Tag Archives: climate change

Visualization

Portraits of Resilience

Leave a comment

Portraits of Resilience, a photography exhibit at the Danish National Muesum for COP15, organized by the NGO Many Strong Voices.  The projects goal was:

to illustrate in a direct and personal way the ethical dimension of the climate change discussion. The goal is to train children in the use of digital media in order to help bring personal stories and faces from vulnerable regions onto the floor of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009. It is important that the world be able to see not only effects of climate change but the efforts people are making to both combat and adapt to it.

Below are photos from from Nunavut in Canada and Nesseby in Norway:

The arena in Pangnirtung used to open October or the beginning of November. Now it opens the end of December or beginning of January. The ice doesn’t freeze as much as it used to because of climate change.

The arena in Pangnirtung used to open October or the beginning of November. Now it opens the end of December or beginning of January. The ice doesn’t freeze as much as it used to because of climate change.

We travel a long distances with reindeer in the spring. If there is less snow on the ground it will be more difficult to drive with the snowmobile and it will get harder to graze the herd.

We travel a long distances with reindeer in the spring. If there is less snow on the ground it will be more difficult to drive with the snowmobile and it will get harder to graze the herd.

Visualization

Modelling climate trajectories in Copenhagen

Leave a comment

My systems modelling colleague Tom Fiddaman has been working to develop a policy screening simulation model to aid with climate negotiations.  He and his colleagues at Climate Interactive have developed a simple integrated energy and climate model C-ROADS.  Some negotiators are running on their laptop computers to evaluate alternate proposals.  Climate Interactive are using it at COP15 to provide dynamic updates of the consquences of different policy proposals.  An updated figure is shown in the figure above.

On the Climate Interactive website they write:

…how close do current proposals bring the world to climate goals such as stabilizing CO2 concentrations at 350ppm or limiting temperature increase to 2°C? The challenges of adding up proposals that are framed in multiple ways and the difficulty of determining long-term impacts of any given global greenhouse gas emissions pathway are just as present for citizens as they are for policy makers and political leaders.

With these facts in mind, our team is tracking the proposals under consideration and using the same climate change simulation available to policy-makers to report our estimate of how close ‘current proposals’ come to realizing climate goals. And we are aiming to do it in real-time as the summit unfolds.
…

Calculations in the Climate Scoreboard are made in C-ROADS, a scientifically reviewed climate simulator built using the system dynamics methodology that is designed to aggregate the proposals of 15 countries and country groups and calculate the climate impacts such as carbon dioxide concentration and temperature.  C-ROADS was built by Sustainability Institute, Ventana Systems, and the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Follow these links to understand more about C-ROADS, explore its site, read the scientific review, read the reference guide, read user quotes, read the “Frequently Asked Questions”, or experiment with the online, CO2-focused, three region version, C-Learn.

To view more Scoreboard results beyond the temperature values shown in the “widget” image, view the table of proposals, download a PowerPoint file with graphs, consult the “Frequently Asked Questions” and view an Excel file that includes a table of references for the proposals, lists our modeling assumptions, and shares C-ROADS output for the proposals.

Ecological Management, Inequality

Climate vs. Tobacco

Leave a comment

Tobacco and public health researcher Maria Nilsson and others have a Comment in the Lancet Climate policy: lessons from tobacco control (doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61959-0) in which they compare the policy response to the public health problems of tobacco to climate policy:

Controlling tobacco use is the highest immediate priority for global health, while climate change is the biggest threat to health in the medium and long term. The longstanding efforts to control the impact of the tobacco industry have important lessons for climate control.

Both health threats are underpinned by scientific evidence of increasing robustness. …
There are many similarities between tobacco use and climate change. In addition to causing huge damage to population health, both cause substantial adverse social, economic, equity, and gender effects. Both have long lead times between cause and effect, and both require long-term policies and monitoring systems. The number of countries implementing the policies effectively is far too low. Negative effects are increasing over time and will have greatest effects in low-income countries and poor populations. Both issues are influenced by strong vested interests; moreover, delaying tactics and the use of “junk science” by opponents of change have impeded effective policies.

Climate change can be compared to passive smoking because those who generate the damage are not the same people as those who suffer (in the case of tobacco) or the same country (in the case of climate change); greenhouse gases are the largest externality the world has ever experienced.

Externalities require public policy intervention because markets cannot and will not deal with them. As with tobacco use, climate change requires local action informed by local circumstances. But in both cases, solutions ultimately depend on globally coordinated policies.

There are also important differences. The health damage due to smoking accrues either directly to smokers or indirectly to others through passive smoking. The effects from climate change will be global; those countries responsible for the most cumulative emissions are much less damaged than those who suffer most from the health effects.

There are important lessons from tobacco control for climate policy. The existing research base calls for urgent, comprehensive, and sustained action. Political will and strong leadership are required for both areas: implementing effective tobacco control policies has taken decades and is far from complete. Additional funding to support action in low-income countries is in the interest of all. The main lesson from tobacco for the Copenhagen conference is that delay in agreeing on international policy and poor implementation will cost countless lives. We must act now in the interests of future generations.

Visualization

The non-suprising dynamics of climate change

3 Comments

On his weblog Open Mind Tamino makes some graphs of decadal climate change.  He writes:

Those who are in denial of global warming insist that the last decade of global temperature contradicts what was expected by mainstream climate scientists.

Here’s global temperature data from NASA GISS before the 21st century, for the time span 1975 to 2000:

I’ve computed and plotted a trend line using linear regression. In addition, I’ve plotted dashed lines two standard deviations above and below the trend line — we expect most of the data to fall within these dashed lines. Finally, I’ve projected those lines out to the present day.

That’s what mainstream climate scientists expected to happen.

Here’s what actually happened.

Gosh. What actually happened is exactly what was expected. Exactly. By mainstream climate scientists. You know, those folks who keep telling us that human activity is warming the planet and that it’s dangerous.

Tamino also shows that various alternative climate data sets show the same pattern. And as Nature reports the UK Met Office shows the last decade was the warmest recorded, since instrumental records began in 1850.

met-office-average-temperatures

General

Three Climate Change Lecturer Positions at Tyndall Centre

Leave a comment

Neil Adger writes to announce three exciting research positions at UEA.

Three Lecturer Posts Ref: ATR842 (£37,651 to £43,622 per annum)

These new academic staff appointments at UEA have been created as a result of substantial new investments in the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. The posts offer excellent opportunities for continuing, or developing, internationally outstanding research careers UEA is the Headquarters of the Tyndall Centre which includes the universities of Manchester, Southampton, Oxford, Newcastle, Sussex and Cambridge. At UEA, the Tyndall Centre’s interdisciplinary activities span the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Social Sciences. These new positions will be based alongside existing Tyndall colleagues within the School of Environmental Sciences.

You must have a PhD (or equivalent) in an appropriate discipline in physical, natural, or social science, ideally with research interests in one or more of: land use and climate change; food security and climate change; mitigation, adaptation and behavioural change; energy and climate security; climate change and prosperity, and you must also be able to satisfy all other essential elements of the person specification. Applications from candidates with research interests in other climate-related areas will also be considered.

Closing date: 12 noon on 30 November 2009.

Further particulars and an application form are available on the UEA website www.uea.ac.uk/hr/jobs/ or Tel. + 44 (0)1603 593493. Ref: ATR842 (£37,651 to £43,622 per annum)

Ecological Economics, Ecological Management

Uncertainty and climate change

1 Comment

Australian Economist, John Quiggin points out that uncertainty should increase intensity of climate change action.  He writes

…it’s a straightforward implication of standard economic analysis that the more uncertainty is the rate of climate change the stronger is the optimal policy response. That’s because, in the economic jargon, the damage function is convex. To explain this, think about the central IPCC projection of a 3.5 degrees increase in global mean temperature, which would imply significant but moderate economic damage (maybe a long-run loss of 5-10 per cent of GDP, depending on how you value ecosystem effects). In the most optimistic case, that might be totally wrong – there might be no warming and no damage. But precisely because this is a central projection it implies an equal probability that the warming will be 7 degrees, which would be utterly catastrophic. So, a calculation that takes account of uncertainty implies greater expected losses from inaction and therefore a stronger case for action. This is partly offset by the fact that we will learn more over time, so an optimal plan may involve an initial period where the reduction in emissions is slower, but there is an investment in capacity to reduce emissions quickly if the news is bad. This is why its important to get an emissions trading scheme in place, with details that can be adjusted later, rather than to argue too much about getting the short term parts of the policy exactly right.

…

Anyway, back to my main point. The huge scientific uncertainty about the cost of inaction has obscured a surprisingly strong economic consensus about the economic cost of stabilising global CO2 concentrations at the levels currently being debated by national governments, that is, in the range 450-550 ppm. The typical estimate of costs is 2 per cent of global income, plus or minus 2 per cent. There are no credible estimates above 5 per cent, and I don’t think any serious economist believes in a value below zero (that is, a claim that we could eliminate most CO2 emissions using only ‘no regrets’ policies).

For anyone who, like me, is confident that the expected costs of doing nothing about emissions, relative to stabilisation, are well above 5 per cent of global income that makes the basic choice an easy one.

Regime Shifts, Vulnerability

Dead Ahead: Similar Early Warning Signals of Change in Climate, Ecosystems, Financial Markets, Human Health

Leave a comment

What do abrupt changes in ocean circulation and Earth’s climate, shifts in wildlife populations and ecosystems, the global finance market and its system-wide crashes, and asthma attacks and epileptic seizures have in common?

According to a paper published this week in the journal Nature, all share generic early-warning signals that indicate a critical threshold of change dead ahead. Cheryl Dybas writing for NSF.gov covers a new paper on “Early Warning Signals for Critical Transitions” (Nature, 3 Sept 2009, 461: 53-59).

In the paper, Martin Scheffer of Wageningen University in The Netherlands and co-authors found that similar symptoms occur in many systems as they approach a critical state of transition.

“It’s increasingly clear that many complex systems have critical thresholds–‘tipping points’–at which these systems shift abruptly from one state to another,” write the scientists in their paper.

Especially relevant, they discovered, is that “catastrophic bifurcations,” a diverging of the ways, propel a system toward a new state once a certain threshold is exceeded.

Like Robert Frost’s well-known poem about two paths diverging in a wood, a system follows a trail for so long, then often comes to a switchpoint at which it will strike out in a completely new direction.

That system may be as tiny as the alveoli in human lungs or as large as global climate.

“These are compelling insights into the transitions in human and natural systems,” says Henry Gholz, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Division of Environmental Biology, which supported the research along with NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences.

“The information comes at a critical time–a time when Earth’s and, our fragility, have been highlighted by global financial collapses, debates over health care reform, and concern about rapid change in climate and ecological systems.”

It all comes down to what scientists call “squealing,” or “variance amplification near critical points,” when a system moves back and forth between two states.

“A system may shift permanently to an altered state if an underlying slow change in conditions persists, moving it to a new situation,” says Carpenter.

Eutrophication in lakes, shifts in climate, and epileptic seizures all are preceded by squealing.

Squealing, for example, announced the impending abrupt end of Earth’s Younger Dryas cold period some 12,000 years ago, the scientists believe. The later part of this episode alternated between a cold mode and a warm mode. The Younger Dryas eventually ended in a sharp shift to the relatively warm and stable conditions of the Holocene epoch.

The increasing climate variability of recent times, state the paper’s authors, may be interpreted as a signal that the near-term future could bring a transition from glacial and interglacial oscillations to a new state–one with permanent Northern Hemisphere glaciation in Earth’s mid-latitudes.

In ecology, stable states separated by critical thresholds of change occur in ecosystems from rangelands to oceans, says Carpenter.

The way in which plants stop growing during a drought is an example. At a certain point, fields become deserts, and no amount of rain will bring vegetation back to life. Before this transition, plant life peters out, disappearing in patches until nothing but dry-as-bones land is left.

Early-warning signals are also found in exploited fish stocks. Harvesting leads to increased fluctuations in fish populations. Fish are eventually driven toward a transition to a cyclic or chaotic state.

Humans aren’t exempt from abrupt transitions. Epileptic seizures and asthma attacks are cases in point. Our lungs can show a pattern of bronchoconstriction that may be the prelude to dangerous respiratory failure, and which resembles the pattern of collapsing land vegetation during a drought.

Epileptic seizures happen when neighboring neural cells all start firing in synchrony. Minutes before a seizure, a certain variance occurs in the electrical signals recorded in an EEG.

Shifts in financial markets also have early warnings. Stock market events are heralded by increased trading volatility. Correlation among returns to stocks in a falling market and patterns in options prices may serve as early-warning indicators.

“In systems in which we can observe transitions repeatedly,” write the scientists, “such as lakes, ranges or fields, and such as human physiology, we may discover where the thresholds are.

“If we have reason to suspect the possibility of a critical transition, early-warning signals may be a significant step forward in judging whether the probability of an event is increasing.”

Co-authors of the paper are William Brock and Steve Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jordi Bascompte and Egbert van Nes of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Scientificas, Sevilla, Spain; Victor Brovkin of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany; Vasilis Dakos of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Potsdam, Germany; Max Rietkerk of Utrecht University in The Netherlands; and George Sugihara of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

The research was funded by the Institute Para Limes and the South American Institute for Resilience and Sustainability Studies, as well as the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research, the European Science Foundation, and the U.S. National Science Foundation, among others.

General

Postdoctoral research opportunity in Climate Change Adaptation

Leave a comment

Postdoctoral research opportunity in Climate Change Adaptation

Complex challenges for resilience under climatic uncertainties

The successful applicant will be part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers focused on integrating debates on climate change impacts, vulnerability, resilience, and ethics.

The overall goal of this position is to assist in research on social-ecological dynamics and thresholds that are likely to determine successful adaptation, livelihood transformations, and environmentally-induced migration in the developing world (particularly Africa), as well as creative climate learning and communication tools. The applicant is expected to contribute to university-wide discussions regarding potential interdisciplinary educational programs on climate change, including international research and training partnerships and service learning/study abroad programs. The applicant is also expected to take a leadership role in preparation of manuscripts for publication and contribute to the organization of climate-related events. Penn State has extensive opportunities for collaboration across the natural and social sciences.

The successful applicant must have a mix of expertise in climate science, development, and resilience thinking. Moreover, the applicant must be able to work in an interdisciplinary collaborative setting, have experience working in a different cultural environment, have excellent communication and writing skills, and demonstrate evidence of ability to publish in scientific journals.

The position is for one year with possibility for renewal for a second year. The salary and benefits package are competitive.

Applicants should submit (electronically) a cover letter; curriculum vitae; a one or two page statement of experience as it relates to the stated position goals; a maximum of three sample reprints/preprints (electronic versions); and names, addresses, fax numbers and e-mail addresses of three references to: Dr. Petra Tschakert, petra@psu.edu or via post to: Dr. Petra Tschakert, Department of Geography, 315 Walker Building, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802.

Complete Applications must be received by October 10, 2009 to ensure consideration. Applications, however, will be accepted until the position is filled. For further information please contact Dr. Petra Tschakert; phone 814 863-9399). Penn State is committed to affirmative action, equal opportunity and the diversity of its work force. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply.

Scenarios

Ian McEwan’s climate change novel

Leave a comment

Bestselling, and Booker prize winning novelist, Ian McEwan talks about his forthcoming novel on climate change in McEwan’s novel take on climate change:

“It took me a long time to find a way into this subject – I’ve been thinking about it for a number of years,” he says. “And then I spent some time in the Arctic, with a group of artists and scientists; we were living on a boat that was frozen in a fjord. One of the things that struck me about that was there was a sort of boot room, and one of the iron rules of this boat was we had to take off all our outer clothing – boots, goggles, balaclava, skidoo suits – and over the week, the chaos of this boot room grew more and more intense.”

These eminent inhabitants of the Cape Farewell project’s vessel the Noorderlicht began to decline into a kind of genteel chaos. Someone mislaid his boots and, not wishing to delay the departure of a party itching to head out on an exploration, grabbed the nearest pair of a similar size he could find. A domino-effect of similar “borrowings” ensued. Good people, McEwan wrote at the Time (this was March 2005), were impelled to take what was not their own: “With the eighth Commandment broken, the social contract is ruptured too. No one is behaving particularly badly, and certainly everybody is being, in the immediate circumstances, entirely rational, but by the third day, the boot room is a wasteland of broken dreams.”

“I thought ‘well, this is a highly self-selected group of climate change people’,” he says now. “In the evenings we were discussing how to save the planet, and a few feet away through a bulkhead was this utter chaos! And I thought ‘that’s perfect, that’s the human angle on this that I want’. If one thinks of literature and novels in particular as investigations of human nature, then human nature suddenly became at the centre of our problem about climate change: that we’re sort of cooperative but selfish, we’re not used to thinking in long-term eras beyond our own lifespans or immediate spans of interest.

“So I devised a character into whom I poured many, many faults. He’s devious, he lies, he’s predatory in relation to women; he steadily gets fatter through the novel. He’s a sort of planet, I guess. He makes endless reforming decisions about himself: Rio, Kyoto-type assertions of future virtue that lead nowhere.”

General

Paul Krugman on Betraying the Planet

2 Comments

In his New York Times column economist Paul Krugman strongly criticizes climate change denial in the US congress:

…we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Given this contempt for hard science, I’m almost reluctant to mention the deniers’ dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.