant anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. It is assumed that CO2 emissions are brought to zero after 200 years. SLPF refers to short-lived positive forcing agents, like methane or black carbon on snow or ice. SLNF refers to short-lived negative forcing agents, primarily reflecting aerosols. “Early Action” refers to a scenario in which early, aggressive action is taken to mitigate emission of short-lived radiative forcing agents, while “Deferred Action” refers to a scenario in which such actions are delayed. The green line shows what happens if the aggregate of all short lived forcings brought under control originally added up to a cooling effect (so that reducing them warms the climate). The dashed green line is similar, except that it assumes there there is a residual methane emission that cannot be reduced to zero. The cumulative CO2 emissions are assumed to be the same in all of these scenarios.

So, where does this leave us? Do we launch a large, highly dispersed effort to reduce black carbon emissions, to chase that short-term gain, or do we ignore it and pour all our effort into reducing the long term threat, CO2 emissions? Right now, I’m not convinced we know the answer to that question. At a minimum we’d have to determine how much warming we could realistically delay by cutting black carbon emissions and at what cost, and then take into account the feedbacks that would be more active under the current business as usual path. It seems exceedingly unlikely that the decision to pursue black carbon reductions could also determine whether we trigger a massive methane hydrates or permafrost time bomb, but all things considered, it would be useful to take our best stab at finding out.

About that NRC report: I’m reading it in chunks, as time allows, and will have a lot more to say about it in time. The most notable thing about the report, at least as far as I’ve read, is its focus on the long term nature of our CO2 problem. One could even read it as being, in part, a refutation of the “year 2100 fetish” I’m always complaining about.

For now, go to the link above and grab a free PDF copy of the prepub version while it’s still available.

The grim news comes from Climate Action Tracker:

Three days before the start of the next round of UN negotiations on climate change in Bonn, actions pledged globally on reductions of greenhouse gas emissions give virtually no chance to limit global mean temperature increase to below two degrees Celsius. Analysis on several developing countries was added to the Climate Action Tracker that show movement in the right direction: Bhutan pledged to stay carbon neutral, Papua New Guinea pledged to significantly reduce its emissions. The situation of developed countries has not changed. Talks in Bonn will focus on possible accounting rules for forests. These rules have significant implications on the stringency of the pledges reductions.

Press release, 29 July 2010: http://www.climateactiontracker.org/pr_2010_07_29.pdf

The graphic at the above link shows a projected temperature increase of 3.5°C by the year 2100 (everyone’s favorite climate fetish object), with an error range of 2.9 to 4.4°C.

See the linked press release for more detail.

I thought a lot about what to say about the visible-from-orbit, toxic, flaming train wreck that the US climate bill turned into, but luckily I don’t have to — Dave Roberts over at Grist has a post up that nails it perfectly. A few excerpts that stood out, even in that excellent summary:

Blame where it is due: I’m frustrated with Obama’s passivity on this issue. I’m frustrated with Reid. I’m frustrated with the environmental movement. But we should be clear about where the bulk of the responsibility for this farce ultimately lies: the Republican Party and a handful of “centrist” Democrats in the Senate. They are the ones who refused to vote for a bill, no matter how many compromises were made, no matter how clear the urgency of the problem. They are moral cowards, condemning their own children and grandchildren to suffering to serve their own narrow electoral interests. There isn’t enough contempt in the world for them. So when the anger and recrimination get going — as they already are — let’s at least try to keep the focus on the real malefactors.

…

Big Coal will be back begging for cap-and-trade: No, really. Right now there are EPA rules in the pipeline that are going to shut down a third or more of the existing coal fleet. No new coal plants are going to get built — they’re not cost-competitive with natural gas or wind, and every one runs into a buzzsaw of grassroots opposition. In other words, carbon caps or no carbon caps, Big Coal is in trouble. Sooner or later, the industry will realize that the funding it can get from cap-and-trade, to support carbon capture and sequestration, is its only path to survival. Robert Byrd tried to tell the industry the truth before he died. Byron Dorgan tried to tell it the truth just the other day. By 2012, certainly by 2015 when many of the rules kick in, the industry will be forced to acknowledge this basic truth. And they’ll come begging Congress for cap-and-trade.

…

“We don’t have 60 votes” is bull: Every cowardly senator repeats it like a talisman to ward off the terrible threat of having to act: “We don’t have the votes.” Two things to say about that. First, of course you don’t have votes for something this controversial before you go to the floor and force the issue. Pelosi didn’t have the votes before she took the House bill to the floor. She got the votes by twisting arms and making deals. She forced the issue. That was the only way the Senate vote could ever work — if the bill was put on the floor, the issue was forced, and Dems united in daring the GOP to vote against addressing the oil spill. There’s no guarantee that would have worked, but at least it would have been a political rallying point. It would have put senators on record. And it’s not like the wimpy avoidance strategy is producing better results.

By all means, go read it all.

It’s hard to read the energy and climate news some days and not hear a frustrated Vince Lombardi, the legendary US football coach, shouting, “Does anyone here know how to play this game???”

That’s precisely the reaction I had last night when I ran into a couple of articles, one concerning the coal industry and the other the prospects for a meaningful US climate bill.

Bradford Plumer, a writer you should be following, asks the non-rhetorical question, Is The Coal Industry Suicidal?, in a piece which begins with a perfect description of the coal business:

For years, the coal industry’s strategy for dealing with climate change has gone something like this: 1) Fight off caps on carbon pollution for as long as possible. 2) Convince politicians to throw gobs of money at fancy low-carbon technologies like carbon capture and sequestration. 3) Pray that those fancy technologies actually work. The strategy has succeeded so far. Seeing as how half the electricity in the United States comes from coal, there’s never a shortage of members of Congress willing to do whatever the industry wants.

But it might be time for King Coal to switch gears…

For a long time, coal was the cheapest energy source because the industry was allowed to offload so many of its hidden costs onto the public—asthma-causing air pollution, shoddy safety regulations, coal debris dumped in Appalachian streams… But as the government starts regulating these side effects more closely, it will become clear that coal isn’t actually all that cheap. Meanwhile, natural gas prices are falling and prices for renewables are tumbling. Fewer and fewer utilities want to keep plunking money down on coal.

Then there’s global warming. Again, the industry is clinging to the hope that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) will become viable someday, and low-carbon coal can become America’s energy source of choice. Right now, though, CCS is very much unproven, and it’s hugely expensive. A recent GAO report found that CCS simply won’t take off unless there’s a price on carbon or some sort of restriction on greenhouse gases. The coal industry could fight for a cap-and-trade system that a) allowed utilities to continue operating (some) coal-fired plants, and b) provided financial incentives for carbon capture. But, instead, the industry is just digging in its heels—and, in the end, that may prove to be a huge blunder.

Quite the nasty corner coal is stuck in, isn’t it? If they stick to their old game plan, they can likely help to delay a price on carbon emissions a little while longer, but that only digs them deeper into a losing proposition and heightens the potential loss from betting on CCS. And no one should doubt the importance of CCS to the coal business. Given that the proper level for CO2 emissions is, as one scientist (Ken Caldeira?) once said is the same as the proper number of muggings of little old ladies: zero, we cannot and will not tolerate a highly polluting form of electricity generation like coal to continue with business as usual in the long run. In the US, coal accounts for 36% of all energy-related CO2 emissions, meaning if we wiped out all other CO2 emissions we’d still be well above the required 80%-by-2050 reduction and emitting nearly twice our limit.

The coal industry is running out of time and options.

The second article has the grim title Climate Bill, R.I.P. and starts with a body blow:

A comprehensive energy and climate bill – the centerpiece of President Obama’s environmental agenda – is officially dead. Take it from the president’s own climate czar, Carol Browner. “What is abundantly clear,” she told Rolling Stone in an exclusive interview on July 8th, “is that an economy-wide program, which the president has talked about for years now, is not doable in the Senate.”

But the failure to confront global warming – central not only to Obama’s presidency but to the planet itself – is not the Senate’s alone. Rather than press forward with a climate bill in the Senate last summer, after the House had passed landmark legislation to curb carbon pollution, the administration repeated many of the same mistakes it made in pushing for health care reform. It refused to lay out its own plan, allowing the Senate to bicker endlessly over the details. It pursued a “stealth strategy” of backroom negotiations, supporting huge new subsidies to win over big polluters. It allowed opponents to use scare phrases like “cap and tax” to hijack public debate. And most galling of all, it has failed to use the gravest environmental disaster in the nation’s history to push through a climate bill – to argue that fossil-fuel polluters should pay for the damage they are doing to the atmosphere, just as BP will be forced to pay for the damage it has done to the Gulf.

Top environmental groups, including Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, are openly clashing with the administration, demanding that Obama provide more hands-on leadership to secure a meaningful climate bill. “We really need the president to take the lead and tell us what bill he’s going to support,” says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense Fund. “If he doesn’t do that, then everything he’s done so far will lead to nothing.”

But Obama, so far, has shown no urgency on the issue, and little willingness to lead – despite a June poll showing that 76 percent of Americans believe the government should limit climate pollution. With hopes for an economy-wide approach to global warming dashed, Congress is now weighing a scaled-back proposal that would ratchet down carbon pollution from the nation’s electric utilities. It has come to this: The best legislation we can hope for is the same climate policy that George W. Bush promoted during the 2000 campaign. Even worse, the “utilities first” approach could wind up stripping the EPA of its newfound authority to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.

You get the idea, but you should go read it all.

Related: Forward or Backward on Global Warming?

The NRDC has issued a new report that finds “More than One Out of Three U.S. Counties Face Water Shortages Due to Climate Change”:

More than 1,100 U.S. counties — a full one-third of all counties in the lower 48 states — now face higher risks of water shortages by mid-century as the result of global warming, and more than 400 of these counties will be at extremely high risk for water shortages, based on estimates from a new report by Tetra Tech for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

The report uses publicly available water use data across the United States and climate projections from a set of models used in recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) work to evaluate withdrawals related to renewable water supply. The report finds that 14 states face an extreme or high risk to water sustainability, or are likely to see limitations on water availability as demand exceeds supply by 2050. These areas include parts of Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. In particular, in the Great Plains and Southwest United States, water sustainability is at extreme risk.

The more than 400 counties identified as being at greatest risk in the report reflects a 14-times increase from previous estimates. For a look at county- and state-specific maps detailing the report findings (including a Google Earth map), go to http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/watersustainability/ and http://rd.tetratech.com/climatechange/projects/nrdc_climate.asp.

…

Dan Lashof, director of the Climate Center at NRDC, said: “This analysis shows climate change will take a serious toll on water supplies throughout the country in the coming decades, with over one out of three U.S. counties facing greater risks of water shortages. Water shortages can strangle economic development and agricultural production and affected communities. As a result, cities and states will bear real and significant costs if Congress fails to take the steps necessary to slow down and reverse the warming trend. Water management and climate change adaptation plans will be essential to lessen the impacts, but they cannot be expected to counter the effects of a warming climate. The only way to truly manage the risks exposed by this report is for Congress to pass meaningful legislation that cuts global warming pollution and allows the U.S. to exercise global leadership on the issue.”

…

More detailed explanations of the study methodology and water sustainability criteria can be found at http://rd.tetratech.com/climatechange/projects/nrdc_climate.asp.

Over at The Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum has a brief post about The Forecasted Collapse of a Fishery. This unnecessary tragedy reminds us, as if any reminder should still be needed in 2010, that the ramifications of our own past actions are increasingly forcing us to deal with a very changed world. Some intrepid author might even give it a catchy name, like Eaarth.

One of the fundamental changes is a new (or simply newly recognized) urgency about finding broadly acceptable ways to keep individuals from doing specific things that have unacceptable consequences. We have many laws and regulations now, of course, with a subset devoted to reducing or eliminating some forms of pollution. But we’ll need many more, with some way of restraining carbon emissions being the most urgent and most obvious example.

In other words, we have to realize that we really don’t live on a planet with infinite resources or infinite sinks for our waste, which has been the operational model of much of our activity throughout human history. We will have to find ways to measure and manage[1] virtually everything we do, not out of some starry-eyed, utopian vision of How The World Should Be, but simply because the unflinching facts tell us it’s in our own best interest to do so.

We have to get beyond the cynical, childish, and breathtakingly selfish view that, “there’s no profit in saving the world for future generations”, and find a path to, dare I say it, a more enlightened world view.

[1] Hence my summary of the Metricene, “living measured lives on a managed planet”.

Brendan DeMelle is one of perhaps a gazillion people to chime in on the latest exoneration of scientists in the ridiculous scandal-that-wasn’t known as Climategate. (You can grab a copy of the 160-page report from the latest investigation here [PDF].) But in his post, Climategate Is Dead! Or Long Live Climategate?, he makes some points forcefully that nearly everyone else I’ve read on the matter has missed:

While this 160-page independent report should settle once and for all any lingering suspicion about the actions of the handful of scientists most frequently cited in the emails, it is unlikely to appease the conspiracy theorists who fear the U.N. is going to steal their liberties and zombify their babies under a New World Order.

As with birthers and truthers and others who cling to extreme conspiracy theories in the face of overwhelming evidence, once people are lured by the fear-induced frame suggesting that dark forces are at work to control them, they apparently can’t tell reality from fiction. Even when handed a giant stack of scientific studies documenting what is known about climate change, some still deny the blatantly obvious conclusion that the world is warming, humans are driving that disruption, and we had better get cracking to confront this challenge.

…

But will this thorough debunking of the main allegations made by the Climategate conspiracy bloggers and their fans at FOX News suffice to end the attacks on climate scientists? Will it deflate Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s witch hunt of climate scientist Michael Mann? Will it be the “final nail in the coffin” of climate denial?

Not a chance. Climate deniers like Cuccinelli have no respect for science. They are only interested in ensuring further political dithering while the planet burns. Expect them to label it another whitewash, as usual, and continue their antics to distract the world from taking much-needed action.

But the U.S. Congress and international negotiators must now accept that the science of climate change is completely sound, and use it to craft policies to protect future generations from the ravages of climate change. They no longer have any semblance of an excuse to delay. The world’s engineers, physicists and entrepreneurs can work together to find solutions to global energy challenges and build resilience to cope with the damage already done to climate systems. But only with international cooperation can real progress be made to safeguard future generations.

DeMelle is absolutely right about the persistence of denialism. We could have dozens of coastal cities flooded, massive heat waves, devastating hurricanes,floods, and droughts, and there would still be a hard core group of deniers willing to swear it was all caused by cosmic rays or who knows what, and therefore we shouldn’t go near imposing a price on carbon emissions or anything of the sort.

He’s also right in pointing out that the only goal of the deniers is delay. Use any and every tactic possible, from lies to misrepresentation to death threats to horrors still unseen. But the critical point, which so many people on “our side” of this Dali-esque debate still somehow don’t understand, is that the deniers are not trying to convince us of anything. They are using these “discussions” with us merely as a way to put on a performance to sway the newcomers to climate issues, the non-experts who probably make up 80 to 90% of the US public and will determine the overall sentiment of the voting public.

This is why I contend that the deniers “won” this round simply by getting the headlines they wanted from the astoundingly dense and compliant media. Now that we know officially that the Climategate charges were a large truckload of bullshit, the deniers will simply keep quoting the headlines or lying about the whole affair or claiming the multiple exonerations are simply proof of the breadth and depth of the vast climate change conspiracy.

Finally, I have to disagree vigorously with the last thing I quoted from DeMelle (at least if you choose to take it literally), this notion that “the U.S. Congress and international negotiators must now accept that the science of climate change is completely sound, and use it to craft policies to protect future generations from the ravages of climate change”. No, they must not do any such thing despite the overwhelming body of evidence and the howling urgent need for them to act quickly and responsibly. And that is arguably the ugliest and most frightening detail of our current predicament. There is no safety net to save us from our own collective stupidity, no mechanism of nature or our institutions to limit the damage we can do to ourselves. We have only each other and whatever determination we can muster collectively to overcome the forces of ignorance, ideology, myopia, and the basest of motivations, greed.

Can we get there? Yes.

Will we get there? No one knows, but I sure as hell haven’t given up and I hope no one who reads this site has, either. So stay tuned to see how it plays out, but by all means work like hell you wait.

As the NE US sweats through a thoroughly delightful heat wave[1], we’re seeing the usual blip of news stories like the NY Times’ A Record 103° in New York City Tests Con Edison:

The Northeast faced a fourth day Wednesday of a record-breaking heat wave, after triple-digit temperatures tested power supplies throughout the region and tried the patience and resilience of anyone who dared to venture outside.

While temperatures were expected to moderate some from Tuesday’s peak — which saw a record set at 103 degrees for the day in New York City — utilities warned that the length and intensity of this heat wave was testing the limits of the power grid.

…

Con Edison officials used automated calls Tuesday night to appeal to customers in New York City to turn off “non-essential” appliances as power consumption reached record levels.

The heat’s effects on the five boroughs were unsparing: Some city pools were filled to capacity within an hour or so of opening, sending seekers of respite to libraries, cooling centers and other public havens from the heat. Hospitals set out jars of ice water as their waiting rooms filled with wheezing elderly patients and exhausted firefighters.

…

But even as Con Edison officials were optimistic that the city would survive the day without widespread power failures, they acknowledged that the intensity and duration of the heat wave could have a cumulative effect on the cables and transformers. In short, they said, the worst may be yet to come.

“It’s Round 1 in a prizefight,” said John Miksad, Con Edison’s senior vice president of electric operations. “Round 1 looks O.K., but the bell hasn’t rung yet.”

…

By late Tuesday evening, Con Edison had reduced voltage in neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn and Queens because of problems with electrical cables. Mr. Miksad said that more people might have lost power if not for a set of demand-reduction programs that were used on Tuesday, including voluntary cutbacks by big corporate customers and the utility’s ability to control the thermostats in some residents’ homes. All told, those programs saved as much as 400 megawatts and kept total demand from surpassing the all-time high, he said.

Some office buildings, including Con Edison’s headquarters near Union Square, shut down banks of elevators, lowered the lights and turned up thermostats. Con Edison requested that all of its customers conserve electricity by turning off equipment not being used, keeping air-conditioners at 78 degrees and running washers, dryers and dishwashers late at night.

OK, so we’re doing all the obvious things to deal with 103 degrees in NYC. No real surprise there.

But where are we headed under various emissions scenarios, you might well ask? As it turns out, this is something I was researching just the other day, which led me to (re-)find Climate Choices in the Northeast: Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment, and the document on that page that addresses New York State [PDF], which includes these graphics about what’s in store:

The first diagram is a terrific way of making the point about what a warming world means. It’s especially intriguing for me, since the high emissions/2070-2099 case puts Rochester very close to Atlanta. I’ve visited Atlanta in the summer, and the weather can be challenging for people who think 45F in January is T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flop weather.[2]

The second diagram is even more startling, as it says NYC could be in for roughly 70 days/year over 90F and 25 days/year over 100 — just like yesterday. What kind of changes would that much warming force any large city in the US or anywhere else to make to its infrastructure and social services, and at what cost? “Merely” keeping electrons flowing would be a colossal challenge.

My advice: Cut emissions and avoid the whole mess altogether. But what do I know? I’m just an economist who’s always looking for the easiest, cheapest way to deal with such issues.

[1] For all those who live in much hotter places in the US (or elsewhere) who are laughing at we northeasterners in this heat wave, let me remind you of two things: First, we just love the news footage we get several times every winter of people from the South spinning their tires as they try to drive on icy roads. (Which begs the question: If it happens all the time, why is it news?) Second, when you can gracefully handle this kind of heat and humidity and 100 inches of snow every winter (the long term average for Rochester), get back to me.

[2] That’s not an exaggeration. Go shopping in Rochester on an unseasonably warm winter day and you’ll see people dressed like that plus (at most) a windbreaker. Hardy lake folk, indeed.

Bradford Plumer has a terrific piece up at The New Republic’s blog The Vine, Is Climate Change Worth Tackling? A Reply To Jim Manzi:

Over at our new In-House Critics blog, Jim Manzi has written a long riposte to Al Gore on the subject of climate policy. It’s a thoughtful essay that’s very much worth reading in full, but if you’re pressed for time, here’s Manzi’s conclusion: “[A] massive carbon tax or a cap-and-trade rationing system would likely cost more than the damages it would prevent.” Not surprisingly, I disagree with this and want to make a few points in response.

…

I see a couple problems with this argument. The first is that Manzi is clinging way too tightly to the IPCC report. Yes, the IPCC assessments represent the best summaries of scientific knowledge about our climate system. I rely on them all the time. But the 2007 report is also dated. Climate science is a rapidly moving field, and more recent research has suggested that things may be bleaker than that 2007 report projected.

…

Second, it’s a bit too simplistic to use a single global GDP figure when talking about the effects of climate change. True, a 3 percent drop in global GDP may not sound so bad. We’ll all be much richer in 2100, we can take a hit. But that topline figure can obscure some serious distributional issues.

…

Third point: Harvard economist Marty Weitzman has recently been arguing that there’s plenty of uncertainty in climate projections, and the worst-case scenarios could be really freaking bad. Like, civilization-destroying bad. And that prospect, even if it’s slim, is a great reason to cut emissions—think of pollution curbs as an insurance policy against total annihilation.

…

The other big dispute here is over the costs of averting drastic climate change. Is Manzi right that cutting carbon emissions would “cripple our ability to… lead productive and interesting lives”? This seems awfully outlandish.

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Please go read it all, if only to see the further reasoning behind these points.

Allow me to leap in here with some of my own comments…

The point about the IPCC report being flawed because it underestimates some aspects of climate change doesn’t get nearly enough attention, in my opinion. Remember, this report was the work product of hundreds of scientists and was approved by basically every country on the planet. It’s a miracle that it says anything more specific and useful than, “you expect climate but you get weather”. (Remember the infamous “embers” diagram that didn’t make it into the 2007 report, largely because of opposition from the US, China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia? Talk about a coalition of the willing to obfuscate…) Plus, there’s the way the IPCC basically punted on melting ice sheets and sea level rise because of our in ability to model ice dynamics (a point Plumer makes). Whether you think that’s an adequate explanation for the omission (I do) or you think it’s further proof that Some Countries cooked the books in support of their (Semi-)Hidden Agendas is irrelevant; the result is the same: the 2007 report is already obsolete and in effect overly optimistic on this point.

The issue of measuring world impacts by a single GDP figure is also a valuable reminder. It makes sense to gauge atmospheric CO2 levels with a single number, but not things like GDP changes or coastal or freshwater impacts. Virtually every climate change impact will vary significantly by location; local economic circumstances will determine GDP and income impacts just as sure as geography will influence physical impacts.

The big point, however, is the one about the potential magnitude of the impacts from climate change. This is a highly uncertain area, yet it’s critical to distinguish between two scenarios. The first is one in which we can say with an extremely high level of certainty (>99.9%) that the impacts from climate change will range from relatively trivial to substantial. In that case, the cost/benefit analysis, while not easy, is still relatively manageable.

The second scenario, and the one that I’m convinced applies to our situation, is one in which there’s a non-trivial chance that the impacts of climate change will be not just high or very high or even staggeringly high but “really freaking bad”, as Plumer so aptly put it. What if we’re headed for a future where massive methane emissions from Arctic permafrost kick climate change into high gear and over a billion people are fighting for water thanks to the shrinking Himalayan glaciers plus drought in the US west, Australia, and large parts of Africa and there’s a dramatic collapse of the ocean food chain thanks to ocean acidification and many heavily populated coastal areas are threatened by sea level rise and/or an increase in the occurrence of the most powerful hurricanes? That sounds like the script for a dreadful SF disaster movie, but the more we observe about real world changes and the more paleoclimate studies we do, the more likely that becomes.

Please don’t assume that I think we’re locked into this nightmare scenario, because I don’t. But I do think we’d be unbelievably foolish to ignore the evidence that says not only is such a horrible turn of events theoretically possible but it likely has some non-trivial chance of happening before the magical planning year of 2100[1] under a business-as-usual emissions track. I have no idea if that probability is 5%, 10%, 50%, or even higher, but we’re just now realizing that our past and current actions have left us staring down the barrel of Mother Nature’s 44 Magnum as she sneers and says through clenched teeth, “you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?” Call me overly cautious if you want, but that’s not a risk I think we should take.

[1] Yes, I still have a very serious issue with this unofficial agreement that we will focus on what happens in the next 90 years and assume that whatever comes after that date somehow doesn’t count. I’ll have a lot more to say about this in an upcoming post about the fat tail of CO2 emissions.

Andy Revkin points us to an article in the NY Time that demonstrates just how large an environmental challenge China’s emerging consumer class will be:

Keith Bradsher has filed an important story showing how the energy demands of China’s emerging consumer class are overwhelming the central government’s efforts to cut industrial energy waste and blunt growth in carbon dioxide emissions.

The article provides a closeup view of the demographic and economic forces that are destined to make Asia the dominant influence on the planetary greenhouse for decades to come, by almost every analysis.

But even as Beijing imposes the world’s most rigorous national energy campaign, the effort is being overwhelmed by the billionfold demands of Chinese consumers.

Chinese and Western energy experts worry that China’s energy challenge could become the world’s problem — possibly dooming any international efforts to place meaningful limits on global warming.

If China cannot meet its own energy-efficiency targets, the chances of avoiding widespread environmental damage from rising temperatures “are very close to zero,” said Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency in Paris.

Aspiring to a more Western standard of living, in many cases with the government’s encouragement, China’s population, 1.3 billion strong, is clamoring for more and bigger cars, for electricity-dependent home appliances and for more creature comforts like air-conditioned shopping malls.

I have to admit that my initial reaction to this piece was, “No shit, Sherlock.” On a somewhat less emotional level, let me point out that this situation is a classic example of a paradigm shift, i.e. a suddenly recognized change that should have been obvious to everyone, and was therefore not a “surprise” and certainly not “sudden”, in and of itself. For a very long time we’ve know that:

• China has a very large population.
• That population has historically consumed energy and emitted CO2 at extremely low per capita rates, at least compared to the US, Japan, the EU, etc.
• Vast portions of that population is quickly rising from what people in the US would consider “poverty” to our view of “middle class”.
• Such a transition of the lifestyles of so many millions of people in such a short time frame will necessarily entail dramatically higher per capita rates of energy consumption and emissions.
• This transition is happening precisely when neither energy sources nor pollution sinks are abundant.
• The government has made it clear that economic growth is higher priority than environmental issues.

In other words, do the math. 1.3 billion people moving upscale has to have a huge impact on worldwide sustainability issues.

Add India to the mix, a country in exactly the same situation, and we now have what should have been painfully obvious all along: One hell of a sustainability challenge.

(Please forgive my snarky tone in this post. I’ve long ago grown tired of defending the implications of the arithmetic regarding this particular situation. I would ask everyone reading this to remember that just because I say, “the evidence says X is true”, doesn’t mean that I like X being true or that I enjoy talking about it. I’ve been hammering this issue simply because it’s so important and it’s clear that a lot of people are in denial over it, choosing to find ways to blame the US for China’s emissions or claiming that China can grow quickly without much greater energy consumption and CO2 emissions.)

See also:

• The battle over CO2 emissions
• China’s oil consumption
• Welcome to our coal-fired future
• The IEA and the future of carbon capture (especially for the graphics showing how China, India, and the US generate electricity)

EDF crunches the numbers for climate change:

In their Montreal presentation, Alexander Golub, a senior research fellow at EDF, and Dominic Marcellino of the Ecologic Institute look at intensity targets, policies that specify emissions reductions relative to a country’s economic output or productivity (e.g. tons of CO2 per million dollars GDP), and pose the question: “Are intensity targets the way to facilitate economic development and prevent climate change?” Answer: No.

They explain why: developing countries are both the primary future victims and the main future contributors to climate change. These countries need to address climate change without sacrificing their economic development goals.

Some policymakers have proposed climate policy based on intensity targets. Not a good plan, say Golub and Marcellino, who argue intensity targets don’t provide advantages for climate policy because they:

1. don’t provide better environmental results

2. are more expensive than other types of policy

3. will do nothing to ease international negotiations

Follow the link for more on this as well as related issues.

As I pointed out in yesterday’s post The battle over CO2 emissions, the evidence now shows that we’re in a really bad position in terms of international efforts to address this gigantic climate challenge we’ve created. And nonsense like intensity-based targets not only won’t help, they’ll make things far worse by wasting precious time.

This is why I keep stressing two points:

• We’re on a collision course with a trade war triggered by an attempt to reign in the emissions of China and India (and possibly other countries) via carbon tariffs. The only thing that will avoid such a public policy train wreck is a dramatic change of course and attitude among the leaders of China and India, and I see no reason to expect them to be any more enlightened than the elected representatives we continually inflict upon ourselves here in the US.
• It would be in everyone’s best interest to take preconceived notions and emotions out of all analyses of energy and climate issues. In other words, go exactly where the evidence leads you and nowhere else. A blame America first attitude won’t magically reduce the quickly rising emissions from China, and a jingoistic, xenophobic world view won’t change the fact that the US isn’t doing nearly enough to reduce its emissions.

As Albert Einstein pointed out, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Humanity is still in the early stages of coming to grips with the ramifications of our climate mess, so we haven’t yet felt enough urgency to change our thinking as drastically as the situation dictates. It better happen soon, because the Earth System is infinitely indifferent to our state of mind.

Anyone who didn’t see this coming is either hopelessly naive or dumber than a minivan full of deniers…

Kerry, Lieberman Willing To Scale Back Energy Bill To Get Republican Support:

The authors of sweeping energy legislation stalled in the Senate said Tuesday they were prepared to scale back their bill to get Republican support.

Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman made the comments after meeting at the White House with fellow senators and President Barack Obama, who is pushing for action in the wake of the Gulf oil spill.

“We are prepared to scale back the reach of our legislation in order to try to find that place of compromise,” Kerry, D-Mass., said after the meeting.

But the road to compromise looked anything but clear. Kerry, D-Mass., and Lieberman, I-Conn., said that during the meeting with Obama the president insisted the bill must include a price on the carbon emissions blamed for global warming - something that’s anathema to many Republicans.

And when Republicans left the meeting they lambasted the approach, calling it a “national energy tax” they could never accept.

“If we want a clean energy bill, take a national energy tax off the table in the middle of a recession while we focus on the oil spill and focus on what we agree on,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

The climate bill by Kerry and Lieberman would tax carbon dioxide emissions produced by coal-fired power plants and other large polluters, as a way to reduce pollution blamed for global warming. The measure aims to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020 and by more than 80 percent by 2050.

Yep, right on cue — the Republicans are labeling something they don’t like a (gasp!) tax and going to their favorite page in the playbook, full-court obstructionist mode. And just as predictable is the Democratic response, which will be to do everything to “look reasonable” while they “reach a compromise”, which is just polite code for, “we’re going to wimp out for the 12,000th time and let the Republicans and their 41-seat majority in the Senate stop us from doing what science says we must.”

To both camps, I say: Thanks for nothing you bunch of pathetic, greedy, myopic cowards. You’re playing petty politics and doing everything you can to run us straight into the burning building that is climate change.

Which reminds me — if you read this site you’ve probably seen speculations about what the person who cut down the last tree on Easter Island thought when he did it. I think we know the answer. He was thinking, “I can’t listen to those nutjobs who want to ‘preserve trees for future generations’! We’re running out of wood and food — now is not the time to reduce consumption! We have to keep cutting down trees so we can get healthy again and then we can worry about their so-called peak wood theories.”

And as for the term “BOHICA”…

TreeHugger has some lighting news that should be greeted with raucous cheers from anyone who’s concerned about energy and climate issues:

Late last year we reported that the US Federal Trade Commission proposed a new label for compact fluorescent lightbulbs that would show vital statistics like mercury content and the light output in terms of lumens rather than watts, which would make the brightness of CFLs, LEDs and other lighting technology more comparable among consumers. Well word has just hit that the new system has been approved and we’ll soon see nutrition-facts-style labels on our lights.

EarthTechling gave us a heads up about the new label, pointing us to the announcement from the FTC.

The FTC states, “Under direction from Congress to re-examine the current labels, the FTC is announcing a final rule that will require the new labels on light bulb packages. For the first time, the label on the front of the package will emphasize the bulbs’ brightness as measured in lumens, rather than a measurement of watts. The new front-of-package labels also will include the estimated yearly energy cost for the particular type of bulb.”

Why is this such a big deal?

All of my fellow geeks here on this site don’t need those labels when buying light bulbs, but for the non-geeks out there, they will help a lot. Not only will the new labels make it easier for consumers to do A/B/C comparisons, but it will also make it abundantly clear just how much energy they can save by changing light bulbs.[1] In general, this kind of small, cheap education can have a much greater positive impact for individuals and society as a whole.

I also like this regulation because it’s a terrific example of the right kind of government intervention in the “free” market. And anything that jabs the “All government is evil, let the Free Market Rule All!!!” clowns in the eye with a sharp stick, metaphorically speaking, of course, is simply terrific.

[1] I’m amazed by how often strangers in the lighting aisle at Lowe’s will look at me with a CFL blister pack in one hand and say, “Do these things really work?” Whenever this happens I give the bulbs an enthusiastic thumbs up, of course, and tell people I save around $5/month by using them. I still haven’t figured out why so many strangers talk to me in Lowe’s and other stores, though…

From the abstract of Assessing the climatic benefits of black carbon mitigation (PDF):

To limit mean global warming to 2 °C, a goal supported by more than 100 countries, it will likely be necessary to reduce emissions not only of greenhouse gases but also of air pollutants with high radiative forcing (RF), particularly black carbon (BC). Although several recent research papers have attempted to quantify the effects of BC on climate, not all these analyses have incorporated all the mechanisms that contribute to its RF (including the effects of BC on cloud albedo, cloud coverage, and snow and ice albedo, and the optical consequences of aerosol mixing) and have reported their results in different units and with different ranges of uncertainty. Here we attempt to reconcile their results and present them in uniform units that include the same forcing factors. We use the best estimate of effective RF obtained from these results to analyze the benefits of mitigating BC emissions for achieving a specific equilibrium temperature target. For a 500 ppm CO2e (3.1 Wm−2) effective RF target in 2100, which would offer about a 50% chance of limiting equilibrium warming to 2.5 °C above preindustrial temperatures, we estimate that failing to reduce carbonaceous aerosol emissions from contained combustion would require CO2 emission cuts about 8 years (range of 1–15 years) earlier than would be necessary with full mitigation of these emissions.