Defrosting skeptics & melting glaciers

Political Cartoon by Steve Sack

While the text of the comic is not quite accurate—we’ll chalk it up to artistic license—it gets the point across. In the past week or so, a number of independent groups have examined the “evidence” including FactCheck.org and the Associated Press. Even so, the East Anglian emails stirred one paper in England to publish an article purportedly giving 100 reasons why global warming was perfectly natural to which New Scientist replied with 50 reasons against. See also this side-by-side graphic refuting skeptics’ major points.

In other news, the New York Times recently interviewed a climatologist who strives to engage skeptics and openly debate the evidence.

Non Sequitur strip entitled "Nature's adaption process": Business man sees sign proclaiming global warming is a hoax, and to enter dark alley for proof. Thinks to himself "I knew it!" Waiting in the shadows is a polar bear with pencil

Meanwhile, Støre-Gore reports snow and ice across the world vanishing quickly as a new article in Nature suggests that Earth’s polar ice sheets vulnerable to even moderate global warming. Indeed, the Greenland ice cap is melting faster than ever. As a consequence, Antarctica could contribute 1.4m to sea-level rise. If for you, seeing is believing, check out James Balrog’s recent TED Talk in which he shows compelling time lapse photography of glacier retreat and deflation. A particularly troubled region he does not cover since the reports of its problems are fairly recent is the Himalayas.

No Meaningful Agreement in Copenhagan. No Surprise.

Let’s see if we can grasp the so-called agreement reached in Copenhagan.

  1. Many of the Developed Countries (the North) have promised to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as much as they (comfortably) can in the future. These are not binding commitments; just promises to make a best effort. And, they are all over the place in terms of the cuts they represent compared to past and present CO2 emission levels. A number of Developing Countries (the South, including China) have now promised to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Again, nothing binding and wildly inconsistent targets and timetables. And, even if you add up all the promises, you won’t come close to getting the world on track to stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions at a (350–450 ppm) level by 2050 sufficient to forestall the worst effects of climate change over the rest of the century and beyond.
  2. The North has promised to come up with $30 billion over the next three years to help the South “fight” climate change. It’s not clear, though, how this money will be used or where it will come from. Presumably, some of it will be used to reduce CO2 emissions (although it is not clear what the best way to do that is or how such efforts should be prioritized). Some of it will have to be used to help countries adapt to sea level rise, increased storm intensity, periods of drought, adverse effects on biodiversity, and other disasters. (Which forms of adaptation should be pursued, are not clear.) Also, it is not obvious how this money will be administered or who will get it (presumably a disproportionate share should go to the poorest countries in Africa). The North says it will try to raise $100 billion by 2020, but, again, it is not clear where the money will come from, how it will be administered, or who will get it. Finally, these are just informal promises, not binding commitments.
  3. There was almost a new forest agreement, but at the end it got dropped. In Kyoto, the question of how to define and protect “sinks” (i.e., forests and oceans that absorb CO2) was not addressed. In Copenhagan, the leaders agreed that halting deforestation is “crucial.” Funds to pay countries, like Brazil, to conserve their forests are now supposed to be forthcoming. Note that rich nations like this idea because they want to count the funds they donate for this purpose toward “carbon credits” (thereby reducing the CO2 reductions they have to make in their own countries). It is not yet clear, though, how this system of carbon credits and forest preservation would work.
  4. As with all global treaty negotiations, there was a lot of uneasiness when the topic of monitoring and enforcement came up. No country can really force another to do what it doesn’t want to do—even if it has signed a treaty. Countries are sovereign. Most global agreements require countries to report regularly. But, in this case, if the reports don’t seem accurate, all the Climate Change Secretariat can do is ask for more information or clarification. It can’t double-check the data that countries submit or take independent measurements of its own. The South agreed for the first time, however, to report domestic CO2 emissions on a regular basis. There was some language discussed regarding “provisions for international consultation and analysis.” That’s as close as we’ll get to verification. Some observers had hoped that a new global panel of experts might have access to all monitoring equipment, data and technical specialists in each country so that suspect reports could be verified, but that didn’t happen.
  5. The so-called “Statement on Temperature” agreed to in Copenhagen says that the nations agreed that any global increase in future temperature should be kept to under two degrees Celsius. Since the new agreements specifies no targets, timetables, enforcement mechanisms, provisions for technology sharing between the North and the South, or ways of enhancing capacity building, it’s hard to take such a statement seriously. Saying it should be done, but not saying how, is tantamount to saying nothing.
  6. None of the promises made in Copenhagen are binding. Maybe, in the next year or two, a formal Protocol will be drafted that explains how implementation of these various commitments is supposed to happen. Until then, though, we’ll be operating under the Rio Climate Change Convention and the Kyoto Protocol.

What happens when the Kyoto agreement runs out in 2012? It appears that we will have no binding targets in place to bring global greenhouse gas emissions to a level (450 ppm? by 2050) needed to forestall dangerous temperature increases. We certainly won’t have the level of cooperation between North and South required to tackle the climate change problem over the long haul. Many countries in the South resent the way they were (once again) left out of the last minute wheeling and dealing in Copenhagen. And, tossing money at them, no matter how many billions, without ever agreeing in principal that the North is responsible for the climate change mess we are currently in, just puts off the day we can achieve the global collaboration required to address the problem effectively. Small island nations face total destruction. The numbers of international refugees that will have to move from low-lying coastal areas devasted by meterological events is sure to increase markedly. Unfortunately, nothing will be done to jump-start Southern efforts to achieve more sustainable patterns of development. In short, after Copenhagen, the climate change problem will continue to get worse at an even faster clip.

What should have been done and what can still be done to turn this situation around? First, we need to alter the system of global treaty drafting. Each region of the world should bring together governmental and non-governmental interests on a specific multi-year timetable to produce a draft global treaty that takes account of its needs and sort out its responsibilities for achieving proportionate greenhouse gas mitigation efforts sufficient to reach the required 450 ppm goal by 2050. Two or three countries in each region should immediately mobilize such efforts. Using a common template—developed by the Climate Change Secretariat which still has a 160±country mandate—each regional caucus should spell out ten year incremental reduction targets sufficient to meet the 450 ppm goal by 2050, explicit strategies that countries can use to meet these targets if they have to, the cost implications of meeting such targets (netting out the costs of not meeting them as well), ways reasonable data reporting and verification responsibilities might be met, institutional capacity building requirements, financial forecasts likely to have an impact on implementation, and possible financial or in-kind contributions each country needs or could provide). This needs to be done in eight to ten regions of the world. Each regional “caucus” should draft its suggested version of a new global agreement to meet greenhouse gas reduction requirements responsibly and designate five members from its caucus to participate in a global treaty-making council with responsibility for reconciling the differences among the proposed regional drafts. The Global Congress would have to be mediated by an international panel of skilled facilitators acceptable to all the regions. A Congress of 40–50 regional representatives would need a year or more to prepare a meaningful treaty the takes account the differences among all the regional drafts. The final version of the treaty would then be sent to each national legislative body to ratify (not at another Copenhagan-style type fracus). When a minimum of 2/3 of the countries in each region ratifies it, and a minimum of 2/3 of the regions ratify it, it would come into force. If 2/3 of the countries in 2/3 of the regions ratified the treaty, those 130 countries would be in a position to take action (under a range of trade and other treaty regimes) to pressure any and all hold out countries to ratify the new Climate Change treaty. If a county won’t sign the new treaty, they ought not be eligible to participate in international trade regimes. If they don’t sign, they ought not be eligible for assistance from any multinational banks. Since all the same countries are part of all these regimes, the climate change treaty signers would have sufficient numbers (and through the process I am describing) sufficient legitimacy, to make this happen.

Let’s get to work.

Candlelight Vigil at Senator Kerry’s Office

350 Candelight VigilMassachusetts’ citizens will be gathering together tonight in solidarity with the citizens of those nations that will be first to face the impacts of climate change.  The candlelight vigil is part of 350.0rg’s call for a science-based international climate treaty and effective U.S. legislation to get us back below 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The program includes compelling speakers invoking the moral imperative for world leaders to act, a group photo documenting the event, and development of photo messages to President Obama calling for action. People will be meeting at Cardinal Cushing Park in Boston, located at the intersection of Cambridge Street and New Chardon Street (across the street from Senator Kerry’s office at One Bowdoin Square).  The vigil is being held from 6:00 – 7:30pm with a post-vigil gathering at the Beantown Pub.

This strategic location is aimed to reach Senator Kerry, who will be America’s principal negotiator at the United Nations Climate Change Conference held this month in Copenhagen. It is not clear what will come out of the negotiations, as there is the potential for developing countries to walk out due to resistance from developed nations providing retribution for past carbon pollution.   The US has backed away from taking any action until spring, though the US has established the U.S. Center at the Copenhagen Conference.  350.org has called for vigil’s across the globe, urging for a climate treaty that is line with the latest sciuence and protects the most vulnerable countries to safeguard their very survival.

To rsvp for the climate vigil go to:  www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=186121428405&ref=
For more info: email 350Boston@gmail.com

Climate Sleep-Out in Boston pays off

Green PRCs Picture of Boston Common by Ian Maclellan for The Leadership Campaign For the past seven weeks, college students from around the region have been camping out on Boston Common on Sunday nights calling for Massachusetts to run entirely on clean energy by 2020. After a final, snowy sleep-out last Sunday, the demands of The Leadership Campaign were answered, sort of.

On December 7, state officials introduced a bill to create a task force charged with proposing ways to get Massachusetts to 100% clean electricity by 2020.

The resolution seems like a nice way of saying we’ve heard you, now bugger off, but then again Massachusetts relies on coal for only 25 percent of its electric power (about half the national average) and has set a goal of 20 percent renewable electricity production by 2020.

I wonder what it would take for the state to get to 100 percent “clean electricity”—the Leadership Campaign seems to include fossil fuel plants that use waste heat capture and recycling in its definition of clean—by 2020.

Image Credit: Ian Maclellan for The Leadership Campaign

Opening the talks

Burke lecture panorma by Colm MacCárthaighWhile we still have great expectations of the upcoming talks in Copenhagen are all fine and dandy, it’s a rather elite event about a topic that touches us all. There have been efforts to democratize the discussion, such as the Museum of Science’s, “World Views on Global Warming,” but participation is still limited to those who can be physically present. Of course, you have another chance to do so at a follow-up session tomorrow (12/5) morning. MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence has also launched a new project, the Climate Collaboratorium, to allow people to share, vote on and discuss ideas about reducing emissions on a large scale.

Pilfered file fury

Sydney_GraphLast Thursday unknown individual(s) released 120 MB of files and correspondence from a climate research group in Britain. This has lead to a bit of fervor amongst rabid skeptics such as Hiding evidence of global cooling: Junk science exposed among climate-change believers. Never mind that last month the Associated Press reported that statisticians have rejected global cooling, or that the “incriminating files” are from a single laboratory among hundreds around the world.

The claim by those involved that selected documents were made public in order to support the skeptics views seems reasonable. Afterall, consider what an arbitrary selection of your own files and email might portray (probably pretty boring stuff about lunch plans, TPS reports, SPAM and the occasional forwarded joke) versus a set chosen by an enemy or jilted lover1. However, the leaked records may still prove to be damning, though not in the manner the hacker hoped, as they do provide evidence of slightly less than stellar sportsmanship.

For those interested, it seems you can download the files at WikiLeaks and search the plain text files at the skeptic-sponsored site East Anglia Mails.

1. “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” —Cardinal Richelieu

Frogs in a pot: Lessons from the BECC conference

frogImagine if I offered someone a 17% return on their investment, that would help to prevent catastrophic long-term environmental consequences and improve the comfort and value of their home. Now envision this person shrugging off this offer and spending their money instead on upgrading their car to a fancy SUV that immediately devalues over time. Would you call this action “rational”?

This was the crux of the Behavioral, Efficiency, and Climate Change conference I attended this week, that looked into the psychological motivations of human beings, exploring why they continually make poor choices and uncover the motivating factors to help people make better decisions. Opening keynote speaker, Dan Ariely author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, is a behavioral economist who explores such questions as, “Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a five-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents?

In one poignant example, he shared his experience as a bomb victim in an Israeli hospital for 4 months. When he had to get his bandages removed the nurses wanted to rip them off quickly rather than a slow undressing. He argued for the latter, but they said that quick removal was the less painful option. This brought him down the road of behavioral psychology and through his own experiments with volunteers, using interesting pain inducing techniques, he found that people preferred slow prolonged pain rather than intense shorter experiences. He brought his evidence back to the nurses who cared for him and upon learning about his findings one nurse exclaimed: What about my pain of having to experience your screams or the pain of adopting something new?

The four day conference explored many of the questions of why people make irrational decisions, all the while we think of ourselves as unbiased and objective. Take climate change, despite the evidence that our collective impacts are surpassing the worst case scenarios predicted by the IPCC, support for Climate Change action is on a decline. This can be primarily explained by humans being hard wired to deal with immediate threats. Here are a couple of other interesting reasons on why we do not shift our behaviors to fight climate change:

  • Choices are habitual
  • Lifestyle change requires immediate sacrifices: time, money, and doing things differently than peers
  • People pursue risk seeking rather than risk avoidance activities
  • People believe we can adapt and that technology will save us
  • It is hard for us to understand or worry about intangible future consequences and we are always looking for an enemy– it is hard to believe it is us!
  • Wide range of measures make it difficult for people to adopt– Where do I start?

While many believe that the invisible hand of the market will save us, time and again this assertion has been proved wrong such as the recent collapse of ocean fisheries. Just last week, fishing nations agreed to a 30% decline in fishing yields, giving blue fin tuna a 60% chance of recovering in 15 years– tuna’s numbers have been decimated to 15% of their historical size.

Ultimately, some of the biggest findings from leading social scientists, economists, and industry experts revealed that humans are typically not moved by facts but by emotions. Our deeply held beliefs prevent us from integrating new, sometimes life saving information. I leave you with some exciting information provided by Hannah Choi Granade, lead author of the McKinsey report on “Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy“. If our nation were to invest $520 billion dollars in upfront investments, we would capture $1.2 trillion dollars in energy savings– and that is without behavior changes. That would lead to a 23% decline in projected demand, saving enough electricity to power Russia and provide natural gas to Canada for a year.

Let’s hope our leadership comes through for Copenhagen and beyond!

More than 4 out of 5 economists agree…

…the United States should act to curb emissions.

“Many observers look at economists as skeptics of the need for (climate) mitigation,” says economist Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. But “most accept the unquestionable consensus from the natural scientist that the planet is warming and humans are to blame.” —Dan Vergano, USA Today

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Gore to bring Climate Challenge to Cambridge

AlGoreNobel Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore has published a new book Our Choice:  A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.  Newsweek sets out a review of the book interspersed with quotes from Gore including his assertion that, “laying out the facts is not enough”.  Mr. Gore sees a future where an international climate bill is passed this year and the world finds out that changes in energy use were not only inexpensive but profitable. It is unclear if his vision of an international climate treaty being passed this year will come to fruition, as many leaders now see decisions not being made until 2010.

Al Gore is of course not without controversy, with his home in Tennessee consuming more than 20 times the amount of energy of a typical home, even with compact fluorescent light bulbs and energy efficient measures.  Never the less, Al Gore has played a crucial role in bringing climate change into the public’s awareness with his groundbreaking Inconvenient Truth.

Local residents will have an opportunity to hear Al Gore speak at the First Parish Church this Saturday, November 7.

Does inaction speak louder than words?

Climate frogs by Ed Stein After months of inaction by Congress, the Senate has finally decided to twiddle its thumbs some more. Note that the comic was actually published last Friday. Lest you think Stein is a modern day Nostradamus, it’s not that surprising given our nation’s poor record on global warming… but terribly disappointing nonetheless. Continue reading