Science – Page 92 – a sibilant intake of breath

Big picture uncertainty

Climate change policy focuses on constant attempts to make guesses about the future: about economic development in rich states and poor, about patterns of technological evolution, about climatic responses to radiative forcing caused by changes in the gas mixture of the atmosphere. One cannot always evade the feeling that too many uncertainties are being layered. Consider, for instance, the possibility that hydrocarbon fuels will peak in world output within the next few decades. If that happened, most of our ‘business as usual’ economic projections would be badly wrong.

An even more ominous consideration relates to global conflict. When the world is generally doing well, it is devilishly hard to convince states to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions for the universal good. Imagine how hard it would be in a geopolitical environment based around rising tensions and the growing expectation of great power war. We make projections for 2100 without acknowledging that making it from now to then without such a war would be a historical aberration.

In the end, I suppose, cynicism does us little good. The vast majority of ordinary people – and of powerful people – will not believe in the disastrous potential consequences of climate change until they start to manifest themselves visibly. As such, agonizing about them just makes you more marginal to the debate that exists among those not kept awake by fear about the possibility for self-amplifying positive feedbacks in the climate system. We must do the best we can, avoid confusing engagement with the mainstream debate with genuine complacency, and hope that humanity possesses more wisdom than it has ever demonstrated before.

Post-2012 climate conference

The International Institute for Sustainable Development is running a two-day conference in Ottawa about post-2012 climate change policy. 2012 is the end of the first compliance period for the Kyoto Protocol, so ‘post-2012’ is shorthand for whatever international climate regime is to be the successor to Kyoto. Notes will be published on the wiki as they become available.

Notes from previous conferences are also available:

In Defense of Food

Having recently read and enjoyed Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his newer book caught my eye this morning. I had seen a review contrasting it negatively with his prior work, but decided to take the plunge anyhow. I am glad I did. While there is less value added in terms of general knowledge, it is a much more practical guide to how the realities of contemporary food production affect the choices of conscientious modern omnivores.

The book does an excellent job of combining a good breadth of consideration with the production of manageable advice. Opening with “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” it elaborates those simple sentiments into a pretty good set of suggestions. Critically, ‘food’ refers only to things that would be recognized as such by people from a few hundred years ago. After going through the decidedly unnatural list of ingredients for a loaf of bread, Pollan declares that:

Sorry, Sara Lee, but your Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread is not food and if not for the indulgence of the FDA [in not longer requiring the use of the word ‘imitation’] could not even be labelled “bread.”

Pollan does an excellent job of critiquing food science and the ‘nutritionism’ that reduces the complex chemistry of food and eating to simple affirmation or condemnation of individual chemicals and chemical classes, such as saturated fats. He provides a compelling description of the nature and evolution of the Western Diet, as well as the societal and economic reasons for its emergence and the health consequences that emerge from it.

In addition to discussing what to eat, Pollan provides some good tips on how. Basically, he suggests that people return to forms of eating more rooted in culture. Constant snacking, eating alone, and consuming massive portions are problematic even if the foodstuffs in question are relatively good. He also endorses gardening and cooking from scratch as ways of weeding out non-foods while also gaining more appreciation for the relationships involved in growth and eating.

Pollan provides a list of 24 bits of concise (and sometimes counterintuitive) advice. He provides some good tips on where and how to shop (avoid the centre of supermarkets – stick to the unprocessed foods at the edges). I was particularly delighted to learn about the strong case for how a glass of wine with dinner can do a fair bit to promote cardiovascular health. Since reading his previous book, I had already made some pretty significant dietary changes. Barring the occasional pot of Knorr soup, I have eaten virtually nothing that wasn’t “food” as he defines it. I have also been thinking a lot more about what I eat, where it comes from, how I prepare it, and so forth. Overall, the process has been meaningful and enjoyable.

It is pretty rare for me to buy a book and read it though in a day. The fact that I did with this one demonstrates both how engaging and accessible it is. For those wanting some sound dietary advice, rather than a more extensive discussion of the nature of various food systems, this book is well worth examining. I am planning to foist my copy onto as many people as possible.

Deceit and development

An interesting article in New York Magazine discusses the development of lying in children. While one might superficially expect truthfulness to be the greater virtue, deception is highlighted as the more advanced behaviour:

Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.

This really isn’t too surprising. It is, after all, the development of strategic thinking that differentiates sophisticated actors from unsophisticated ones, and the ability to avoid revealing strategic vulnerabilities is crucial to effective action in many circumstances.

While parents probably feel as though their children should be willing to trust them with anything, they also need to appreciate the degree to which an ability to mislead is crucial to success in pretty much all significant engagements with strangers, and probably even colleagues and friends. After all, how many dates, weddings, or job interviews is a person liable to get through successfully without a strategic awareness of information and an ability to leverage it through everything from tactful suppression of facts or details to their outright misrepresentation.

Contraction and convergence

The interim version of the Garnaut Review (mentioned earlier) includes a numberless graph illustrating what the principle of contraction and convergence in per capita greenhouse gas emissions would resemble:

A few features are especially notable. The first is the relative trajectories in the opening years. States with very high per capita emissions, like Australia and Canada, would have to reduce emissions sharply right from the outset. Rapidly growing poor states like China would be allowed to grow until per capita emissions are comparable to those in relatively low emission developed states, such as the EU. Gradually, everybody’s per capita emissions become lower and more similar.

This approach becomes a lot more politically feasible when you take these lines to represent emission allocations rather than actual emissions. Developing states would have a choice about how to use the extra space allocated for their development. They could opt to use the allocation for their own emissions, allowing the growth of GHG emitting industry; alternatively, they could sell the allocations to more developed states at a globally established market price. That way, poverty reduction and development goals could be served at the same time as total GHG emissions trend towards a sustainable level. The big advantage of allowing global trading is that it should equalize the international marginal cost of abatement. In simple terms, that means that it will ensure that the emissions that can be avoided at the lowest cost will be addressed first, minimizing the overall cost of mitigation.

The Garnaut Review rightly highlights that it would be incredibly politically difficult to establish such an international regime. At the same time, it is probably also right to say that a general approach that embraces contraction and convergence has the best chance of stabilizing global greenhouse gas emissions at a level that avoids dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system, and does so in a way that minimizes total costs and manages the distribution of costs and benefits in an acceptably fair manner.

Ethics among the doomed

There have been a number of arguments here before about how excess can be justified: specifically, how emitting more greenhouse gasses than is sustainable per-capita based on the present human population can be morally justified. A new logical possibility occurred to me today: it is possible that we are already doomed. By that, I mean that pretty much all aspects of life that we consider to be deeply meaningful or important are already destined to be obliterated as a result of past action or inevitable future actions. For instance, the amount of climate change already locked into the climate system as the result of lags and positive feedbacks may be sufficient to make human civilization untenable.

If this is true, it changes the dynamic somewhat. The standard view of climate change is that we are all on a big ship in the middle of the sea, completely isolated from any help, and a serious hull breach has occurred. If most of us work together selflessly, we can plug it and save the ship. There is, however, the logical possibility that the leak is so bad that even the complete commitment of everyone aboard will not stop the rising water, and will not save a single one among us.

If we have crossed that threshold of inevitability, we are released of our obligations to prevent the sinking of the ship. Of course, the extent to which the sinking was preventable or not can only be known after the fact. Either we find ourselves in the position of being saved, on the basis of whatever efforts were made, or we find ourselves in oblivion, in spite of whatever was done to encourage an alternative outcome.

Seed vault opening

A particularly tangible sort of insurance policy is being initiated today, with the opening of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The underground facility is intended to protect the genetic diversity of plant species, in recognition of the risk that other seeds could be destroyed by a worldwide disaster. Eventually, the vault is meant to contain 4.5 million seed samples, deposited by governments from around the world.

The vault is buried 120m inside a sandstone mountain selected for remoteness, persistent cold, and lack of tectonic activity. The selection of a site 130m above sea level ensures that, even if all the world’s ice melts, it will not be submerged. The seeds will be kept at a temperature of -20 to -30 degrees Celsius using electrical power. In the event of a failure of refrigeration, several weeks would elapse before temperatures rose to the -3 degree temperature of the surrounding rock. The packaging of the seeds – along with their natural durability – should make at least some viable for long periods of time, even in the absence of refrigeration.

The $9.1 million project was financed by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. While there is no particular reason to believe that the world’s 1400 or so other seed banks would be universally unable to survive something like a nuclear war or a comet or asteroid impact, $9.1 million is probably a sensible expenditure when so many potentially vital species are to be protected. Less sensational disasters are also being insured against: from the destruction of national seedbanks through conflicts or errors to administrative blunders or localized natural disasters.

An interactive tour of the facility is accessible online.

New UNEP report: ‘In Dead Water’

This blog has documented a number of the most important threats facing fisheries and marine ecosystems, including over-exploitation, ocean acidification, harmful fish farming practices, invasive species, and climate change. A new report (PDF) put out by the United Nations Environment Program does a good job of summarizing all of these, as well as providing a good overall picture.

Major conclusions of the report make for sober reading:

Half the World catch is caught in less than 10% of the ocean
With climate change, more than 80% of the World’s coral reefs may die within decades
Ocean acidification will also severely damage cold-water coral reefs and affect negatively other shell-forming organisms
Coastal development is increasing rapidly and is projected to impact 91% of all inhabited coasts by 2050 and will contribute to more than 80% of all marine pollution
Climate change may slow down ocean thermohaline circulation and continental shelf “flushing and cleaning” mechanisms crucial to coastal water quality and nutrient cycling and deep-water production in more than 75% of the World’s fishing grounds
Increased development, coastal pollution and climate change impacts on ocean currents will accelerate the spreading of marine dead zones, many around or in primary fishing grounds
Over-harvesting and bottom trawling are degrading fish habitats and threatening the entire productivity of ocean biodiversity hotspots, making them more vulnerable to climate change
Primary fishing grounds are likely to become increasingly infested by invasive species, many introduced from ship ballast water
The worst concentration of cumulative impacts of climate change with existing pressures of over-harvest, bottom trawling, invasive species, coastal development and pollution appear to be concentrated in 10–15% of the oceans concurrent with today’s most important fishing grounds
A lack of good marine data, poor funding for ocean observations and an ‘out of sight – out of mind’ mentality may have led to greater environmental degradation in the sea than would have been allowed on land
Substantial resources need to be allocated to reducing climate and non-climate pressures. Priority needs to be given to protecting substantial areas of the continental shelves. These initiatives are required to build resilience against climate change and to ensure that further collapses in fish stocks are avoided in coming decades

There is still some debate about which generation will experience the first reeling blows from climate change. It is increasingly clear that the young people of today will be alive to see the collapse of the world’s fisheries and coastal ocean ecosystems.

97-day West Antarctic expedition

Not content with data from satellites, a group of British researchers made the trek to the remote Pine Island Glacier in order to gauge whether climate change is accelerating its flow into the sea. The team is only the second group of humans to ever visit the area, following a brief visit by American scientists in 1961.

The Pine Island Glacier comprises about 10% of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet which, along with Greenland, represents the largest plausible contributor to sea level rise. The total melting of this one glacier would raise global sea levels by 25cm. The melting of the entire region of West Antarctica where it is located would contribute 1.5m.

Experiments performed included an examination of the ice structure using towed RADAR and the use of small explosions and geophones to identify soft sediments that might be lubricating the flow of the glacier. GPS receivers have been left behind to perform additional precise tracking. Their central conclusion is a significant acceleration of the glacial flow, compared with the 1% flow rate that satellite measurements tracked during the 1990s:

“The measurements from last season seem to show an incredible acceleration, a rate of up to 7%. That is far greater than the accelerations they were getting excited about in the 1990s.”

Since air temperatures in Antarctica have not risen significantly (as predicted by all General Circulation Models), it is plausible that the acceleration is the result of warmer sea currents.

Some component of the melting could be the result of geothermal activity. If so, it would continue to some extent even after global greenhouse gas concentrations were stabilized and their full consequences have been manifest through the climate system. Of course, the lower that concentration, the greater the chance that West Antarctica’s glaciers will be able to endure.

Nicholas Stern video

Emily kindly sent me a link to the video of Sir Nicholas Stern’s presentation in the Examination Schools at Oxford in February of 2007. I was lucky enough to attend in person; I even got to speak with him at the exclusive reception afterwards. My notes are on the wiki. This is your chance to compare a verbatim record of the talk with my notes and thus determine my particular strengths and failings as a note taker.

The talk is well worth watching, not least because Stern is obviously very well informed and quite a capable speaker. His report is fully deserving of its status as the seminal discussion of the economics of climate change.