The environment – Page 170 – a sibilant intake of breath

Earth Day

As I learned from Google’s altered logo, today is the 37th Earth Day. I suppose some kind of celebration is in order. Perhaps that is most true because of how notable today is not. Back in 1970, it might have been a politically important act to recognize the importance of the environment. Now, it seems daft to think otherwise. Of course, that doesn’t mean that heightened environmental awareness has always translated into good environmental policy. Our society is far from sustainable, but the business of changing that is probably not the spectacular fare of street demonstrations and activist announcements.

When it comes to fairly localized environmental problems – like particulate emissions – it does seem to be a matter of societies becoming rich enough that they can afford to prioritize that instead of more pressing matters like food or security. Japan’s re-development after the Second World War is probably the most clearcut example. The first Earth Day certainly had something to do with the progession towards investing more resources in conservation and environmental management in the United States: helping to spawn the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. It seems reasonable to hope that a similar progression will occur in newly developed places in coming decades. Of course, that leaves the diffuse and difficult problems like climate change and fisheries management to be tackled multilaterally somehow. That may well require a progression in politics akin to what transpired 37 years ago.

This thesis is carbon neutral

Thanks to a gift from my mother, I have been able to add the following to the opening section of my thesis:

This thesis, which generated about six tonnes of carbon dioxide from flights, paper production, printing, heating, and electricity usage has been carbon-neutralized through NativeEnergy. This was done by capturing methane from an American farm.

Six tonnes should cover my personal energy usage, as well as flights to and from Vancouver and emissions associated with printing the thesis. I have also included an estimate for my share of the power used by the server hosting this site. Methane is twenty-one times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2 and livestock agriculture produces about 18% of global emissions (discussed earlier).

The majority of NativeEnergy is owned by the The Intertribal Council On Utility Policy: a not-for-profit council of federally recognized Indian tribes in North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa, with affiliates throughout the northern Great Plains. The gift is much appreciated.

While I realize that carbon offsets are not a viable mechanism to deal with the whole problem of climate change, they are a good way to make a statement about the issue, as well as avoid charges of hypocrisy when expending energy on climate research or advocacy. They have been discussed here before.

Connections

One thing about studying climate change is that you never know where you will find new information. Have a look at this segment from James Burke’s Connections. He is talking about the Little Ice Age, which began in the 16th century. Much of what he says about adaptation is relevant, in an indirect way, to the kind of climate change being experienced now. I remember being terribly disappointed when his column vanished from the back of Scientific American – my staple reading before shifting to The Economist. Here is another short clip from Burke, also relevant to my thesis project. Here is yet another.

Note that Wikipedia has an entry on the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, and the IPCC. It is badly in need of being improved.

Minimum temperatures

Most of the climate change discussion has centred on global mean temperatures, but it is also important to consider minimum temperatures. The degree to which winters are properly cold has important effects: notably, on the distributions of pests and disease. The temperature a species can tolerate serves as a limit to its expansion, so warm winters can help undesirable creatures to spread into new areas. This is akin to how it is important for a course of antibiotics to kill 100% of the target bacteria. If it does not, a fullblown new infection is likely, once the drugs are discontinued.

The ranges of ants and bees have been extending northward in Europe and North America. Likewise, the populations of ticks carrying Lyme Disease and malarial mosquitoes have been shifting northward, along with those carrying Dengue Fever and Japanese encephalitis. This is part of a general trend in which species being displaced by climatic changes (See: Thomas Lovejoy notes). The fact that whole ecosystems do not move northwards and to higher altitudes at the same rate causes further problems, as predation relationships are disrupted.

These kinds of higher level effects are likely to become better understood as further research is carried out. The depth of information has already increased a great deal: the fourth IPCC report, which is in the process of being released, is based upon a review of more than 1,000 academic studies. The Third Assessment Report, in 2001, was based on about 100.

PS. The trio of WordPress sites have been upgraded to version 2.1.3. If you spot any problems, please let me know.

The US Supreme Court on the EPA

On April 2nd, the United States Supreme Court passed down a decision on how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates greenhouse gases. The ruling was made on the basis of the Clean Air Act (a piece of 60s era legislation) and asserts that the EPA has the jurisdiction to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. It goes on to chastise the organization for not doing so.

While the decision is certainly in keeping with the way the things are blowing, one has to wonder whether such an approach is sensible. The kind of problem posed by climate change has only become reasonably well understood in the period after the Clean Air Act was implemented. Also, while the EPA has a considerable amount of expertise, it does not have a huge amount of legitimacy. At least, it doesn’t have the level that would be necessary to push through the kind of societal changes society requires.

The smart money is that the next American administration – whether Democrat or Republican – will oversee a substantial change of tack when it comes to climate policy. The denialism of the present lot simply won’t be tenable in the post-2008 world. What form that new engagement takes – national, through bilateral or regional initiatives, or through a global system – will be the truly interesting thing to keep one’s eye upon.

PS. Apologies, but the profoundly disrupted state of the St. Antony’s College network at the moment prevents me from posting an image. Just getting this post to appear required more than ten hours of frustration. An image will appear once I am on a solid connection again. How cruel to come home to such shoddiness.

The Golden Spruce

John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce is a superb book: the best I have read in many months. It tells the intertwined stories of British Columbia, the economic development of Canada, old growth logging, the Haida (and the Haida Gwaii), and, of course, a unique Sitka Spruce and the man who destroyed it. Particularly for somebody interested in both Western Canada and the environment, it was the ideal type of non-fiction reading.

The story told is a compelling one, full of informative detail and light on preaching and speculation. I read it in one long session, sitting in my hermitage in Devon while temporarily avoiding thesis work. What the book did remind me of, in part, is why the whole study of the environment is important.

I already have two people waiting to borrow my copy (one of the books my mother kindly sent to England for me), but there are surely other examples of it out there.

Scientists and remedies: brainstorming

Tonight, I am brainstorming connections between scientists and remedy design. Addressing environmental problem basically seems to revolve around changing the intensity with which an activity is being carried out (ie. fish or cut down trees at the rate of regeneration) or finding substitutes (using solar power instead of natural gas power). Both kinds of solutions involve some critical imputs from scientists. Not surprisingly, my focus here is on types of actions that pertain specifically to my case studies.

I have come up with the following. Does anything else spring to mind?

Technological development

Development of:

Alternative chemicals to replace ones that have been problematic (for instance, CFCs and POPs)
Alternative mechanisms for energy generation, storage, and transmission
Energy-using technologies that are more efficient
Plant varieties that require fewer pesticides
Mechanisms for the disposal or long-term storage of unwanted by-products
Less polluting mechanisms for waste disposal

Predictions

Anticipating the consequences of:

Continuing to behave as we have been
Adopting one or another alternative approach
The combination of our impact upon the world with possible natural changes, such as major volcanic eruptions

Providing information about uncertainty:

How good are our predictions?
If they do fail, in what ways might it occur (what is not included in the models?)
What kinds of uncertainty are out there (ie. magnitude of effects, distribution of effects, etc)

Predictions about technological development:

What will the state of environmentally relevant technologies be in X years?
Is it better to invest in the best technology we have now, or continue research and wait (partly an economic question)

Big ideas about the world

Establish and describe the limits of nature:

Is this a factual or ideological exercise?
The same facts could justify differing views
Some ideologies have elements that can be pretty effectively undermined by science (ie. eugenics)

How should we treat uncertainty?:

Are there categories of risk that it is more ‘rational’ to worry about?
When does it make sense to ‘wait and see’ and when does it make sense to act in a precautionary way?

Naturally, those last few items extend into territory that is not obviously scientific. One big question about the social role of scientists is the extent to which they do or should contribute to such hybrid debates, with both empirical and ethical dimensions. Also, there is the question of whether they do or should do so ‘with their scientist hats on’ or whether they are no different from any other actor, once they have strayed from their area of core competence.

Climate change feedback effects

Starting with an index card full of items to include, I tried to make a map of basic feedbacks relating to climate change. I got this far, then decided that it probably cannot be done in two dimensions, except perhaps on a really massive sheet of paper:

Note: a chemical formula in [square brackets] indicates the concentration of that substance.

Consider, for instance, a single pathway of effects. Agriculture uses fossil fuels, which produce CO2. The CO2 raises global temperature, affecting global cloud cover in an uncertain way. The cloud cover affects temperature, by reflecting more or less solar radiation back into space. It also affects the rate of forest and plankton growth (as does the original increase in CO2).

All told, you need to account for phenomena in the following domains: atmosphere (gas concentrations, cloud effects), hydrosphere (ocean density, temperature, currents), cryosphere (ice and glacier levels, permafrost), and biosphere (plant growth, forest fires). Add to that feedbacks within human behaviours (agriculture and forest burning, for instance) and feedbacks between anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic sources of climate change, such as volcanic eruptions (lithosphere) and changes in orbits and solar output. Doubtless, I have overlooked and forgotten many relevant effects, also.

My hat goes off to the producers of general climate models (GCMs) that have started to incorporate the most important of the linkages shown above. These complex dynamic systems are tricky things, not easily dealt with through the general tendency in science to break questiond down and understand them bit-by-bit.

Coal and climate change

Few government policies have longer lead-times than those dealing with infrastructure development. This is demonstrated through the 17-year time-frame from design to deployment for Britain’s replacement Trident subs and it pertains directly to climate change issues. Despite Nicholas Stern’s espousal of a fossil fuel free society by mid-century, fossil fuel based plants are still in construction around the world. Right now, coal power plants account for about 1/4 of all human caused greenhouse gas emissions. About 150 new plants are slated for construction in the United States alone: 56% of them coal fired. By the time they have been completed, operate, and reach the end of their operational lives, we will be getting pretty close to 2050. All told, the International Energy Agency predicts that global coal use will rise by 71% by 2030, raising greenhouse gas emissions with it.

Even if we cannot go straight to infrastructure based entirely around renewables, we can make some modest investments now that could save us a lot of trouble in the long term. One example is building coal plants that can be easily converted to “Oxy-fuel” systems. In these, coal gets burned in nearly pure oxygen. The products of that reaction are mostly pure carbon dioxide, which can then (theoretically) be sequestered underground. By eliminating the need to separate CO2 from other gases, before sequestration, such plants could save a lot of money. Of course, they do require a system to extract oxygen from air to feed the reaction, though this is apparently easier to pull off.

Such transition technologies might be the trickiest part of the entire move away from fossil fuels. Renewables seem as though they will eventually mature, allowing some mix of solar, hydro, and related systems to power the grid. Transition technologies are critical for two other reasons, as well: both China and the United States are concerned about energy security and have masses of native coal, and fast-growing developing countries are unlikely to be able to make the kind of costly commitments to low-carbon energy that developed countries will. Managing interim emissions, and trying to stay below the 550ppm level that the Stern report has highlighted as highly dangerous, will be a considerable challenge.

Climate change and the Amazon

Tonight, I saw a public lecture associated with the Oriel College conference: Climate change and the fate of the Amazon. Notes on Thomas Lovejoy’s presentation have been posted on my wiki. Most of it was stuff that I had heard or read before in multiple places, but it will be useful to have another source to cite on a few issues, for the thesis.

The issue of biodiversity also really drives home the instrumentalist v. inherent value perspectives on nature. If golden toads provide no concrete benefit to human beings, should we be concerned about them going extinct. If we are, what level of resources is it sensible to devote, given the myriad other problems that exist?