Mining the mountains of spin

Andy Revkin published a blog piece about Jim Hansen's latest escapade. he asked for comments on whether or not getting arrested at a protest was "professional" for a scientist. Mine is below, but click on the link and read the article first.

Hansen of NASA Arrested in Coal Country

James Hansen of NASA gets arrested in effort to stop coal mining.



Hansen is making clear the level of his commitment, and I for one appreciate the clarity. And he's right. Mountaintop removal mining is an impressive dead end.

Clarity is often elusive in a world dominated by media types (on both sides) and postmodern "spokespersons" trained to believe they can spin any event to their advantage and that it doesn't really matter what people are made to believe because there's no such thing as a fact. I expect that Hansen's message will quickly and easily become garbled for some "consumers" of what passes for news in today's world.

Let's make it perfectly clear, at least in this one media outlet, because the scientific logic of Hansen's stand is impeccable.

Jim (with colleagues, post-docs, students) in 2008 published a paper in which he calculated with some precision (http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126) that the remaining carbon dioxide equivalent climate agent in the 1,200 or so billion barrels of economically extractable oil, and a few hundred billion barrels of other kinds of economically extractable petroleum products, is possibly insufficient, by itself, absent coal-burning, to keep adding enough CO2e to the atmosphere to exceed the 350 ppm atmospheric threshold he feels we should not exceed for very much longer.

It helps that the likelihood that we can increase our rate of burning oil, or the final amount we burn by a big number is low, simply because we're running out of the stuff and it's becoming harder and harder to extract. The price is increasing in the long run (fluctuating wildly in the short) and simple supply-demand theory says this will have a strict conservation effect. Everyone will then have to insulate their existing homes, buy better cars, use renewable energy, etc, etc, whether they are Republican or Democrat, green or bright pink, all because of one thing, the oil price.

Even Limbaugh will want a hybrid. A really really big one, for his corrupt, rotten-to-the-core corpulence.

So, logically, if you're as terrified about the potential destabilization of climate change as you should be, as Jim is, all we have to do is stop burning coal. That's the Hansonian climate to-do list. One big item. There are a few items in the small print, such as managing the methane from farms, or calculating the CO2e value of forests natural or planted.

Oil will take care of itself.

From the point of view of the average Joe or Jill that hasn't read Hansen et al, 2008, Jim's latest stand does all seem a bit confusing, and possibly ungrateful.

After all, we're getting what we wanted, right? A President who cares? A climate bill? A real energy policy? A green makeover for Detroit? Didn't the greens win?

Didn't they?

Arguably, Hansen is a better scientist for following the evidence where it leads, Hatch Act and other supposed professional and behavioral niceties notwithstanding, even when it may seem so contrary and tendentious. I don't agree with him completely on the solution (since we need coal for steel and we need steel for wind turbines and hybrids, we need to learn how to properly sequester the carbon from coal), but I appreciate his strength of character and damn the torpedoes commitment.

One of these days we postmoderns will spin ourselves into such a tizzy with our refusal to face facts that we'll get in a real pickle, with climate, oil, China, Iran (all related, by the way), and when we do, we'll need some women and men of real character. Hansen's on my A-list.

As the general said, when the going gets tough they send for the sonsabitches.

Hansen retires, to take up more activism

Big news!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/science/james-e-hansen-retiring-from-nasa-to-fight-global-warming.html?ref=science?src=dayp

For students who've never heard of Jim Hansen, a) where have you been going to school? b) here's a link to all our Hansen posts from over the years.

http://ucsustainability.blogspot.com/search?q=hansen

Update to Hansen et al 2016

Although I'm no longer employed as a climate professional, I still monitor the climate science news and cherry-pick the latest papers. In particular, I look for progress that would or would not confirm the primary hypothesis in Hansen et al 2016, "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming could be dangerous."

This is the paper that turned my professional life upside down. It took me three weeks to read it carefully, annotate it, and follow up on the primary literature cited therein. It's a very dense eighty-some pages. But I had a feeling then and still do that I was witnessing the emergence of the best prediction for the fate of the earth, and its consequences, all in real time, and that nearly everything I had done as an environmental activist, scholar, and teacher would become moot as a result.

Seems like the kind of thing you would want to keep track of. Especially if you have a six year old daughter.

In the years after Hansen and his colleagues published this tome, I tried to teach it. I was responsible for general education classes that included a climate change module, as well as a senior-level climate science class that taught the general science and the basics of climate modeling. It seemed my responsibility to give them this paper. But I failed badly in the attempt to teach it. 

It's just too complex a proposition. 

Not "if a then b," which is what most undergraduates can handle in terms of logic problem, essentially linear cause and effect, but "if a and b and c, then d might happen and e will perhaps ensue and then f is a distinct possibility if we cross threshold g and reach set point h, and hypothetical feedbacks i, j and k set in, and we have evidence of varying quality for a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, and k, and if we get to f then a total catastrophe will drown all major cities within seventy years and set off storms that can flatten Florida, but you have to be an expert to understand the evidence and by the way, even you, the professor, is probably too stupid to understand any of this."

I have to admit I took a certain morbid and masochistic satisfaction trying to teach it. I could spend a lifetime just learning to teach this one paper. But this is what science is about for me: struggling with logic and reason and consequences.

Anyway. Updates, right? They have been fairly scarce and not written for the lay person.

Dr. Hansen has finally published an informal update of sorts here. It is intended to be a foreword to a book, but looks to me more like an attempt to put forming thoughts about updating H2016 on paper.

As such, I would expect it to either disappear or appear later in some other format. But for now it's very interesting. I plan to follow up on the literature as soon as I can get a draft copy of Chapter 48 of his new book, which is where he says to go next.

Summing up the class: Week 14 materials

A version of this is available for each of my classes. This one is for Global Change.

When you get done with everything in this announcement, you're done with the study materials for GL4003. (You still have the final exam to take.)

It's up to me now to try to make some sense out of climate change and the fate of humanity. I'm going to do so based on some of my own life experiences and academic thought. There's a strict limit to how useful this kind of thing is. Instructors shouldn't inflict their own history or ideas on students too forcefully. Too much, and it slops over into egotism. It can also be very confusing for weaker students, whose understanding of key ideas may have been shaky to begin, to endure having an instructor picking apart those ideas at a much higher level. But in the end, I feel you have a right to know what I think about all these big questions, particularly since I've been in this business a long time.

I've been working on this problem since about 1984 when I first became interested in environmental sustainability. At the time I was a corporal in Her Majesty's most excellent Royal Air Force, an engine propulsion technician-supervisor and trade trainer, and a mountain rescue "troop." (MR team members in this branch of the UK service are called "troops," for some reason long lost to history.) Always an avid outdoorsman, in the UK working-class style (which tilts to mountaineering, hill-walking, and associated activities and away from hook-and-bullet sports), I'd become interested in the natural history of the British mountains. I found what study materials I needed in the local university libraries and became a self-taught geologist and moderately expert in the ethnography of the British Isles. The UK mountains are filled with Roman camps and bronze and iron age villages and hill forts, so this too was natural curiosity. I just wanted to know why the landscape I saw around me was the way it was. My buddies on the team thought I was strange, but the British are generally tolerant of eccentricity, so they were still good to me, and still are.

My researches in natural history eventually led to my discovery of the then-relatively new idea that humans were simply not going to be able to keep growing in both population and scale of economic impact on planet earth -- that there would eventually be some kind of carrying capacity for humans. This was a problem for me because we were then deep into one of the hottest periods of the Cold War, the Reagan arms build-up, and my job was clearly to fight that war, or at least help do so. I wanted instead to join the environmental movement and work on this problem because I saw it was more important. This was the early days of modern environmentalism, which for me meant Greenpeace and the Green Party, both of which I joined. I thought that neither side had it right. Untrammeled industrial development would be the end of all humanity, not just the other side.

The Royal Air Force was remarkably good about things. They let me go two years early through a compassionate discharge (still an "honorable discharge"), and allowed me to keep my pension (which will kick in shortly). I also stayed friendly with my buddies on the MR teams. I've even had some come talk to my classes at Unity College.

But I was discharged. And I immediately went to live in a so-called sustainable commune. It didn't take too long to discover the denizens of the commune were quite nuts and incredibly blinkered to reality. Too much meditation, not enough hard thinking. But I was introduced to green building and solar power. I also worked in education for the first time there, through the commune's Youth Program. And a lot of the residents were American. I married an American girl there in 1986 (not Aimee), and a year later, tired of the commune, we found ourselves in California.

Eventually I was able to go to college in the US, and went right through to the PhD, twelve years studying ecology and ecological economics full time. I studied under Herman Daly at the University of Maryland, one of the founders of ecological economics, which is a pretty big deal in my circles. I got the job at Unity College in fall 2000, and have been here ever since. I'd rather teach here than somewhere more ritzy, Colby or CoA. I may be fooling myself, but you guys seem a bit more deserving. Most of the time.

But my life's real work hasn't changed so very much from what it was in 1984.  I still do a little search and rescue. I still fix things, and teach people how to fix things, although these days they are buildings and solar panels, not aircraft. And I think and teach and write about human ecology and ecological economics. (Here's an example.)

Being a military veteran in the environmental movement, especially teaching at an environmental college, gives me a somewhat unique perspective, one that I think you deserve to hear.
Veterans are rare in the environmental movement. I've learned to be more tolerant of some conservative viewpoints than many environmentalists often are. I believe that we need the military and by extension the police services to protect us from bad countries and bad people. But I don't think that gives them license to abuse human rights. Human rights are instead what they are there to protect. I believe that some aspects of environmentalism are overblown. But that doesn't mean to say that I'm foolish enough to disbelieve what scientists are telling us about climate change and other limits to human growth.

I appreciate service. I still serve, or try to, through my work in SAR. Right now the health care workers are heroes. I deeply dislike selfishness, especially civic selfishness. There are times when we clearly are all "in this together." Imagining that it's a good idea to "open up" the economy when there are clearly still millions of people carrying this virus is a recipe for disaster, especially for old folk, and an opinion quite ignorant of the science basis for epidemiology. It will kill people.

This is important: Just because one person or a group of people consistently holds the same particular set of ideas doesn't mean to say they have the right set. Some of their ideas could be right, for sure. But some are probably wrong. And this is especially likely if the consistency of these ideas is rigidly enforced within the group and the group tries hard to make everyone adopt the same set: if you believe a, then to be part of this tribe, you have to also believe b, c, d, and e with the same foolish intensity. This is as true for left wing nut jobs as it is for right wing nut jobs. (They're all nut jobs in the end.)

You can for instance, understand that climate change is happening and a terrible problem for humanity and still be a moderate second amendment advocate. You just have to think about it a bit harder than the others in your peer group may do, accept belief a, but reject belief b. But that doesn't mean that it would be smart if everyone gets to have their own bazooka! Imagine how hard that would be for the police. Moderation is nearly always wise.

I also realized from the commune experience that if I wanted to live sustainably and create a resilient lifestyle for my family, we would probably do better if we did it mostly ourselves and didn't try to rely on other people too much. Self-improvement is, as Adam Smith believed, the best motivator. Call this environmental libertarianism if you want. But this too can only go so far. I need to rely on government and other people and businesses from time to time too.

This spring, particularly with the lockdown and the power cuts, I feel somewhat vindicated to be a homesteader, although it has taken years of very hard work to get the farm where we want it to be. Our farm is safe, healthy, and productive. We have useful things to do, planting food and birthing lambs and stacking firewood, and that gives healthy exercise, even under lockdown. We can go outdoors as much as we want. We have water, food, heat, and shelter, and even solar electricity, all from our own resources. This is good because it saves stress on other resources, which are then available for other people. But I also see the farming and homesteading we do as an adjunct to teaching sustainability. If I think society needs to be more resilient, I should be capable of modeling that resilience. It's only fair on you, and, to boot, true to the ethic of service.

So, now you know why I do what I do and how long I've been doing it, let's talk about what I think is going to happen with climate change and renewable energy.

My ideas on this have changed dramatically since 2016 when leading climate scientist James Hansen and several eminent colleagues came out with the paper I now build much of this class around, Hansen et al 2016.



In case you need a reminder, there's a summary here.

Below is the movie in which Hansen explains the paper in lay terms. Unless you think you remember it really, really well, the movie is required. This time you may wish to take notes at key points. There will be questions on the exam.

Here is the text of the movie for those who like me, read faster than they listen.

Basically, and this is repetitious, I know, but very important, Hansen and his co-authors hypothesize that we are either close to or have passed a point of no return with regard to Greenland and Antarctic ice melt. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun to collapse. This changes the calculation with regard to climate change mitigation. Because the melting can't be stopped, mitigation of greenhouse gases won't help. Instead we'll need to adapt, and perhaps very quickly, to the rising seas.

This means that the current prediction from the IPCC (page 25) for only three further feet of sea level rise this century is probably off. We may get instead several meters. We may get meter-scale sea level rise as soon as the late 2060s, or even earlier. The current doubling time for Antarctic ice loss is six years. We are currently getting about 4mm of sea level rise per year. Assume all this water ends in the ocean. Do the math with me:

2020: 4 mm/year
2026: 8 mm/year
2032: 1.6 cm/year
2038: 3.2 cm/year
2044: 6.4 cm/year
2050: 12.8 cm/year
2056: 25.6 cm/year
2062: 51.2 cm/year
2068: 1.02 m/year

And so on. This is the danger of exponential growth. The famous parable of the chess board applies.

Sea level rise due to Antarctic and Greenland melting may easily go even faster than this. Some important ice scientists expect it to do so (although not all). It certainly has melted faster in other geological periods. We still need to mitigate, because to continue to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere risks another climate catastrophe after this first one. But, as Hansen states, we will know within a few years if the pace of Antarctic and Greenland melting is keeping up with this scenario, decelerating, or accelerating yet faster.

These days we keep pretty good track of both Greenland and Antarctic ice:
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/4/1095
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/19/9239

This last year was particularly worrying:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020GL087291

I've been a major advocate for rapid mitigation for a long time now. Here's an example of some of my work, in which I try to reconcile mitigation with Keynesian economics and geopolitical realism. Notice that Vladimir Putin is mentioned in my talk as a "fossil elite" trying to hold onto power as the leader of an oil state. I don't claim any particular prescience, but this was a full year before he interfered in the US election. It didn't work out well for him in the end because of the US Congress's refusal to go along with the Trump administration's efforts to reduce sanctions,  and now the oil price war and the corona virus, to which Russia is highly vulnerable because Putin delayed the response, and there's no free press to tell anyone what's really happening. So the 2016 election interference was a tactical success and a strategic failure. But you can be sure that he likes the tactic and is trying it again. (This movie is also required.)



Applying Realism to Climate Policy Presented by Prof. Mick Womersley Feb. 26th 2015 from Quimby Library Unity College on Vimeo.

Mitigation means reducing the risk of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mostly through renewable energy and energy efficiency. A big problem with mitigation has been the way that conservative groups and corporations have lied to the public and managed to convince a lot of people that mitigation is an environmental hoax. This deliberate effort to mislead the public is one reason why, for instance, a lot of second amendment advocates feel they need to also oppose climate science. You can see the same phenomena in almost all conservative causes from same-sex marriage to abortion. It all gets lumped in together and as I said above, if the tribe is required to believe one dogma, they have to believe all. This is partly explained by the Yale "Cultural Cognition" work, but not completely.

Denialism has been the bane of my life since the 1990s. My PhD thesis was essentially an attempt to to find a way around conservative denialism through understanding religious advocacy for the climate. Despite the college's mission, I've had climate deniers in every single one of my Unity College classes since Fall 2000. Most of them have gone away thinking differently, but there has often been enormous friction as I challenge their mistaken ideas.

In the movie I make clear that the problem with climate change mitigation is that it is opposed by "fossil elites," my term for the owners of fossil fuel capital, who will resist to the end the devaluation of that capital, even though they have children and grandchildren. Some of these fossil elites are de-facto owners of nation-states (or at least kleptocracies). They use their money to fund denial propaganda. Ordinary Americans that embrace denialism, especially if they are themselves vulnerable to climate impacts, are to them what Stalin called "useful idiots."

That's one problem. The other is that mitigation as proposed by some left wing thinkers and even some climate scientists might cause a recession. A recession might weaken the democracies vis-a-vis the dictators and fossil elites, and lead to a setback for mitigation. This is why the Green New Deal is a superior approach. It uses Keynesian thinking to avoid the trap of recessionary mitigation. This is what I advocated in the movie above, before the GND came out. Again, I don't claim prescience. It's an obvious solution. And it turns out others were working on this idea long before me.

That still leaves denialism. Unless we defeat it, we won't get mitigation in time. Fossil elites have bought themselves time on the throne by funding denialism, including casting doubt on renewable energy's effectiveness and cost-efficiency, even though renewable energy prices are lower than fossil energy. As I said, I have beat myself to death for many years now tackling denialism in the classroom and in public. At times it has driven me close to despair.

But these new data from Greenland and Antarctica may mean I no longer have to do so. If Hansen is right, mitigation can't help us stop sea level rise in any case, and we will soon have very convincing proof that the rise is accelerating (by 2025 or at least 2030). By the time we have this proof, denialism will be yet weaker because the average age of climate deniers is quite old. (It's already weakening over time.)

This, to be honest, and despite the bad news that caused it, has been something of a relief. We won't get mitigation in time to head off this first great climate disaster, and that is bad. But this disaster, along with the aging out of denialists, will be the end of denialism, and we should get some sane mitigation policy shortly thereafter.

Hansen shows that a regional cooling in the north Atlantic, or even a general global cooling, will accompany such vast ice melt, by adding cool water to the parts of the oceans where thermohaline circulation starts, hindering poleward movement of atmospheric heat, and by the melting ice just cooling the oceans, period. That should help human agriculture, previously in grave danger from warming. The bad news is that this increased temperature gradient will lead to superstorms. But you can't have everything. I think humanity and liberal democracy will survive sea level rise and superstorms. I doubt it would survive the collapse of global agriculture. Here's the relevant graphic from the paper. The accompanying explanation is section 3.4 on page 3766 and 3767.

So I'm optimistic for a partial resolution soon. It's not a great basis for optimism, to be sure. We'll lose Florida, or much of it, and quite a lot of some major east coast cities. Adapting to the loss will be very hard and will cause great disruption, something we've had practice in recently. But we will enter a new political reality in which it will become almost impossible to deny human-caused climate change.

The bad news is, this is just the beginning of the Great Human Ecological Crisis of the 21st Century. Scientists believe that there are other ecological limits or boundaries to human economic growth looming in the background.

This is usually covered in your Environmental Issues and Insights core class. Here's a quick reminder:

Introducing 'The Doughnut' of social and planetary boundaries for development

In this video there are nine planetary boundaries, but of course, others may surface. A few years ago it was proposed that "novel entities" are a similar human ecological issue. Novel entities are chemicals or diseases introduced into human habitat, often by economic growth, as human development expands into wild habitats to find disease or finds new chemicals both of which we have had little exposure to.

Examples include PCBs, Agent Orange, Ebola, and now the novel corona virus. Just as Ebola found a way to get from African wildlife into the human population, so has Covid 19. And I should think we are not done yet with pandemics and poisons. And don't forget the superstorms.

So this is, as Churchill said of appeasement,

"...only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time."

Apologies. I'm fond of Churchill's rhetoric. It can be bracing in a crisis. At least my parents and grandparents thought so at the time. But, in other more prosaic words, you are all going to have interesting lives. I hope it works out well for you. But keep smiling and remember, a couple generations ago there were lots of people still alive, like my own grandparents, who had survived the Great War, the Great Depression, World War 2, and much of the Cold War. You won't have it nearly that bad. (My grandfather, a British Army private in both WW1 and WW2, taught me how to garden. I think of him every time I plant something.)

Another thing to remember: The planet has melted down before. It knows how to do it and survive. It's the humans we have to worry about. And especially democracy. That's what is really threatened by all these ecological problems and especially the fossil elites. I'll be dead by the time this is all worked out, and your generation will be in charge. If you manage to save democracy, you'll have done well. I'll be rooting for you.

Just listen to the scientists (or be one), and don't buy a house on the coast.

Hansen's latest

Former senior NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen -- who is either the canary in the coal mine or beezlebub, depending on your point of view on whether scientists ought be activists -- has released an important new summary paper written with a large number of seriously scientific co-authors. The paper was intended for submission in court in Oregon, where a group of young people are suing the federal government for inaction on climate change.

These are big events in the world of climate change. My opinion is that Hansen is neither canary nor demon. He's more like the goldfinch in the coalmine. Not quite as effective as a canary, and certainly not a common metaphor, but you'll know just fine when becomes anoxic.

We will talk about this paper in both EcoEco and EII.

https://app.box.com/s/t050csk2z20iqk9u14vnllz3i15dh5i0

Somebody liked my Churchill metaphor

This is vain, but I'm going to post it anyway, mostly because Aimee complains I read too much "world crisis" history. These are some responses I got to my recent post on NYT's Dot Earth blog, re Hansen's idea to prosecute CEOs of energy corporations for climate change "crimes.":


#53.
June 26th,
2008
5:46 am

When the world comes to its senses about the combined energy/climate crisis, we will take Jim Hansen very seriously, and while we might not, by the Constitution, actually be able to seriously consider prosecution of certain energy CEOs, we certainly will feel very differently about them.

I’m thinking now not not so much about those “just doing their jobs,” “following orders” from shareholders and boards to make profit at any cost, but those who deliberately funded the disinformation campaign that is responsible, since the early 1990s, for much of the public confusion about climate change.

It’s fairly well documented now that leaders of ExxonMobil and other energy corporations funneled money to fake scientists, lobbying groups and commentators who would spread the notion that scientists lacked consensus on climate change.

Now that this has been exposed, let’s begin to put it in perspective. And I like the 1930s metaphor.

The combined climate-energy World Crisis is already ruining lives and killing people all over the planet. The climate effects: from extreme storms, floods, wildfires, and drought; are combining with the energy effects: high prices, food shortages, a major recession; to create unemployment, poverty, hunger, starvation, and the unhousing of millions. And this is just the beginning. More is to come, a “bitter cup” from which we will now have to drink, “year after year.”

Now, with the midwestern floods, grain prices will likely skyrocket this fall, adding to the gathering storm.

Hansen is our climate Churchill. When we get beyond this crisis, into the “broad sunlit uplands” of a renewable energy century, we will look back and excoriate those who, for pure greed or ideological lunacy, delayed our response, much as we look back on the appeasers, isolationists, and apologists for Nazism of the 1930s. The climate denial lobby are the Lindberghs, Mosleys, and the German-American Bund “in our time.”

Unfortunately, the crimes they have committed (so far) are ones against compassion, reason and truth, not against the law.

— Posted by Mick Womersley

#71.
June 26th,
2008
10:57 am

Mick Womersely, #53,

What a damn great post!
To my usual heroes in here, (you know who you are). Keep speaking the truth.
Elizabeth Tjader

— Posted by Elizabeth Tjader

#
75.June 26th,
2008
11:38 am

Elizabeth Tjader #71, Mick Womersely, #53

I am glad that there are two people agrees with me of the urgency. (Maybe I should re-post poem here again.)

I have reread the September 2005 special issue of Scientific American,”Crossroads for the Planet Earth”. It is still quite current, though I wish somebody can revise it by now. I would recommend to folks in dotearth blog circle to read it too. What amounts to the crisis is that we need a Churchill, a FDR, and a general Gorge Marshall, to arose the people, to inspire the people, and to organize people.

Yu-tsang Hwang

— Posted by Yu-tsang Hwang

Jimmy the man says it again

NY Times image of Hansen

You gotta love Jim Hansen, the Jonathan Swift of our era, a doughty foe of all unsustainable stupidity, and a solid scientist to boot. The paper referred to in this e-memo, a fairly accessible read on climate sensitivity, was quickly used in our Ecological Economics class to do modeling experiments on the rate of oil depletion in "peakist" scenarios versus EIA scenarios, and to create a basic model for carbon sensitivity.

Say what? If you "know nothing" about peak oil and carbon sensitivity, should you be voting?

James Hansen

To: jhansen@giss.nasa.gov

Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 8:33 PM

Subject: Yankee Ticket Prices and Fossil Fuels

Yankee Ticket Prices and Fossil Fuels is at http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080410_YankeeTicketPrices.pdf

Yankee Ticket Prices and Fossil Fuels

10 April 2008

When I was young, Yankee Stadium had ~70,000 seats. It seldom sold out, and almost any kid could afford the cheap seats. Capacity was reduced to ~57,000 when the stadium was remodeled in the 1970s. Most games sell out now, and prices have gone up.

The new stadium, opening next year, will reduce seating further, to ~51,800. This intentional contraction is aimed at guaranteeing sellouts, increasing demand, allowing the owners, in pretty short order, to hike prices to double, triple, and more. The owners know that scarcity will fatten their wallets, even though it reduces the number of sales. This is more than a bit distasteful, as it discriminates against the lower middle class.

Nevertheless, it should be a great stadium and as long as the owner is footing the bill without public subsidies for the stadium itself, we may have little grounds for complaint.

The reason that I draw your attention to this practice is that fossil fuel moguls are intent on hoodwinking the entire planet with an analogous scheme. The basic trick is this: fossil fuel reserves are overstated. Government “energy information” departments parrot industry. Partly because of this disinformation, the major efforts needed to develop energies “beyond fossil fuels” have not been made.

The reality of limited supply forces prices higher. Eventually, sales volume will begin to decline, but fossil fuel moguls will make more money than ever. They will continue to assert that there is plenty more to be found, aiming to keep the suckers (that’s us) on the hook. Indeed, they could find somewhat more in the deep ocean, under national parks, in polar regions, offshore, and in other environmentally sensitive areas. They don’t need much to keep the suckers paying higher and higher prices.

Oil “reserves” suddenly doubled when OPEC decided that production quotas would be proportional to official reserves. These higher reserves are, at least in part, phantom. Coal “reserves” are based on estimates made many decades ago. Closer study shows that extractable coal reserves are vastly overstated, which is consistent with present production difficulties and rising prices. The presumed “200 year” supply of coal in the United States is a myth, but it serves industry moguls well.

Conventional fossil fuel supplies are limited, even if we tear up the Earth to extract every last drop of oil and shard of coal. Tearing up the Earth to get at those last drops, even though Exxon/Mobil proudly advertises that they are drilling to the depths of the ocean and going to the most extreme pristine environments, is, for us, as insane as the smoker who trudged four miles through a raging storm to buy a pack of Camels to feed his nicotine addiction.

It would be possible to find more fossil fuels, and extend our addiction and pollution ofthe environment, should we be so foolish as to take the path of extracting unconventional fossil fuels such as tar shale and tar sands on a large scale. That choice cannot be left to the discretion of industry moguls. The planet does not belong to them.

Basic fossil fuel facts (about reserves) must be combined with basic climate facts described in the paper “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?”. That paper has been submitted to Science and is available in arXiv, the permanent archive for physics preprints. The main paper is at: http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126 and the Supporting Material is at: http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1135

Our conclusion is that, if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, CO2 must be reduced from its present 385 ppm to, at most, 350 ppm. We find that peak CO2 can be kept to ~425 ppm, even with generous (large) estimates for oil and gas reserves, if coal use is phased out by 2030 (except where CO2 is captured and sequestered) and unconventional fossil fuels are not tapped substantially. Peak CO2 can be kept close to 400 ppm, if actual reserves are closer to those estimated by “peakists” (people who believe that we are already at peak global oil production, having extracted about half of readily extractable oil resources).

This lower 400 ppm peak can be ensured (assuming phase-out of coal emissions by 2030) if a practical limit on reserves is achieved by means of actions that prevent fossil fuel extraction from public lands, off-shore regions under government control, environmentally pristine regions, and extreme environments. The concerned public can influence this matter and it is important to do so now – time is short, the industry voice is strong, and climate effects have not yet become so obvious to the public as to overwhelm the disinformation of industry moguls.

A near-term moratorium on coal-fired power plants and constraints on oil extraction in extreme environments are important, because once CO2 is emitted to the air much of it will remain there for centuries. Our paper describes ways in which improved agricultural and forestry practices, mostly reforestation, could draw down atmospheric CO2 about 50 ppm by the end of the century. But a greater drawdown by such more-or-less natural methods does not seem practical, making a long-term overshoot of the 350 ppm level, with potentially disastrous consequences, a near certainty if we stay on a business-as-usual course for several more years.

If we choose a different path, which permits the possibility of getting back to 350 ppm CO2 or lower this century, we will minimize the chance of passing tipping points that spiral out of control, such as disintegration of ice sheets, rapid sea level rise, and extermination of countless species. At the same time we will solve problems that had begun to seem intractable, such as acidification of the ocean with consequent loss of coral reefs.

A fundamental point is that, in any event, we must move beyond fossil fuels reasonably soon. The underlying reason is that a large fraction of CO2 emissions remains in the air for many centuries. Thus the upshot: we must move to zero fossil fuel emissions. This is a fact, a certainty, a lead pipe cinch. So why not do it a bit sooner, in time to avert climate crises? At the same time, we halt other pollution that comes from fossil fuels, including mercury pollution, conventional air pollution, problems stemming from mountain-top removal, etc.

Breaking an addiction is not easy. But we may now be at a point analogous to that of the smoker who told me about trudging four miles through rain to get a pack of Camels – when he got back to his motel he threw the pack of Camels away and never smoked again.

Fossil fuel addiction is much more difficult -- an epiphany to one person cannot solve the problem. This problem requires global cooperation. We must be on a new path within the next several years, or, our paper shows, it becomes implausible to reduce CO2 below the dangerous level this century. Developed countries, as the cause of most of the excess CO2 in the air today, must lead in the steps needed to develop clean energy and halt CO2 emissions. Yet it is hardly a sacrifice: ‘green’ jobs will be an economic stimulus and a boon to worker well-being.

A major fight is brewing – it may be called war. On the one side, we find the short-term financial interests of the fossil fuel industry. On the other side: young people and other beings who will inherit the planet. It seems to be an uneven fight. The fossil fuel industry is launching a disinformation campaign and they have powerful influence in capitals around the world.

Young people seem pretty puny in comparison to industry moguls. Animals are not much help (don’t talk, don’t vote). The battle may start with local and regional skirmishes, one coal plant or other issue at a time, but it will need to build rapidly – we are running out of time.

P.S.: Do not fall for the moguls’ dirtiest trick – ‘green’ messages spewed to the public. That is propaganda, intended to leave the impression they are moving in the right direction. Meanwhile they hire scientific has-beens to dispute evidence and confuse the public. How will you be able to tell if they ever “get it”? When they begin to invest massively in renewable energies, when they become truly energy companies aimed toward zero-carbon emissions.

Hansen heats up

Jim Hansen's pleas have been getting ever more agitated and frustrated and ever less scientific these last few years and months. He has done far more than any other scientist to put the climate change issue, especially the abrupt climate change issue, on the table.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/15/james-hansen-power-plants-coal

UOCP as preferred carbon strategy

I've been interested in the proposal to exorcise coal from domestic electricity production as the primary carbon reduction strategy since Jim Hansen first proposed it a few years ago.

The basic idea is, oil depletion will take care of oil within the forty-year, 80% emissions reductions time frame to 2050 in any case, so don't worry about oil, ergo don't worry about transportation: Oil price will increase inexorably over the next ten-fifteen years, and as long as the commercially viable substitutes involve less carbon, such as plug-in hybrids running on green power, or liquid natural gas, then transportation emissions will take care of themselves.

Instead regulate the emissions from the electric generation sector. You have only a relative handful of producers to worry about, less than a few hundred in the case of the USA, and so the policy is manageable and enforceable. Plus it avoids the kind of backlash politics I detailed in my own dissertation, which politics indeed came to pass, by the way, more or less as described.

One of Hansen's students, Pushker Kharecha, I believe, ran the numbers and proved the concept quantitatively in this article here.

So now Michael Levi has endorsed the proposal too.

That's a significant weight of endorsement, given the way the man's mind works. Hansen's response to these ideas, of course, was explosive and committed, and led to his arrests at the site of a mountaintop removal coalmine, and his giving evidence at the trail of the Kingsnorth activists.

I doubt we'll see Michael Levi put himself on the line quite like that. Instead, though, we have the weight of reason, which I do appreciate.

As for my own neck of the woods, it will be interesting to see what effect the Gulf oil spill will have on the next wind power planning battle here in Maine. Will the penny drop? Our home-grown anti-wind activists have passed several more ordinances, but several towns have also accepted the state's model ordinance.

For the record, and before someone decides to post a nasty comment, I remain an advocate for community-owned wind for Maine, and that's what we're working towards with our wind assessment research program.

Hopefully, in the light of the BP spill showing us just what the upstream impacts of fossil energy can be, the Maine anti-wind folks can begin to distinguish between proposals for small scale community-owned turbines and farms, such as the Fox Islands farm, and larger scale, colonial schemes.

Hansen to Obama: Get on with it

Jim Hansen has a new missive -- actually, missile would be more correct, given his propensity for forceful debate -- on climate change. This one is directed to President-elect Obama. You can get to it through Andy Revkin's blog.

I like Hansen. He just says his piece, doesn't mess around worrying about hurting people's feelings.

A climate Cromwell.

We British have a long tradition of forceful debate. We regularly throw off forceful characters like Cromwell, Wilberforce, or Churchill, extreme characters, full of vision and flaw, whose ability to imagine futures good and bad is translated into emotive argument for the good, yet whose vision is usually before their time.

Jim Hansen's 20 year anniversary visit to Congress

This is the full text. Hansen recommends putting CEOs of ExxonMobil and Peabody coal on trial for crimes against humanity.

I like Hansen. I think he has a clear-eyed understanding of what will most likely happen this century, and he doesn't feel the need to water down his statements for political purposes.

A truly independent mind.

I still stick to my thoughts of yesterday -- plenty of folks are working on the climate problem now. Climate change will either get fixed, by a supreme effort to reduce emissions, or we will have to adapt to sea level rise and loss of habitable land areas. Most likely we will do a bit of both. The microeconomic and population consequences of either the fixing or adaptation or both seem to me to be the most interesting, and least considered, questions now.

But Hansen is, as ever, always worth a read, our climate Churchill:

Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near on Global Warming

James Hansen

Tomorrow I will testify to Congress about global warming, 20 years after my 23 June 1988 testimony, which alerted the public that global warming was underway. There are striking similarities between then and now, but one big difference.

Again a wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by policymakers and the public. Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic. Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 percent.

The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next President and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.

Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity’s control.

Changes needed to preserve creation, the planet on which civilization developed, are clear. But the changes have been blocked by special interests, focused on short-term profits, who hold sway in Washington and other capitals.

I argue that a path yielding energy independence and a healthier environment is, barely, still possible. It requires a transformative change of direction in Washington in the next year.

On 23 June, 1988, I testified to a hearing, chaired by Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado, that the Earth had entered a long-term warming trend and that human-made greenhouse gases almost surely were responsible. I noted that global warming enhanced both extremes of the water cycle, meaning stronger droughts and forest fires, on the one hand, but also heavier rains and floods.

My testimony two decades ago was greeted with skepticism. But while skepticism is the lifeblood of science, it can confuse the public. As scientists examine a topic from all perspectives, it may appear that nothing is known with confidence. But from such broad open-minded study of all data, valid conclusions can be drawn.

My conclusions in 1988 were built on a wide range of inputs from basic physics, planetary studies, observations of on-going changes, and climate models. The evidence was strong enough that I could say it was time to “stop waffling.” I was sure that time would bring the scientific community to a similar consensus, as it has.

While international recognition of global warming was swift, actions have faltered. The U.S. refused to place limits on its emissions, and developing countries such as China and India rapidly increased their emissions.

What is at stake? Warming so far, about two degrees Fahrenheit over land areas, seems almost innocuous, being less than day-to-day weather fluctuations. But more warming is already “in-the-pipeline,” delayed only by the great inertia of the world ocean. And climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Elements of a “perfect storm”, a global cataclysm, are assembled.

Climate can reach points such that amplifying feedbacks spur large rapid changes. Arctic sea ice is a current example. Global warming initiated sea ice melt, exposing darker ocean that absorbs more sunlight, melting more ice. As a result, without any additional greenhouse gases, the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the summer.

More ominous tipping points loom. West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are vulnerable to even small additional warming. These two-mile-thick behemoths respond slowly at first, but if disintegration gets well underway it will become unstoppable. Debate among scientists is only about how much sea level would rise by a given date. In my opinion, if emissions follow a business-as-usual scenario, sea level rise of at least two meters is likely this century. Hundreds of millions of people would become refugees. No stable shoreline would be reestablished in any time frame that humanity can conceive.

Animal and plant species are already stressed by climate change. Polar and alpine species will be pushed off the planet, if warming continues. Other species attempt to migrate, but as some are extinguished their interdependencies can cause ecosystem collapse. Mass extinctions, of more than half the species on the planet, have occurred several times when the Earth warmed as much as expected if greenhouse gases continue to increase. Biodiversity recovered, but it required hundreds of thousands of years.

The disturbing conclusion, documented in a paper I have written with several of the world’s leading climate experts, is that the safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is no more than 350 ppm (parts per million) and it may be less. Carbon dioxide amount is already 385 ppm and rising about 2 ppm per year. Stunning corollary: the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation.

These conclusions are based on paleoclimate data showing how the Earth responded to past levels of greenhouse gases and on observations showing how the world is responding to today’s carbon dioxide amount. The consequences of continued increase of greenhouse gases extend far beyond extermination of species and future sea level rise.

Arid subtropical climate zones are expanding poleward. Already an average expansion of about 250 miles has occurred, affecting the southern United States, the Mediterranean region, Australia and southern Africa. Forest fires and drying-up of lakes will increase further unless carbon dioxide growth is halted and reversed.

Mountain glaciers are the source of fresh water for hundreds of millions of people. These glaciers are receding world-wide, in the Himalayas, Andes and Rocky Mountains. They will disappear, leaving their rivers as trickles in late summer and fall, unless the growth of carbon dioxide is reversed.

Coral reefs, the rainforest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species in the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid.

Such phenomena, including the instability of Arctic sea ice and the great ice sheets at today’s carbon dioxide amount, show that we have already gone too far. We must draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide to preserve the planet we know. A level of no more than 350 ppm is still feasible, with the help of reforestation and improved agricultural practices, but just barely – time is running out.

Requirements to halt carbon dioxide growth follow from the size of fossil carbon reservoirs. Coal towers over oil and gas. Phase out of coal use except where the carbon is captured and stored below ground is the primary requirement for solving global warming.

Oil is used in vehicles where it is impractical to capture the carbon. But oil is running out. To preserve our planet we must also ensure that the next mobile energy source is not obtained by squeezing oil from coal, tar shale or other fossil fuels.

Fossil fuel reservoirs are finite, which is the main reason that prices are rising. We must move beyond fossil fuels eventually. Solution of the climate problem requires that we move to carbon-free energy promptly.

Special interests have blocked transition to our renewable energy future. Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming.

CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

Conviction of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal CEOs will be no consolation, if we pass on a runaway climate to our children. Humanity would be impoverished by ravages of continually shifting shorelines and intensification of regional climate extremes. Loss of countless species would leave a more desolate planet.

If politicians remain at loggerheads, citizens must lead. We must demand a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. We must block fossil fuel interests who aim to squeeze every last drop of oil from public lands, off-shore, and wilderness areas. Those last drops are no solution. They yield continued exorbitant profits for a short-sighted self-serving industry, but no alleviation of our addiction or long-term energy source.

Moving from fossil fuels to clean energy is challenging, yet transformative in ways that will be welcomed. Cheap, subsidized fossil fuels engendered bad habits. We import food from halfway around the world, for example, even with healthier products available from nearby fields. Local produce would be competitive if not for fossil fuel subsidies and the fact that climate change damages and costs, due to fossil fuels, are also borne by the public.

A price on emissions that cause harm is essential. Yes, a carbon tax. Carbon tax with 100 percent dividend is needed to wean us off fossil fuel addiction. Tax and dividend allows the marketplace, not politicians, to make investment decisions.

Carbon tax on coal, oil and gas is simple, applied at the first point of sale or port of entry. The entire tax must be returned to the public, an equal amount to each adult, a half-share for children. This dividend can be deposited monthly in an individual’s bank account.

Carbon tax with 100 percent dividend is non-regressive. On the contrary, you can bet that low and middle income people will find ways to limit their carbon tax and come out ahead. Profligate energy users will have to pay for their excesses.

Demand for low-carbon high-efficiency products will spur innovation, making our products more competitive on international markets. Carbon emissions will plummet as energy efficiency and renewable energies grow rapidly. Black soot, mercury and other fossil fuel emissions will decline. A brighter, cleaner future, with energy independence, is possible.
Washington likes to spend our tax money line-by-line. Swarms of high-priced lobbyists in alligator shoes help Congress decide where to spend, and in turn the lobbyists’ clients provide “campaign” money.

The public must send a message to Washington. Preserve our planet, creation, for our children and grandchildren, but do not use that as an excuse for more tax-and-spend. Let this be our motto: “One hundred percent dividend or fight!”

The next President must make a national low-loss electric grid an imperative. It will allow dispersed renewable energies to supplant fossil fuels for power generation. Technology exists for direct-current high-voltage buried transmission lines. Trunk lines can be completed in less than a decade and expanded analogous to interstate highways.
Government must also change utility regulations so that profits do not depend on selling ever more energy, but instead increase with efficiency. Building code and vehicle efficiency requirements must be improved and put on a path toward carbon neutrality.

The fossil-industry maintains its strangle-hold on Washington via demagoguery, using China and other developing nations as scapegoats to rationalize inaction. In fact, we produced most of the excess carbon in the air today, and it is to our advantage as a nation to move smartly in developing ways to reduce emissions. As with the ozone problem, developing countries can be allowed limited extra time to reduce emissions. They will cooperate: they have much to lose from climate change and much to gain from clean air and reduced dependence on fossil fuels.
We must establish fair agreements with other countries. However, our own tax and dividend should start immediately. We have much to gain from it as a nation, and other countries will copy our success. If necessary, import duties on products from uncooperative countries can level the playing field, with the import tax added to the dividend pool.

Democracy works, but sometimes churns slowly. Time is short. The 2008 election is critical for the planet. If Americans turn out to pasture the most brontosaurian congressmen, if Washington adapts to address climate change, our children and grandchildren can still hold great expectations.

New Hansen paper strikes alarm

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/22/sea-level-rise-james-hansen-climate-change-scientist

A jury of their peers...

I posted this whole article because I thought it was very interesting. If a jury trial in the UK can reach a verdict like this, then it won't be long until a similar action is tried in this country. Whether or not it would have the same result is highly questionable, because a UK jury would be much more likely to be educated about climate change. But someone will almost certainly try.

From the Guardian article posted here

A Greenpeace activist abseils down the Kingsnorth power station in October 2007. Photograph Will Rose/Greenpeace

Six Greenpeace climate change activists have been cleared of causing £30,000 of criminal damage at a coal-fired power station in a verdict that is expected to embarrass the government and lead to more direct action protests against energy companies.

The jury of nine men and three women at Maidstone crown court cleared the six by a majority verdict. Five of the protesters had scaled a 200-metre chimney at Kingsnorth power station, Hoo, Kent, in October last year.

Greenpeace activists on the painted chimney October 8 2008. Photograph: Will Rose/Greenpeace

The activists admitted trying to shut down the station by occupying the smokestack and painting the word "Gordon" down the chimney, but argued that they were legally justified because they were trying to prevent climate change causing greater damage to property around the world. It was the first case in which preventing property damage caused by climate change had been used as part of a "lawful excuse" defence in court. It is now expected to be used more widely by environment groups.

In his summing-up at the end of an eight-day trial, the judge, David Caddick, said the case centred on whether or not the protesters had a lawful excuse for their actions. He told the jury that for this defence to be used it had to be proved that the action was due to an immediate need to protect property belonging to another.

He said allowance for demonstrations did not extend to breaking the law and the jury's task was to examine the boundary line represented by the lawful excuse and to evaluate whether the defendants had crossed the line. He also warned the jury to put aside any feelings towards Greenpeace, climate change or fuel companies during their deliberations.

John Price, prosecuting, had earlier argued that the protesters' actions were "not capable of being lawful". He said: "There are things you can lawfully do in making a protest but there's a line which has to be drawn. When the defendants caused damage to that chimney, it's the line that they crossed."

The court had heard from Professor Jim Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, that the 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted daily by Kingsnorth could be responsible for the extinction of up to 400 species. Hansen, a Nasa director who advises Al Gore, the former US presidential candidate turned climate change campaigner, told the court that humanity was in "grave peril". "Somebody needs to step forward and say there has to be a moratorium, draw a line in the sand and say no more coal-fired power stations."

It also heard David Cameron's environment adviser, millionaire environmentalist Zac Goldsmith, and an Inuit leader from Greenland both say climate change was already seriously affecting life around the world. Goldsmith told the court: "By building a coal-power plant in this country, it makes it very much harder [to exert] pressure on countries like China and India" to reduce their burgeoning use of the fossil fuel.

The court was told that some of the property in immediate need of protection included parts of Kent at risk from rising sea levels, the Pacific island state of Tuvalu and areas of Greenland. The defendants also cited the Arctic ice sheet, China's Yellow River region, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica, coastal areas of Bangladesh and the city of New Orleans.

The jury was told that Kingsnorth emitted the same amount of carbon dioxide as the 30 least polluting countries in the world combined - and that there were advanced plans to build a new coal-fired power station next to the existing site on the Hoo peninsula.

Greenpeace used the court's decision to put pressure on the government to abandon plans for a new generation of coal-fired plants. "Today's acquittal is a potent challenge to the government's plans for new coal-fired stations from jurors representing ordinary people in Britain who, after hearing the evidence, supported the right to take direct action in order to protect the climate," said Ben Stewart, the group's communications director and one of the six acquitted. The others were Will Rose, Kevin Drake, Tim Hewke, Huw Williams and Emily Hall.

"It wasn't only us in the dock, it was coal-fired power generation as well," said Hall. "The only people left in Britain who think new coal is a good idea are business secretary John Hutton and the energy minister Malcolm Wicks. It's time the prime minister stepped in and embraced a clean energy future for Britain."

Jim Hansen pre-emptively bombs Copenhagen

Copenhagen climate conference
Copenhagen climate change talks must fail, says top scientist

Exclusive: World's leading climate change expert says summit talks so flawed that deal would be a disaster

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/02/copenhagen-climate-change-james-hansen

I might have expected this, although I wouldn't have guessed it would make the front page.

I'm not sure Jim is right about the politics.

I am sure he's right about the science.

Including trading. Although I helped pioneer some fairly creative uses of offsets in Maine (bundling Maine Housing energy efficiency improvements to gain offset income), that was perhaps hypocritical on my part because I've never really believed a trading regime would work that well in large scale. The main reason I wanted the offsets was because they were required for us by the ACUPCC, and was durned if I was going to pay for traffic lights in Portland Oregon, which was what another Maine college chose to do.

In this case, though, I think we need to get our first international climate agreement behind us. Climate treaty policy is going to be for the first decades of the 21st century what the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trades (GATT) was for the last of the 20th century, all high level negotiations that set the terms of the balance of trading power throughout the world, and like the many rounds of the GATT, we need to get in the habit of having one.

There's another article that's interesting, too, an editorial by Sachs, headlined "Time to let the experts lead."

I liked his paragraph summary of what serious climate problem solving looks like:

"Here, then, is a proposal for the post-Copenhagen attempt to square up national and global policies so they add up to something more than more years of empty promises. Let's start by recognising that most of the human-made crisis emerges from a few pivotal human activities: how and what we grow to eat; how we mobilise and distribute energy; how we transport ourselves and our freight; and how we build our buildings and lay out our cities. Each related sector requires its own intensive strategy – to identify the kind of research and development activities, public infrastructure investments and public policy to accompany a positive price on carbon emissions, through permits or taxes. Countries would have a lot to share – for instance in new technological options – and a lot that would distinguish them, according to geography, resource base, development level, and more."

And


"...Copenhagen should be the end of negotiation by politicians with technical issues kept in the shadows or ignored. Let's get scientists, engineers and ordinary citizens involved in a true discussion about our common future, and especially the tradeoffs, costs and choices. Together we can prove that our world is still capable of reaching long-range agreements when our children's lives and wellbeing hang in the balance."

PLIOMAX and other analogs

PLIOMAX: the international effort to determine the Pliocene sea level highstand, has its landing page linked below. This is an example of an effort to explore climate "analogs" in order to determine key parameters of global change in the next few decades and centuries. An analog might be a geological era or event that offers a good guide to the planet's behavior under similar conditions of forcing and coupled circulation.

You may remember that Hansen et al 2016 depended heavily on the Eemian analog for sea level rise and the future of the WAIS. Analogs stand in some contrast and/or tension with models, both GCMs and Ice Sheet Models. This was carefully expressed in Hansen et al 2016.

http://pliomax.weebly.com/outreach.html

The video we watched is here, and there are a couple other good ones below.

Methane on the uptick

The market may have gone down, way down, to be followed by a period of volatility, but atmospheric methane is going up, after a period of relative stability. This according to Matthew Rigby and Ronald Prinn of MIT.

This is important because it relates to Jim Hansen's (and others') working hypothesis that even a small rise in average annual temperature puts us within closer reach of various possible/hypothetical climate system tipping points than otherwise thought.

One tipping point might be northern hemisphere methane release. Not methane clathrates. (Those are even scarier, almost too scary to think about.) Just plain old bacterial methane from anearobic decomposition in actic and subarctic soils, particularly wet soils, peats, and pond and lake sediments.

AAT increases (the theory goes), heating up northern landscapes more typically too cold or frozen to decompose very fast. But the nutrients, bacteria and moisture are all there, primed and ready to go. Decomposition increases, releasing more methane, increasing AAT.

Rinse and repeat. Otherwise known as feedback. "Feedback can lead to exponential change," I teach my students, and then show them how, ad nauseum, with model after model in Stella ®.

(Even then, most don't get it. Ordinarily, even when taught well, and over and over, many people fail to understand exponential feedback.)

If atmospheric methane is increasing as stated in this new paper (very likely), then it has to come from somewhere. Most likely it comes from the warm Siberian summer of 2007.

Not good. A tipping point like this could ruin your pension plans even more effectively than the current market problems. The methane numbers bear watching closely for a few years. We should all cross our fingers and hope it's just stochastic, an anomaly.

There's a potential tipping point in my career as a climate mitigation academic too. At some point I would have to give up, and start teaching climate emergency management and climate change adaptation. And get busy adapting myself. (As if Aimee and I haven't really been doing that for years with our farming, gardening, forestry and building experiments.)

Abrupt climate change of the speed and effect envisaged by Hansen and others will create a new feedback loop in the climate system, or more correctly change the (mathematical) sign and direction of an old one, by effectively reducing our ability to feed, water, clothe, shelter, house, and keep safe some large portion of the human population.

Emissions from human sources will go down as a result, but it won't be a good thing, and it will be far too late. Unplanned, unreasonable, and distinctly uncivilized. Once out of balance, the global climate system could stay out of balance for quite a while.

Those governments that remain viable will be stretched to the limit.

The question is, in such a scenario, how quickly would we need to adapt, and in what sectors? The answer is, quickly, and in almost all sectors. A thought experiment might be helpful here. Taking the 2001 New England Regional Assessment as our baseline (essentially 6-10 degrees F of regional AAT increase by 2100), a tipping point that accelerated this rate of regional AAT increase by an order of magnitude would require Maine to adopt forestry, agriculture, fisheries, housing, extreme weather, and disease control strategies more like Virginia's or Georgia's before 2020.

This is assuming that there are no other system perturbations or tipping points down the road after the first. Just a more rapid AAT rise than currently predicted.

Sea level rise would lag, giving us a few years to cope there. That would be a blessing. but within a century, instead of a millenium, Jackson, Maine would be a peninsula or an island and Unity College would be the environmental college next to the Atlantic. Assuming there was anything left to teach.

I tend to think there would be. I think Maine could survive this with a democratic civil society intact. Assuming that we don't encounter major security concerns because of threats from countries who are less able to adapt.

Evidence for this: My parents and grandparents collectively survived WWI, the Great Depression, and WWII. They survived, and I survived, the Cold War, the socialist Britain of 1945-1979, the Maggie Thatcher capitalist Britain of 1979 to the present. I survived and adapted to this very different American culture. In my small experience, people are surprisingly adaptable. The twentieth century demonstrates this admirably, even in the case study of my small family.

Of course, other countries, and other people, did not do so well adapting to and surviving the period 1914 to 2000.

In the event of a tipping point, the 21st century will look politically a lot like the 20th, only worse. And there will be no Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler to blame, only ourselves.

UK commits to "clean coal"

The UK government, after many years of wavering, has decided to sequester carbon from its new generation of coal-fired power stations.

This issue has a huge history, some fo which is personal to me. The UK coal fields were deliberately and shamefully run down by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. She was willing to sacrifice the entire industry to break the back of organized labor in the UK, and so undermine the Labour Party. That and Greenham Common forced me to leave UK government employment in 1985, in protest at Thatcher's policies. (It's a long story.)

Labour fought back, primarily on the issue of supporting nationalized health care, another Thatcherite target, and has been in power since 1992, but without as clear a connection to the unions. Labour today is in many ways just another European social democratic party, and in fact more right wing than it's French or German equivalents, more like the US Democratic Party.

Labour takes climate change serously, but they previously couldn't commit to the huge expense of sequestration. Neither, it seems, could they withstand the protests from coalfield representatives, and worries about how to power the islands.

So the Missouri compromise will go ahead, at least partly under the guise of holy Green Stimulus.

It remains to be seen whether sequestration will actually prove cheaper than alternatives for base load power or base load demand reduction, such as nuclear power, third generation offshore wind, pumped storage hydropower, energy efficiency, green building, building retrofit, and smart grids. I tend to think all these prices will equilibriate over time.

But Britain was built on coal. Literally. The coal fields underly such a large part of the island, it's hard to live anywhere that doesn't have at least a disused coalfield close by, within 30-40 miles.

Britan has a lot of expertise too, in major nationalized technology endeavors. Not that these were ever efficient. For the most part they weren't. But they were damnedly competent, in a bloody-mindedly, independently mindedly, British engineering kind of way, damn the torpedoes, fly the Concord, build-our-own jets without US help, have our own private system of nukes, our own cars, trucks busses tractors powerplants combines ships TVs stereos you-name-it.

How we ever afforded a middle class lifestyle with all this R&D expense and duplication is a mystery, but also possibly a subject for theorists of economic multipliers.

British heavy industry designs from the nationalized era, 1945-1979, went out all over the world in the form of ideas, engineering, patents, licenses, and the like. As a Rolls-Royce trained aeroengineer with the RAF, I benefitted from the hard-minded technological competance of this culture through discipline, training and analytic attitudes that I still use daily.

It's just possible that Labour's clean coal push can recover some of this vigor.

I am suspicious of "clean coal" as greenwash for Peabody et al. I lean towards Hansen's position: phase out coal completely. There will certainly have to be verification.

But if British CCS can be made to work, it will be another tool in the expanding base load tool box, one that with the right geology is potentially exportable to China and India.

Now that might solve a very big problem indeed, the problem of how to power China's and India's expansion without destroying the climate for everyone, and success would be well worth the effort.

More power to them. Despite sympathizing with Hansen, I don't think we can afford to rule any solutions out at this point.

Hanson pleas Obama through Holdren

Boy, this climate-advice-to-the-president thing is getting frantic already. In addition to all the missives received through Change.gov and blogs like Andy Revkin's, the buzz about John Holdren on CTR and even TierneyLab, now Hansen has written directly to the president-elect via Holdren, pleading for a moratorium on coal.

If I were Obama, I'd be wondering what to do about all the noise.

Of course, a lot of us think this is the most serious thing in the world right now. So, in my lights, and probably Holdren's and Hansen's, the noise is justified.

Hansen, et al, climate change graphic and paper

This paper and graphic is not required reading just yet, but will be in two to three weeks. (I'm just storing it here for when I need it later. When it finally is required, it will be linked on the right.)

Mick

The paper: (Hansen et al, 2012, Perceptions of Climate Change, PNAS)

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/30/1205276109

The graphic

Editorial from Hansen

(This well-linked editorial appeared in my Guardian this morning. I stole the whole text rather than providing a link because I think more of my students will read it that way.)

Climate change is happening now – a carbon price must follow

The extreme weather events of 2012 are what we have been warning of for 25 years, but the answer is plain to see

Will our short attention span be the end of us? Just a month after the second "storm of a century" in two years, the media moves on to the latest scandal with barely a retrospective glance at the implications of the extreme climate anomalies we have seen.

Hurricane Sandy was not just a storm. It was a stark illustration of the power that climate change can deliver – today – to our doorsteps.

Ask the homeowners along the New Jersey and New York shores still homeless. Ask the local governments struggling weeks later to turn on power to their cold, darkened towns and cities. Ask the entire north-east coast, reeling from a catastrophe whose cost is estimated at $50bn and rising. (I am not brave enough to ask those who've lost husbands or wives, children or grandparents).
I bring up these facts sadly, as one who has urged us to heed the scientific evidence on climate change for the past 25 years. The science is clear: climate change is here, now.

Superstorm Sandy is not the first storm, and certainly won't be the last. Still, it is hard for us as individual human beings to connect the dots. That's where observation, data and scientific analysis help us see.

No credible scientist disputes that we have warmed our climate by almost 1.5C over land areas in the past century, most of that in the past 30 years.

As my colleagues and I demonstrated in a peer-reviewed study published this summer, climate extremes are already occurring much more frequently in the world we have warmed through our reliance on fossil fuels.

Our analysis showed that extreme summer heat anomalies used to be infrequent: covering only 0.1-0.2% of the globe in any given summer during the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. During the past decade, as the average global temperature rose, such extremes have covered 10% of the land.

Extreme temperatures deliver more than heat.

The water cycle is especially sensitive to rising temperatures. Increased heat speeds up evaporation, causing more extreme droughts, like the $5bn (and counting) drought in Texas and Oklahoma. It is linked to an expanding wildfire season and an increase by several fold in the frequency of large fires in the American west.

The heat also leads to more extreme sea surface temperatures – a key culprit behind Sandy's devastating force. The latent heat in atmospheric water vapour is the fuel that powers tornadoes, thunderstorms, and hurricanes. Stepping up evaporation with warmer temperatures is like stepping on the gas: More energy-rich vapour condenses into water drops, releasing more latent heat as it does so, causing more powerful storms, increased rainfall and more extreme flooding. This is not a matter of belief. This is high-school science class.

The chances of getting a late October hurricane in New York without the help of global warming are extremely small. In that sense, you can blame Sandy on global warming. Sandy was the strongest recorded storm, measured by barometric pressure, to make landfall north of Cape Hatteras, eclipsing the hurricane of 1938.

But this fixation on determining the blame for a particular storm, or disputing the causal link between climate change and this or that storm, is misguided.

A better path forward means listening to the growing chorus – Sandy, extreme droughts and wildfires, intense rainstorms, record-breaking melting of Arctic sea ice – and taking action. Think of it like taking out an insurance policy for the planet.

We can fix this. The answer is a price on carbon. We must make the price of fossil fuels honest, reflecting their cost to society including the economic devastation wrought by storms like Sandy, the toll on farmland and ecosystems, as well as priceless human lives.

Whether that price takes the shape of a carbon tax, as some in Washington are now willing to discuss, or a carbon fee, as I have advocated, a price on carbon lets the market find the most effective ways to phase out our reliance on fossil fuels. It also moves us to a sustainable energy future where energy choices are made by individuals and communities, not by Washington mandates and lobbyists.
A carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, will increase consumer costs. So the money that is collected should be distributed to the public. As people try to minimise their energy costs to keep money for other things, their actions will stimulate the economy, drive innovations and transition us away from fossil fuels.

If we make our demand for action clear enough, I am optimistic that our leaders in Washington can look beyond the short-term challenges of today to see the looming, long-term threats ahead, and the answer that is right in front of them. We can't simply allow the next news cycle to distract us from the real task ahead.

Back in the 1980s, I introduced the concept of "climate dice" to make clear the difference between natural variability and climate-change driven extremes. As I predicted, the climate dice in the 21st century are now "loaded". It's not just bad luck Sandy pummelled America's coasts, extreme drought devastated its midlands and wildfires scorched its mountains.

We loaded the dice. We changed our climate.

• James E Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies