The environment – Page 129 – a sibilant intake of breath

1958 climate change video

Boing Boing came up with quite a find today: a video from 1958 that is both amusing and full of relatively accurate information about climate change. Entitled “The Unchained Goddess,” it was produced as an episode of the Bell Telephone Hour.

As I have described before, the idea that climate change only entered the realm of scientific knowledge within the last few years is quite mistaken. Notice also how the announcer in the video is concerned about emissions of “six billion tonnes per year of carbon dioxide.” The figure today is closer to forty billion.

The calm before the storm

Some research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States examined the behaviour of the climate in the period immediately before eight abrupt shifts. In all cases, there was a reduction in the level of climatic fluctuation immediately before the tipping point was reached. The authors argue that “the mechanism causing slowing down is fundamentally inherent to tipping points” and could thus be used to predict when such a shift is imminent.

While interesting, this probably isn’t enormously useful. If we want to mitigate to avoid abrupt shifts, the emissions cuts will need to occur long before the point when a critical threshold is being approached. A warning might provide an opportunity for more targeted adaptation, however, which might in turn reduce the amount of suffering that occurs as a result of crossing any particular climatic threshold. Certainly, learning more about the causes and consequences of abrupt climatic shifts ought to be a priority for the world’s scientific community.

The GAO on carbon capture and storage

The American Government Accountability Office has released a report (PDF) on carbon capture and storage (CCS). Some key points:

To make a significant contribution to fighting climate change, the International Energy Agency estimates that 6,000 CCS facilities would be required, each storing one million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
Integrating CCS into existing coal plants is very expensive and difficult.
It is easier with integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plants, but they are very expensive before you even take CCS into account.
Commercial scale IGCC plants (not necessarily with CCS) can’t be expected before 2020 – 5 years after global CO2 emissions need to peak.
Coal plants with CCS will produce 35% – 77% less electricity than those without.
There are questions about the long-term viability of storing carbon underground.
Leaks could contaminate water and suffocate people.
CCS will only be deployed if companies are forced to use it.

In short, people who are counting on CCS to make a big contribution to fighting climate change have a lot to prove, and cannot be reasonably permitted to assume the near-term emergence of the technology as a viable, low-cost option. Until CCS is shown to be safe and feasible on a commercial scale, we simply cannot allow new coal power plants in countries that are serious about dealing with climate change.

I found out about it via Gristmill.

MEC to sell bikes

It seems that Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) is getting into the business of making and selling bikes. This seems like good news for three major reasons:

MEC is distinguished by having an excellent and knowledgeable staff concerned with finding the best option for you, rather than earning a commission or even maximizing the profits of the store.
MEC has a history of developing their own products, which are generally of good quality and excellent value. They aren’t as good as top-of-the-line equipment from certain other manufacturers, but they are often nearly as good and half the price.
MEC seems to take ethical and environmental issues into consideration very seriously.

In short, I look forward to seeing what they produce (not that I need a bike right now. I am still delighted with my Trek 7.3 hybrid).

Is runaway climate change possible?

One aspect about the possibility of runaway climate change needs to be clarified. The basic mechanism through which it could take place is akin to a feedback loop in a sound system: a small initial warming gets amplified through a feedback, producing more warming in a manner that itself generates even more warming. For such a loop to occur, the feedback effect needs to be quite strong.

Stefan–Boltzmann’s law expresses this mathematically. For an intuitive appreciation, consider the difference between bank lending and a nuclear chain reaction. In an idealized case, a bank would draw from the savings of customers to make a loan. The recipient of that loan might then put part of it in the bank, and the bank may then make additional loans on the basis of that. The total lending of the bank becomes larger than the original loan, but to a non-infinite extent. By contrast, each time an atom of uranium splits in a runaway chain reaction, it releases neutrons that cause more than one other atom to split as well. The result is a reaction occurring at an ever-increasing rate.

It is quite possible that genuine runaway climate change is not possible on Earth – that the existing feedbacks are of the bank lending rather than the nuclear blast variety. That being said, the possibility of warming itself producing further warming remains extremely worrisome. It wouldn’t require ever-escalating temperatures for climate change to be globally devastating. Quite probably, any warming of more than 5˚C would deserve the adjective. The most credible climatic models project approximately that level of warming by 2100, if emissions continue to increase at the present rate.

Mycelium Running

Paul Stamets’ Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World is an informative text, written by a true believer. While it contains a lot of practical information, the author’s unbridled enthusiasm sometimes makes you doubt how valid the more fantastic claims are. That being said, it certainly provides some concrete and believable examples of situations where the strategic use of fungi can have beneficial health and environmental effects.

After providing some basic information about the biology of fungi, Stamets covers four different kinds of ‘mycorestoration.’ He shows how patches of mycelium (the tangled, stringy mass that makes up the bulk of fungi) can be used to filter water flowing through – an application that might have particular value downslope from farm animals. The section on mycoforestry shows how mushrooms can accelerate the breakdown of debris from logging, allowing nutrients to return to the soil. It also addresses the ways in which mycorrhizal fungi on the roots of plants can enhance their growth and health. In a section on mycoremediation, Stamets highlights the ability of different fungi to digest or absorb toxic materials ranging from crude oil to nerve gas to radioactive strontium. Finally, a section on mycopesticides describes ways in which insect-attacking fungi can be used to prevent and cure insect infestations.

In addition to the sections outlining the potential of fungi in general, the book includes a lot of practical information about different types of mushrooms, their uses, and how to grow them. It covers different ways of going from spores to a mushroom patch, at scales ranging from a small garden installation to the very large scale. The last hundred pages is a species-by-species catalogue of different mushrooms: how they look, how to grow them, nutritional information, etc. The assertions about mushrooms having intelligence (partly on the basis of mycelium looking like neurons in a brain), I definitely have my doubts about. The step-by-step instructions on producing mushroom patches, I have no doubt could be invaluable to someone wishing to put fungal theory into practice.

Fungi are probably the class of organisms least well understood by most people, and it is rewarding to gain a deeper understanding of the roles they play in ecosystems. More information can be found on Stamets’ website, which also sells various types of mushroom kit and spawn.

Fine words, more dubious actions

Admirably, the British government has chosen to accept a tougher target for emissions reductions by 2050: pledging to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. They are right to stress how commitment to climate change mitigation cannot falter in difficult economic times.

Unfortunately, two major contradictions continue to exist in British policy: a continued intention to add extra runways to its busy airports, and the proposal to add two new 800 MW supercritical coal-fired power units to the Kingsnorth Power Station. We have reached the point where we must simply refuse to allow coal power plants that do not capture and store their emissions to be built in developed countries.

[Update: 15 January 2009] The British government has announced that it is going forward with a third runway for Heathrow. Hopefully, they will be stopped by popular protest.

The biomass of humans

Sightline Daily has some interesting numbers up on the relative biomass of human beings, domesticated animals, and wild animals. Apparently, just humans have eight times as much mass as all the wild vertebrates on land. Our mass approximately equals that of all the fish and whales in the ocean. Things are even more dramatic when you factor in domesticated animals. They contain 100 megatonnes of carbon – 20 times as much as there is in all the wild vertebrates on land.

The figures certainly make you think about ecological footprints in a more direct way. They also say something about energy. It seems fair to say that one major factor affecting the total biomass of wild animals is the amount of energy they are able to access. To what extent does our inflated biomass result from unsustainable energy use? Will we be able to maintain it when we can no longer count on ever-increasing production of fossil fuels?

Accounting for changes in sinks

It is highly likely that any successor to the Kyoto Protocol negotiated in the next couple of years will include targets based on emissions produced directly by human activities. That means any emissions associated with melting permafrosts, accelerated decay in peatlands, or dried out forests would not be included in the overall total. This is pretty worrisome, given that the climate doesn’t care about the origin of emissions. We could conceivably meet out target for anthropogenic emissions while nonetheless putting far more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than would be wise.

At the same time, it wouldn’t be fair to penalize only the country where the second-order emissions get produced. If the Amazon dries out due to climate change, it is not entirely or even mostly the fault of Brazil. The fairest course of action seems to be:

Come up with a hard global target for both direct human emissions and those induced by climate change itself.
Assign the direct emissions to the states producing them.
Divide up the secondary emissions and assign them to each country according to their total historical contribution to climate change.

That means if Canada has emitted about 2% of all the anthropogenic greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, we would be responsible for 2% of induced emissions coming out of the permafrost in Canada and Siberia, the drying of the Amazon, etc. That way, the polluter is paying, albeit belatedly, and the focus remains the actual amount of greenhouse gas entering the atmosphere, which is the critical determinant in what will happen to the climate.

Climate change – rhetoric and urgency

Joseph Romm has written an interesting post on science, rhetoric, and why those who deny the reality of climate change are so effective at spreading their message. Basically, he argues that they are more sophisticated in terms of argumentation styles, and that they are able to engage people on terms they can intuitively appreciate.

Right now, it actually seems more as though the biggest gap is between accepting that humans are causing climate change and accepting what the consequences of that really are. Even organizations that claim to accept the conclusions of the IPCC are nonetheless perpetuating a society emitting grossly unacceptable amounts of greenhouse gasses. How, for instance, can you accept the science of climate change, then deny that it has a major impact on the applicability of a political philosophy based on unending economic growth?

With bluntness very unusual for a scientist, Andrew Weaver summarized the situation we are in:

[U]nless we reach a point where we stop emitting greenhouse gases entirely, 80 per cent of the world’s species will become extinct, and human civilization as we know it will be destroyed, by the end of this century.

We don’t actually need to completely eliminate emissions by the end of the century, but we certainly need to begin cutting them deeply and rapidly. That remains a reality that no government anywhere seems to have fully accepted. Right now, we are like a gambling addict losing $1,000 an hour. If we can get it down to a dramatically lower level, we can keep gambling for longer without going completely bust. Achieving that will require a lot of politically difficult work.