2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit News 12/10/09: Sea Level Rise 3X Faster & Tuvalu’s Leadership

There was an important development at yesterday’s Climate Summit in Copenhagen that should have gotten more attention in the media.  There was also a data update that provides additional context for the importance of that development.

The island nation of Tuvalu wanted legally binding language to be written establishing limits in global atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 350 parts per million and global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.  For clarity, our current global CO2 concentrations, according to observations, is 387ppm.  So we’re already above the limit that scientists have identified as being a threshold we should not be above if we don’t want global temperatures much higher than they are today.  Tuvalu was asking, therefore, for nations to agree to reduce emissions drastically so that the atmospheric concentrations begin decreasing.  Why would they want legally binding language for such an audacious goal?  Because Tuvalu is a set of four reef islands and five atolls whose maximum elevation is 15ft.  They are extremely susceptible to any future potential sea level rise.  Larger, richer countries (like Saudi Arabia and China) would hear none of it.  They want to keep burning dirty fossil fuels and expand their economies like other developed nations did for the past 150 years.  Tuvalu and a group consisting of other island countries and poorer nations can’t afford to wait until China decides they’re ready to switch to 100% renewable energy at some point in the future.  They’re at risk today from climate change that is already occurring.  The issue was suspended for the time being.  Expect it to arise again before the end of next week (not that a solution will be found in that time frame, unfortunately).

Which brings me to the bad news of the day.  I’ve written for months now that the 2007 IPCC AR4 report was good for its time, but it left significant questions unanswered (I haven’t been the only one).  It was good, but didn’t go far enough.  Major drawbacks resulting from a far too conservative approach, an approach that didn’t examine extremes as likely enough to spend much time on.  Since the collection of papers for the 2007 AR4 release, scientists across the world have worked very hard to try to begin finding answers for the toughest questions remaining.  How sensitive is the climate to GHG emissions?  How responsive are temperatures to those emissions?  When will glaciers and ice sheets melt?  What kind of sea level rise can be expected?  Another paper was put together to try to answer that last question.  As with other facets of the research effort, conditions could very well be much worse than what the 2007 Report may have led people to think:

Sea level rise could occur 3 times faster than previously estimated.  Everybody should be able to click on the link and look at the pdf if they want.  Here’s the high-level message: based on our current emissions profile, which is as high as the worst-case scenario the IPCC examined, sea levels could rise by 6 feet (~2m) by 2100.  The rate at which sea levels have been rising has increased in the past 20 and 10 years.  Scientists’ predictions of sea level rise have been too low, contrary to the denialists’ hopes otherwise.  Natural causes alone have not and cannot explain the rise observed.  Like I wrote above, Tuvalu and many other countries are under immediate threat.  They have no more time to wait while rich countries throw tantrums like spoiled children.  This situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.

My 9Dec2009 summary is here.

My 7Dec2009 summary is here.

Cross-posted at SquareState.

Immediacy & Framing: Climate Change vs. Health Care

Two issues that are being addressed by the 111th Congress and President Obama provide an interesting example of the importance of immediacy and framing.  As this post’s title suggests, I’m talking about legislation to deal with our breaking climate and our broken health care system.  The way potential solutions are being proposed and discussed provide an interesting contrast.

On the one hand, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2454) was passed by the House of Representatives a couple of weeks ago.  There was plenty of talk about how the bill didn’t go far enough by climate activists.  Some activists, including myself, wondered if the bill should have been voted on in the form it took.  As I quickly detailed yesterday, other countries are taking more aggressive steps to ramp down their carbon emissions and ramp up their renewable energy capabilities.  I don’t think the ACESA bill, as currently written, will do enough to cut carbon emissions from history’s biggest polluter: the U.S, in time to prevent 2°C or more warming globally.  Yet most of what I read and heard after the House vote revolved around something like this: “This bill isn’t perfect, but it’s better than nothing”;  “It’s a step in the right direction” and so on.  What I didn’t hear, especially from progressive House members, was a refusal to vote for a bill that didn’t get done what science demands to be done.  What I didn’t hear was a refusal to vote for a bill that didn’t do what a majority of Americans wanted it to do.  Does anyone seriously think Americans wanted the House to give billions in corporate welfare to the nuclear, oil, natural gas and coal industries?  Because that’s what had to be stuck into the bill while at the same time reducing emissions and renewable energy targets.

News Roundup 6/4/09

Things that have caught my eye recently:

Rep. John Salazar (D-CO-03) has declined to support this year’s attempt to regulate hydraulic fracturing.  I know he’s feeling the pressure of the oil and gas industry.  My recommendation: do the right thing, Rep. Salazar.  Back the regulation, which isn’t onerous and will become overdue as corporations move forward with it.

Galveston’s recovery from Hurricane Ike last year continues, albeit slowly.  Much like other parts of the Gulf Coast that were ravaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, Galveston’s road to recovery will be long.  This raises an important question: as ocean temperatures continue to rise the remainder of this century, the incidence of intense hurricanes (> Category 3) is expected to rise.  Sea levels will continue to rise, putting additional areas at risk.  The combination of these two means that storm surges will be able to penetrate further inland.  As additional cities along the Gulf and East coast are hit, will we stop trying to rebuild or will we continue to sink billions of dollars into cities that will be under increasing threat from additional catastrophe?

Electric co-ops, which primarily serve rural areas, have committed their customers to spend millions of dollars to pay for coal plants, both new and expanded.  By doing so, there is a chance that they have increased the risk to future price hikes, especially as a carbon trading market matures and our energy policies direct attention to clean sources of energy.  Are the co-ops really acting in the best interests of their consumers, or the best interests of the diry coal industry?

Gov. Ritter signed legislation this week that will provide economic incentives for companies dealing with the pine-beetle epidemic, funds for mitigating wildfire danger and planning resources for local emergency responders.

Rep. Fred Upton and Rep. Todd Akin can spew plenty of b.s. talking points.  Neither are willing to deal with the climate and energy crises in an honest way.  The energy and climate legislation Congress is considering is far from hazardous waste.  Similarly, winter changing to spring is a far cry from the climate conditions that serious scientists are predicting.  Once again, changing such a ridiculous opinion will wait until it is too late and Missouri has to deal with climate refugees from the U.S. coast.

Climate Change News – 5/22/09: Sea Level Rise Estimates, Oil & Military, Emissions in a Recession

Here are some of the climate-related news stories that I’ve seen this week:

A new study proposes that if the West Antarctic ice sheets melted, global sea level rise would only be 10 feet, not 20 as previously estimated by other studies.  The new study’s author claims that enough of the ice sheet would remain grounded on the Antarctic continent so that only some of the melting ice would find its way directly to the world’s oceans.  If true, this would be at least some good news in the sea level rise arena. One take-away message is that we still don’t know nearly enough about ice sheet and glacier dynamics to reliably forecast their future conditions.  These are interesting results – since they challenge previous findings, they need to be explored further.

Though not my chief concern over fossil fuel usage, a group of retired military officers argue in a recently released report that energy security and efforts to reduce the risks of climate change should be included in the nation’s national security and military planning.  From the article:

The concerns extend beyond America’s dependence on foreign oil, the report says, because no matter what the source, America’s dependence on oil “undermines economic stability, which is critical to national security.”

Also, the report called for modernizing the nation’s electric power system. The country’s “fragile domestic electricity grid makes our domestic military installations and their critical infrastructure unnecessarily vulnerable to incident, whether deliberate or accidental,” said the report.

The report raised alarm about three converging concerns: A future global oil market shaped by limited supplies and increasing demand, rising fossil fuel prices caused by regulating climate-changing emissions, and the impacts of climate change on global insecurity.

Another casualty of the 2008-09 recession?  CO2 emissions.  Many people were curious how the worst recession since the Great Depression would impact emission trends. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions declined by 2.8 percent last year compared to 2007.  The Energy Information Administration attributed the decline to a 2.2 percent drop in energy consumption, largely because of high gasoline and diesel prices last summer and the sharp economic decline in the last half of the year.  It’s not the way anybody wanted emissions to be reduced – millions of Americans are unemployed and our economy is in tatters.  Meanwhile, Cons and ConservaDems watered the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation down significantly, as I’ll cover later.

Corporate Media Covers Disappearing Maldives; Still Misses Important Parts

I read this article about the Maldives the other day and wasn’t sure if I detected two contradictory themes that the author presented (knowingly, unknowingly?) in it.  I checked with a couple other friends and we all came away with the same interpretation.  I’m going to go through it here and discuss what I think of it.

The undisputed theme of the article is adaptation to climate change.  As usual, the devil is in the details.  The Maldives are a collection of islands (atolls, really) in the Indian Ocean.  Their average height above sea level is 4′ 11″.  That means they’re in particular danger from melting ice sheets and glaciers, which is expected to happen as one result of our climate forcing. The Maldives’ President, Mohamed Nasheed, has proposed relocating all 350,000 inhabitants to other countries due to this threat.  Much more was written about Nasheed and the Maldives in this Praer post by Wade Norris.

From the article:

But some recent data challenge the widespread belief that the islands are destined to disappear — and a few mainstream scientists are even cautiously optimistic about their chances for surviving relatively intact beyond the next century.

First off, I’m going to challenge the word ‘belief’.  It has religious undertones, and that isn’t what scientists do.  Without action, the polar ice sheets are forecasted to melt at increasing rates.  Sea level rise could very well reach multiple feet by 2100, which would put the Malidives, among other locations, at risk of being submerged.  Without action, the top of today’s islands will be under water.  Those statements are based on our current understanding of physical processes.  Scientists don’t have to believe in them in order for them to be true – they will be just as true if scientists don’t believe in them.  So just who are the “mainstream scientists” who are optimistic for the islands’ chances for survival?

Paul Kench of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who has published studies in recent years in journals including Geology and the Journal of Geophysical Research. Andrew Cooper, a professor of coastal studies at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, added his support [emphasis mine]:

“They have detailed geological evidence that this kind of growth has happened before in the past. … I think the question of the Maldives being completely wiped out may be overstated.”

Oh.  Detailed geological evidence.  Which means the Maldives have transformed themselves in geologic time-frames.  What do the 21st century residents of the Maldives do?  They can’t wait on a geologic time-scale for the atolls to change.  The article makes mention of scientists’ assumptions of Maldive damage following the 2004 Asian tsunami event.  Sometimes I don’t know why the corporate stenographers even try.  Is it so hard to stretch one’s mind around the fact that a tsunami event is very different than polar ice sheet collapse?  The effective time-scales for each are far, far apart.  Tsunamis immediate impact last hours to days, with longer term impacts lasting years.  Polar ice sheet collapse begin operating on yearly time-scales, with “immediate” impacts lasting decades to centuries and longer term impacts lasting centuries to millenia.  The key here is polar ice sheet collapse is the kind of catastrophe that our race has never faced before.  Comparing it to the 2004 tsunami, which was a catastrophe in its own right, doesn’t do it justice.

Which is where the article contradicts itself.  The very next paragraph reads:

Kench warned, however, that while only a small number of Maldivian islands may not be able to adapt to rising sea levels, those are unfortunately the ones where many people live: Male, the nation’s capital, and Hulule. Residents of those islands will probably need to relocate to another country or move to other Maldivian islands that won’t disappear so quickly, he said.

Oops.  The devil really is in the details, isn’t it?  As geologic formations, all of the atolls will be affected in one way or another by climate change.  As geopolitical formations, the most critical portions of the Maldives are facing the gravest threat.  How then is the question of the Maldives being completely wiped out be overstated, as Andrew Cooper said?  As usual, the corporate stenographers do a grand disservice to their readers.

I do want to point out the following:

While much global warming work aims to limit emissions, adaptation advocates argue for the need to combat the inevitable effects of climate change through forward planning and construction. That includes moving people, building sea walls, and new construction techniques.

This is actually a reasonable statement.  Unfortunately, it is undermined by the lack of a reasonable question: why not discuss both solutions?  Indeed, in an increasingly forced climate, resulting in widespread, intense heating and desertification over 1/3 of the planet, why should adaptation be the only viable solution discussed?  If we take aggressive, attainable measures to reduce our emissions, it has been demonstrated that we can avoid the worst climate change effects in the next 100, 1,000 and 10,000 years.  Realistically, some measure of adaptation will have to be enacted, that much is obvious and agreed upon.  But we can limit the amount of adaptation required if we simultaneously reduce our forcing.  The corporate stenographers missed another opportunity to discuss that fact.

America Post-2050 With Climate Change

The good news is slightly more attention is being paid to the issue of climate change in the media. The bad news is the dates being used don’t reflect the latest research to the degree they should. Since we have to take the bad with the good, I’m going to take a quick look at how the issue was handled recently. This Lifestyle article at MSN was about America post-2100. But since the overwhelming majority of climate change metrics are currently worse (as measured by observations) than they were forecasted to be for the 2007 IPCC Report, and since additional research since the Report was issued has moved up timelines for climate change effects, the article should relay to readers that the conditions within more accurately reflect post-2050 America than post-2100 America. But without further ado, let’s look at exactly what effects were discussed.

Pacific Northwest: Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: Heavier rains, dramatic warming over higher latitudes and sea-level rise.  According to recent research, Alaska has already experienced a 3.6 degree Fahrenheit increase since 1951, much more than the rest of America. The Northwest will also be affected by the forecasted two to three feet (or as much as 3-7 feet, according to more recent research) of sea level rise.

Rocky Mountains: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Montana
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: Shorter snow season, early snow-melt, longer and more intense drought, wildfire and water issues.

Northeast: Virginia to Maine
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: More severe storms in the winter and summer, extreme sea level rise and flooding. Indeed, a couple of recent journal articles I’ve read point out that if the land-based West Antarctica ice sheets melt this century, sea levels won’t rise by the same amount all over the globe. Sea levels off the U.S. Northeast coast will rise a couple of meters more than other places. Unfortunately, that region is also one of the most densely populated by people.

Southeast: The Gulf Coast states, up to Carolina
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: Hurricanes, wind damage, storm surges, flooding, extra sea level rise. Lots of people, lots of infrastructure. That means lots of money to either protect everything and everybody or move them inland.

The Northern Plains, Midwest and Great Lakes
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: Stronger storms (i.e. tornadoes, heavy rain events) occurring throughout the year as well as warmer winters. More intense storm systems mean increased chances of flash flooding across the region.

Southwest: Arizona, New Mexico, California and Nevada
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: Drought and water shortages, heat waves and wildfire.

By not choosing to pay to address these potential effects now, we choose to pay more for them later. Protection along the coasts, more flood defense systems, dropping water tables higher rates of disease associated with warmer conditions, among others, will all have an adverse financial effect. Larger clean-up and rescue efforts will cost more. Building insurance rates will skyrocket – forcing more and more people to go without or move inland whether the coasts are protected or not. What will loss of part of population centers mean for businesses and urban cores?

These changes will more likely occur sooner rather than later.  More people in the U.S. need to understand that potential so that more realistic policies can be set.

Quick Hit: Ice Sheet Melt Picks Up

I’ve encountered folks writing or saying that the globe and/or poles are actually cooling and that melting glaciers are completely natural and people aren’t influencing them significantly.  The truth (based on actual observations) is that the poles have warmed more than the rest of the globe.  The truth is that the land-based ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are melting at faster rates than they did during the 20th century.  Those land-based ice sheets are what will cause sea level rise to reach dangerous rates and levels unless we do everything we can today to slow down their melt rate.

From an MSNBC article:

The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than expected, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, an expert with the Center for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, told the Arctic Council conference in the Arctic town of Tromsoe.

The 2007 IPCC report issued a sea level rise forecast of a couple of feet – at worst.  Observations since that report was issued, including ones Ms. Dahl-Jensen are basing her warning on, are outpacing the rates that were in the 2007 IPCC report.  The only 2-year old forecast of a couple of feet of sea level rise (in itself catastrophic for geopolitical stability) is already an antique.  More realistic levels based on rates seen in the past two years point toward 5-foot sea level rise, which would be even more devastating to global societies and ecosystems.

Quick Hits: Batteries, Sea-Level, Climate Change Poll

Battery research is leading to exciting results.  Can lithium batteries recharge in seconds instead of hours?  That would change how we do a lot of things, wouldn’t it?

Two very related pieces of news that I picked up on today:

Scientists in Copenhagen this week publicly stated that 21st century sea-level rise will be in the neighborhood of a meter or more – not the few inches to a foot that was cited by the 2007 IPCC Report – if we do not change our GHG emission profile.

At the same time, an increasing number of Americans think the threat climate change poses is exaggerated.  This is, quite simply, astounding to me.  The number and intensity of climate change-driven changes around the world have been rising year after year.  But largely due to a multi-million dollar marketing campaign run by a small group of rich extremists, more Americans (mostly Con-servatives) than ever before think the world’s largest conspiracy is afoot.  Their outright rejection of science is stunning, considering the age we live in and considering the news item I just cited.

News Survery 2/17/09: Oil, Afghanistan & Antarctic Station

Some recent articles caught my eye.  Here are three of them:

Crude oil is getting cheaper – so why isn’t gas?  Short answer first: greed.  Longer answer: the oil price reported in the media is West Texas crude.  It’s currently selling for less than other oil grades around the world.  The gas we fuel our vehicles with?  It’s processsed from that foreign oil.  The article actually mentions that refining capacity for West Texas crude is less than for other types of crude.  Why aren’t more refineries built?  Well, that would cost oil corporations money – money they’d rather see in executive bonuses and stock dividends.  Don’t think this benefits your retirement account.  As most of us are now aware, the only people who benefited from stock payouts were the already mega-rich.  That won’t change anytime soon.  So when you’re paying more than $2 per gallon again this year, keep in mind all the record profits the oil corporations posted last year.  The money that we’re all paying at the pump every day could go to building refineries and lowering the price at the pump, but it’s not.

Escalation of troops in Afghanistan.  I’d be happier to read news reports of large-scale, detailed plans to revitalize the infrastructure of Afghanistan.  At this point, I think troops are necessary.  But they’ll be worth less in the long-term if fundamental issues aren’t addressed at the same time.

New Antarctic research station is carbon-free.  It won’t stop deniers/delayers from further beating their dead talking-point horses, but this article is good news for realists.  The station uses wind mills, solar panels and water recycling … in Antarctica.  If buildings in Antarctica can be built as zero-emitters, do you think they can be built on the rest of the continents?  Darn right.

The only beef I have with the last article is its treatment of two separate facts.  Both are important (and correct) alone, but the writer did nothing to merge them coherently.  They are:

Scientists monitoring global warming predict higher temperatures could hasten melting at Antarctica, the world’s largest repository of fresh water, raising sea levels and altering shorelines. If Antarctica ever melted, world sea levels would rise by about 180 feet.

That would impact some 146 million people living in low-lying coastal regions less than three feet above current sea levels, researchers said.

On the path toward total Antarctic ice sheet melt (the continent itself can’t melt, by the way), sea levels would obviously rise 3 feet before they rose 180 feet.  So if a 3 foot sea level rise would impact 146 million people, what kind of an impact would sea level rises between three and 180 feet have?  More than the number indicated in the article.

A two-year old paper indicated over 400 million people for selected parts of the globe.  That’s bad enough.  When you factor in recorded sea-level rise amounts have already exceeded earlier estimates, that number is likely to be higher.  And what about the rest of the globe that the study didn’t examine, such as the west coast of the U.S. and most of Africa?

While the article could have benefited from some additional context, I was glad to see the information that did make it in.  We must rein in greenhouse gas emissions.  Millions of peoples’ livelihoods and untold numbers of plants and animals depend on it.

Climate Change Effects Come Further Into Focus

As the science over the cause of climate change has become increasingly solidified, many researchers are expanding their examination of the effects of climate change.  Among other examples, some recent items of note include:

North American bird species are wintering further north. An Audubon Society study conclusively shows that hundreds of species of birds are spending winters further north in recent winters than they did 40 years ago.  Climate change has affected northern latitudes more than the mid-latitudes and tropics: they’ve grown warmer faster than any other region.  Migratory birds’ wintering patterns have been shifted.

Sea-Level Fingerprint of West Antarctic Collapse.  An important study that came out in last Friday’s issue of Science looks more closely at how sea levels around the world would be impacted if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) collapsed.  Contrary to the incomplete assessment that was part of the 2007 IPCC Report, sea level rise won’t be equitable across the globe.  Due to gravitational effects and uplift as ice mass disappears from land surfaces, oceans bordering North America and in the Indian Ocean could rise ~30% higher than previously assumed.  For instance, the IPCC forecasted a 5m sea level rise for areas near Washington, D.C.  The new assessment indicates a sea level rise of  6.3m (1.3m more) due to additional effects.

Okay, I’m going to bring up a couple of short-comings of this study, one of which the authors identified.  This assessment did not take into account the Greenland, East Antarctic or mountain ice sheets.  Anything that causes the collapse of the WAIS will undoubtedly also cause collapses elsewhere across the globe.  Thus, that 6.3m sea level rise for Washington, D.C. could easily go much, much higher.  The authors acknowledge that serious concerns about the impact on coastal communities is increased as a result of this study, not decreased.  Second, the authors compare their assessment to the IPCC’s.  As I’ve written before, recent observations from across the planet indicate that every model used in the 2007 IPCC Report underestimated recent climate change.  The poles are warming faster than any model used indicated.  Climate zones are shifting faster.  Drought areas are expanding further.  Birds’ wintering areas are shifting north sooner.  CO2 concentrations are higher and positive feedback mechanisms have been initiated.  This doesn’t mean the results of this Science paper are invalid, only that the specific sea level rise number used for contrast is already out of date.  Policy makers must be made aware of the most recent valid research, like this paper.  The challenge facing researchers is being able to provide robust, comprehensive assessments so that strong policies can be created.

Weeds will appear in new areas and disappear in others.  Land managers could have a short period of time to reintroduce native plants in areas that have been taken over by invasive species.  The biggest question is where will precipitation fall most often.

Hurricanes’ roles in influencing Northern Hemispheric winters are being explored.  The view that hurricanes are important in maintaining the balances the atmosphere works toward in much the same fashion as mid-latitude cyclones (think of the low pressure systems that typically move west to east) has gained traction in recent years.  This article describes another effort at working to determine how that mechanism compares to mechanisms like El Nino.