Tag Archives: climate change

Visualization

Climate change theatre

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There has been a lack of art that addresses climate change, and this lack reduces the ability of people to envision possible futures and consequently make better decisions today.  This appears to be changing.

Playwright Steve Waters double play – Contingency Plan: On the Beach/Resilience focuses on science and politics of climate change.  The Observer writes Writers and artists are getting warmer

It is a striking stage experience. A group of cabinet ministers and scientific advisers, part of David Cameron’s newly elected government, gathers in a Whitehall basement to monitor a storm of unprecedented violence that is sweeping Britain. High seas, engorged by melted ice caps, threaten the country. Reports of gales, flooding and stricken communities pour in. Then, abruptly, the emergency telephone lines go dead and the lights fail. The tiny upstairs theatre at the Bush, London, is plunged into total darkness. Outside, a nation is drowning.

It is riveting stuff, though it is not climate change itself that forms the core of Steve Waters’s Resilience. It is the human and cultural reaction to it. “Who supplies us with electricity?” demands an infuriated minister in the pitch black. “EDF! Christ, I have got fucking shares in EDF.” Thus a national crisis becomes a battleground of self-interest, political ideology, buck-passing and bungled responses to scientific warnings.

According to Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington, Resilience has no theatrical rival for its emotional intensity at present and I am sure he is right. The play, with its partner work, On the Beach, is absorbing, intelligent, daringly imaginative and superbly performed. What really intrigues, however, is the fact that this is the London stage’s first serious attempt to tackle the issue of climate change and its impact on society.

Big Back Loop, Ecological Management

Can science deliver? Only twenty more years to come up with sustainable solutions to many planetary dilemmas

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Today, April 30, is the last day of the Open Meeting of the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP).  It is a transdisciplinary meeting where scientists from all over the world come together to discuss solutions to the pressing social and environmental issues facing our societies in the 21st century.  Over the course of 3 days, a multitude of scientific session have been held in parallel and 1200 registered scientists and practitioners have mingled and exchanged ideas.

As an individual, the sheer volume of work presented has been quite overwhelming. Still, some common challenges that we still have not managed to address adequately in today’s scientific community emerge.

These challenges crystallized during the public round table discussion of the opening day. In it a panel of prominent people, scientists from a variety of scientific disciplines as well as practitioners, were gathered to discuss the social challenges of global change and the role of science in the 21st century. A sense of urgency prevailed during the panel debate.

One leading social scientists, Roger Kasperson, feared we may have no more than twenty years to come up with viable solutions to deal with many of the looming problems like climate change, poverty and environmental degradation. So then, what is it that’s missing in our scientific endevours and how can we hope to come up with something useful before the time is out?

Carlo Jaeger, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate research in Germany, believed the way forward lies in pursuing research that treats social and ecological systems as completely integrated and interdependent. Resilience research, focusing on Social-Ecological Systems (SES) have a big and important role to play here and has the potential of leading the field as more and more people become interested in this approach.

But changing our mental models from separate to integrated social and ecological system components may not be enough. As representatives from both the social sciences and humanities pointed out we may also need to question the fundamental value systems upon which much of our science is based. As Kate Brown, from the University of East Anglia in the UK pointed out, values shape people’s perception of what is important and guide moral and ethical choices, To deal with issues such as chronic poverty, and often linked environmental degradation, we have to address value systems.

So transdisciplinary science emerged as the key to success. And the role of young scholars in taking on this challenge was emphasized. But can we wait for an entire new generations of scientists to emerge? If we take Roger Kasperson’s remarks to heart, and aim for solutions in the next twenty years we need to address these issues now. But there are still obstacles that need to be overcome. One major obstacle is the scientific community itself and the structures it has built to ensure quality and integrity. As researchers attempt to cross boundaries, between disciplines and across the boundaries to policy, the traditional methods of quality control and scientific reward systems appear increasingly outdated. This is particularly true for many younger scientists attempting transdisciplinary work but being hampered by the old structures of academic quality control.

James Buizer of Arizona State University pointed to this problem. To speed up transdisciplinary research while simultaneously make sure it maintains a high scientific standard new methods and measures are urgently needed. So as a scientific community we face two major challenges: to produce knowledge that can help society change governance systems for a more sustainable planetary future, while simultaneously transforming our own governance systems to be able to deal with this task!

No small task. But the community of resilience scientists can play an important role in both respects.

Adaptation, Ecological Management, Vulnerability

Should climate change research be 90 percent social science?

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Nature’s Climate Feedback reports that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber in his talk at the Open Meeting of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) urged social scientists to become more involved in climate change research:

“Speaking as a natural scientist,” he said, “I think 90% of research [on global change] will have to be done by the social scientists.”

…Physicists, he told me at the coffee break, can describe climate threats increasingly vividly and can tell decision-makers that technological solutions are out there. But it’s up to social science, he says, to figure out how we bring about massive economic and social transformation on a tight deadline.

Case in point: feeding solar power from the Sahara where it’s plentiful to Europe where it’s highly in demand, one of Schellnhuber’s favorite ideas. “All the technical problems have been solved,” he says, “but it cannot be done.” We don’t have the legal framework, the transboundary agreements, the international will for this mode of energy delivery.

This is where policy experts, economists, and even anthropologists come in. But, he says, “I don’t think the social science community has grasped the scope of the challenge.” Operating on the basic principle that all groups are different, 95% of social science papers are local case studies, not global-scale work, he says. And indeed, there are an awful lot of case studies among this week’s 800 talks. It remains to be seen whether the picture emerging from the conference will be piecemeal or planet-wide.

Adaptation, Networks

Why do some countries adopt the Kyoto protocal and IPCC recommendations earlier than others?

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How is science empowered in different countries? What are the actors and conflicts in different countries? Why is it that more democratic countries seem to adopt the Kyoto protocol earlier than others? The social sciences have a real role to play in answering these questions which will be discussed in the upcoming IHDP Open Meeting in Bonn by researchers affiliated to the COMPON project.

The COMPON project, Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks, is a network of social scientists developing cross-national surveys to explain why some countries adopt IPCC recommendations quicker than others. COMPON, started by US sociologist Jeffrey Broadbent and now includes studies in Japan, China, the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, England, and Greece.

The aim is to trace the flow of cognitive models (“facts,” frames, ideas and normative evaluations) concerning climate change between the global and national levels, and within the national levels in the policy-formation process… [The] policy network method includes the full range of organizations involved in climate change politics (government agencies, political parties, business, union, NGO and movement associations).

One of the researchers involved is German sociologist Philip Leifeld who has an interesting piece on is homepage that more democratic countries are faster at ratifying the Kyoto protocol.

The rate of adopting the Kyoto protocol in different countries

[Red shows democratic countries; Black undemocratic – countries are classified using different indices – not HDI doesn’t show a clear difference]

The trend is followed for other similar international agreements like the Montreal protocol and the Cartagena protocol on biosafety. Philip discusses why we see these patterns:

Why do we find this impressively consistent pattern? Why do democratic countries ratify the protocols faster than the others? We find four theories about this in the literature:

1. Corruption: In countries with high levels of corruption, industry lobbying can more easily assert national policies against climate protection or similar “threats”.
2. Accountability: Democratic countries have a better capacity to foresee upcoming long-term risks because science, policy-makers and the media engage in an open, public discourse.
3. Collective goods and public choice: Climate protection is a collective good, and countries have an incentive to be freeriders regarding international agreements. But only autocratic countries can afford to do so because they do not have to face punishment by the voters.
4. Capacity: Non-democratic countries usually have a lower level of development, less money and more other competing problems, so they assign a low priority to climate protection.

Which theory is now valid, and which one is wrong? The answer is: We don’t know. The problem is that democracy, corruption control, development, freedom of speech and assembly, wealth, etc. are highly collinear, so it is not possible to separate the effects. This is rather a theoretical than a methodological problem. The plots in figure 4 exhibit the problem: Corruption, development and democracy can all be predicted by gross domestic product per capita.

There are only some small clues that may provide preliminary answers: If we try to assess whether corruption or democracy are responsible for ratification pace, it may be a good idea to look at countries that are democratic but also corrupt or countries that are neither corrupt nor democratic. The only strong outlier in this sense is Singapore, which scores low on most democracy scores and also low on the corruption index. Singapore ratifies the Montreal protocol very early but is an extreme laggard in the cases of Kyoto and Cartagena, so it does not provide us with a satisfactory answer. The second clue may be the difference between the two climate protocols, Kyoto and Montreal, and the biosafety protocol, Cartagena. On the one hand, the difference in pace between democratic and non-democratic countries is much less extreme for the Cartagena protocol, and biosafety is indeed much less important for the industry than pollution control, so this may be a case for the corruption theory. On the other hand, the difference is still there, and it is consistent over all indices, so this suggests that a combination of several explanations is at work. Which one is the most important can unfortunately not be determined at the moment.

Regime Shifts

Arctic sea ice begins its annual melt with less old ice

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Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis from the USA’s National Snow and Ice Data Center reports:

Arctic sea ice extent has begun its seasonal decline towards the September minimum. Ice extent through the winter was similar to that of recent years, but lower than the 1979 to 2000 average. More importantly, the melt season has begun with a substantial amount of thin first-year ice, which is vulnerable to summer melt.

Arctic sea ice extent from: National Snow and Ice Data Center

Arctic sea ice extent

Amount of older ice has declined over the recent past: National Snow and Ice Data Center

Amount of older ice has declined over the recent past

Scenarios

Kim Stanley Robinson on Post-Capitalism

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In the consulting company McKinsey’s magazine What Matters, science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson writes about climate change and post-capitalism in an article Time to end the multigenerational Ponzi scheme:

Capitalism evolved out of feudalism. Although the basis of power has changed from land to money and the system has become more mobile, the distribution of power and wealth has not changed that much. It’s still a hierarchical power structure, it was not designed with ecological sustainability in mind, and it won’t achieve that as it is currently constituted.

The main reason I believe capitalism is not up to the challenge is that it improperly and systemically undervalues the future. I’ll give two illustrations of this. First, our commodities and our carbon burning are almost universally underpriced, so we charge less for them than they cost. When this is done deliberately to kill off an economic competitor, it’s called predatory dumping; you could say that the victims of our predation are the generations to come, which are at a decided disadvantage in any competition with the present.

Second, the promise of capitalism was always that of class mobility—the idea that a working-class family could bootstrap their children into the middle class. With the right policies, over time, the whole world could do the same. There’s a problem with this, though. For everyone on Earth to live at Western levels of consumption, we would need two or three Earths. Looking at it this way, capitalism has become a kind of multigenerational Ponzi scheme, in which future generations are left holding the empty bag.

You could say we are that moment now. Half of the world’s people live on less than $2 a day, and yet the depletion of resources and environmental degradation mean they can never hope to rise to the level of affluent Westerners, who consume about 30 times as much in resources as they do. So this is now a false promise. The poorest three billion on Earth are being cheated if we pretend that the promise is still possible. The global population therefore exists in a kind of pyramid structure, with a horizontal line marking an adequate standard of living that is set about halfway down the pyramid.

The goal of world civilization should be the creation of something more like an oval on its side, resting on the line of adequacy. This may seem to be veering the discussion away from questions of climate to questions of social justice, but it is not; the two are intimately related. It turns out that the top and bottom ends of our global social pyramid are the two sectors that are by far the most carbon intensive and environmentally destructive, the poorest by way of deforestation and topsoil loss, the richest by way of hyperconsumption. The oval resting sideways on the line of adequacy is the best social shape for the climate.

This doubling of benefits when justice and sustainability are both considered is not unique. Another example: world population growth, which stands at about 75 million people a year, needs to slow down. What stabilizes population growth best? The full exercise of women’s rights. There is a direct correlation between population stabilization in nations and the degree to which women enjoy full human rights. So here is another area in which justice becomes a kind of climate change technology. Whenever we discuss climate change, these social and economic paradigm shifts must be part of the discussion.

Given this analysis, what are my suggestions?

  • Believe in science.
  • Believe in government, remembering always that it is of the people, by the people, and for the people, and crucial in the current situation.
  • Support a really strong follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol.
  • Institute carbon cap-and-trade systems.
  • Impose a carbon tax designed to charge for the real costs of burning carbon.
  • Follow the full “Green New Deal” program now coming together in discussions by the Obama administration.
  • Structure global economic policy to reward rapid transitions from carbon-burning to carbon-neutral technologies.
  • Support the full slate of human rights everywhere, even in countries that claim such justice is not part of their tradition.
  • Support global universal education as part of human-rights advocacy.
  • Dispense with all magical, talismanic phrases such as “free markets” and promote a larger systems analysis that is more empirical, without fundamentalist biases.
  • Encourage all business schools to include foundational classes in ecology, environmental economics, biology, and history.
  • Start programs at these same schools in postcapitalist studies.

Does the word postcapitalism look odd to you? It should, because you hardly ever see it. We have a blank spot in our vision of the future. Perhaps we think that history has somehow gone away. In fact, history is with us now more than ever, because we are at a crux in the human story. Choosing not to study a successor system to capitalism is an example of another kind of denial, an ostrich failure on the part of the field of economics and of business schools, I think, but it’s really all of us together, a social aporia or fear. We have persistently ignored and devalued the future—as if our actions are not creating that future for our children, as if things never change. But everything evolves. With a catastrophe bearing down on us, we need to evolve at nearly revolutionary speed. So some study of what could improve and replace our society’s current structure and systems is in order. If we don’t take such steps, the consequences will be intolerable. On the other hand, successfully dealing with this situation could lead to a sustainable civilization that would be truly exciting in its human potential.

General

A report from Copenhagen

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Climate change blues: how scientists cope a report from the recent Research Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen:

Being a climate scientist these days is not for the faint of heart, as arguably no other area of research yields a sharper contrast between “eureka!” moments, and the sometimes terrifying implications of those discoveries for the future of the planet.

“Science is exciting when you make such findings,” said Konrad Steffen, who heads the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colorado.

“But if you stop and look at the implications of what is coming down the road for humanity, it is rather scary. I have kids in college — what do they have to look forward to in 50 years?”

And that’s not the worst of it, said top researchers gathered here last week for a climate change conference which heard, among other bits of bad news, that global sea levels are set to rise at least twice as fast over the next century as previously thought, putting hundreds of millions of people at risk.

What haunts scientists most, many said, is the feeling that — despite an overwhelming consensus on the science — they are not able to convey to a wider public just how close Earth is to climate catastrophe.

That audience includes world leaders who have pledged to craft, by year’s end, a global climate treaty to slash the world’s output of dangerous greenhouse gases.

It’s as if scientists know a bomb will go off, but can’t find the right words to warn the people who might be able to defuse it.

Regime Shifts

Icehouse to greenhouse tipping points

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icehouseA better understanding of the transition from an ice-free greenhouse to the current glaciated icehouse world suggests that there exist a tipping point dynamics due to hysteresis global ice cover dynamics. Lee Kump reflects on recent research by Liu et al in a the Science Magazine perspective Tipping Pointedly Colder:

For much of Earth history, the climate has been considerably warmer than it is today. But 33.7 million years ago, at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, the world became trapped in the glacial state that continues to this day. Within just 200,000 years, Antarctica went from being a rather hospitable place to a polar continent buried under kilometers of ice. The transition was abrupt, but also overshot the new equilibrium with a super-glaciation–dubbed the Oi-1 climate event–that lasted a few hundred thousand years.

In an earlier study, Lear et al. (3) found evidence from deep-water sites that there was little if any cooling during the transition. This finding challenged common sense: Surely the planet needs to cool if ice sheets are to grow. Recent work on better preserved shallow-water sites by Lear and colleagues (4) and others (5), together with the results presented by Liu et al. from a geographically diverse suite of locations, shows that cooling did indeed accompany the growth of ice sheets on Antarctica.

…

Simultaneous cooling at high northern and southern latitudes points strongly to a greenhouse gas reduction. It is puzzling, though, that the tropics show little cooling. Climate model simulations, including those conducted by the present authors, cool both tropics and higher latitudes when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are reduced from greenhouse climate conditions.

Using a climate model, Liu et al. can only reproduce the cooling indicated by the temperature proxies when they impose a reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from 8 to 2 times the preindustrial level across the transition. This reduction is much larger than that previously interpreted from atmospheric CO2 proxies, from 4 to 2 times the preindustrial level. If the atmospheric CO2 proxies are correct, then the models are missing something that amplifies the climate sensitivity to changes in atmospheric CO2.

Given the strong evidence that cooling accompanied the transition into the glacial world, the playing out of the onset of Antarctic glaciation follows the script of a tipping-point climate transition. …

In thinking about the future, we must recognize that threshold behavior in one direction–like the Eocene-Oligocene boundary studied by Liu et al.–is normally accompanied by threshold behavior in the reverse direction, although the barriers to transition can differ in size (see the figure). For example, modern climate/ice-sheet models exhibit considerable hysteresis, requiring atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to rise well above the original initiation level to melt the Antarctic ice sheet. Future tipping behavior into a warm Eocene-like climate state may thus be delayed, but if and when it does occur, the transition will likely be abrupt.

Adaptation, Ecological Management, Ecosystem services

Holly Gibbs on biofuels and climate change

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Science News reports on Holly Gibbs talk on biofuels and land clearing at AAAS:

Two papers published last year suggested that clearing tropical forests to plant biofuel crops might actually worsen climate change, but that planting biofuels crops on “degraded” land – such as abandoned agricultural land – offers a net benefit to climate.

Gibbs analyzed satellite images taken from 1980 to 2000 to try to answer the question of whether tropical crops are largely being planted on deforested or degraded land. She found that the majority of new crops were planted on freshly deforested rather than degraded land.

Gibbs said she could not tell from her data whether the new crops were planted for food or fuel. But she added, “What we know is that biofuel use is definitely fueling deforestation.” She said when biofuel prices increase, the amount of deforestation increases as well. She said she would personally estimate that between one-third to two-thirds of deforestation over the past couple of years has been due to the planting of biofuel crops.

“If we run our cars on biofuels produced in the tropics, chances are good that we are effectively burning rainforests in our gas tanks,” Gibbs said.

Regime Shifts

Chris Field says rate of climate change faster than estimated

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At the AAAS meetings in Chicago Chris Field gave a presentation that argues that the Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates:

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, a member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel’s 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said.

Unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as the result of “feedback loops” that are speeding up natural processes. Prominent among these, evidence indicates, is a cycle in which higher temperatures are beginning to melt the arctic permafrost, which could release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon and methane into the atmosphere, said several scientists on a panel at the meeting.

The permafrost holds 1 trillion tons of carbon, and as much as 10 percent of that could be released this century, Field said. Melting permafrost also releases methane, which is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

“It’s a vicious cycle of feedback where warming causes the release of carbon from permafrost, which causes more warming, which causes more release from permafrost,” Field said.

Evidence is also accumulating that terrestrial and marine ecosystems cannot remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as earlier estimates suggested, Field said.

…

While it takes a relatively long time for plants to take carbon out of the atmosphere, that carbon can be released rapidly by wildfires, which contribute about a third as much carbon to the atmosphere as burning fossil fuels, according to a paper Field co-authored.

Fires such as the recent deadly blazes in southern Australia have increased in recent years, and that trend is expected to continue, Field said. Warmer weather, earlier snowmelt, drought and beetle infestations facilitated by warmer climates are all contributing to the rising number of fires linked to climate change. Across large swaths of the United States and Canada, bark beetles have killed many mature trees, making forests more flammable. And tropical rain forests that were not susceptible to forest fires in the past are likely to become drier as temperatures rise, growing more vulnerable.

Preventing deforestation in the tropics is more important than in northern latitudes, the panel agreed, since lush tropical forests sequester more carbon than sparser northern forests. And deforestation in northern areas has benefits, since larger areas end up covered in exposed, heat-reflecting snow.

Many scientists and policymakers are advocating increased incentives for preserving tropical forests, especially in the face of demand for clearing forest to grow biofuel crops such as soy. Promoting biofuels without also creating forest-preservation incentives would be “like weatherizing your house and deliberately keeping your windows open,” said Peter Frumhoff, chief of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate program. “It’s just not a smart policy.”