Politics – Page 134 – a sibilant intake of breath

Johnny Appleseed and our present predicament

The first version of the song ‘Johnny Appleseed‘ I learned was the secularized version, in which Appleseed thanks ‘the Earth’ for giving him the things he needs: “the sun, and the rain, and the appleseed.” He concludes that “the Earth is good to [him].”

Later, I learned that this is a stripped-down version of a Christian song about ‘the Lord’ being good to Appleseed. I can understand why this song wasn’t sung at the province-run Outdoor School I briefly visited, but I have to say in retrospect that it makes more sense. It is at least internally coherent to thank a conscious, benevolent entity for giving you things you need. By contrast, it makes very little sense to thank ‘the Earth’ for anything. The Earth is a 5.97 x 10^24 kg ball of iron that has existed for about 4.54 billion years. For most of its history, it would not have been at all hospitable to Appleseed, or any other human.

Indeed, for most of its remaining history, Earth is likely to be terribly hostile to human beings. The carbon cycle may cease, when erosion overcomes volcanoes, killing everything. The sun may become a red giant, burning away the oceans and atmosphere. Much sooner than either of those, human beings may kick off a runaway greenhouse effect, killing ourselves and maybe even all life.

That is the rub. In this day and age, we shouldn’t be thanking the uncaring Earth for bounty. We should be thanking other human beings for not quite killing us yet, often despite their best efforts to destabilize the climate, kill off species, and poison the air and water. The dangerous implication of the thin-soup version of Johnny Appleseed is that the planet itself somehow determines whether or not any particular person gets the things they need. This is demonstrably less and less true.

In conclusion, it is increasingly pointless to thank or condemn any abstract entity for what happens to people. To an ever-greater extent, what happens to people depends on what those people and other people decide to do. As a result, libertarianism is dead, and we really need to learn how to live together.

When a cap-and-trade system stops biting

The relative merits of cap-and-trade versus a carbon tax for pricing carbon have been discussed here before. One characteristic that was not mentioned, and which is a blow against cap-and-trade, has to do with incentives to go beyond the minimum. Specifically, when the government sets a cap and auctions permits, you can be pretty sure the actual level of emissions will not fall lower than the cap. If it did, the market price for permits would plummet and people would rush in to buy the right to pollute.

A carbon tax wouldn’t have this problem, since people would be paying for every tonne of emissions, regardless of where the whole country was relative to the target. Also, a cap-and-trade system could probably be designed in a way that eliminates or eliminates this problem. For instance, the government could mandate a price floor, below which point permits are automatically withdrawn from sale.

Personally, I think it is possible to design either system well. It would also be possible to use an alternative cap-and-dividend or fee-and-dividend system, with automatic recycling of revenues. The key thing is to put a price on carbon domestically, and do so in a way that can eventually be integrated with systems elsewhere. By itself, carbon pricing won’t be enough. The volume of coal and unconventional fossil fuels out there makes them too dangerous to allow continued growing use. Before carbon prices, I would be happier to see both developed and developing states adopt moratoriums on new coal-fired facilities, except perhaps those that actually capture and store the great majority of their greenhouse gas emissions.

Rebutting Wente

Writing in The Globe and Mail, World Wildlife Fund President Gerald Butts has done a good job of expressing what is and is not important about the recent errors in IPCC reports that have gotten so much attention and rekindled the fires of the climate change denier community:

Yes, some scientists showed poor judgment in private e-mail exchanges later hacked and made public. Yes, some errors in fact and incomplete citations have been found in the IPCC’s 1,000-page reports. That said, even scientists who have criticized the IPCC agree that anthropogenic climate change is both a fact and an urgent threat to the planet.

All independent reviews undertaken so far (by The Associated Press, the University of Michigan and The Economist, for example) agree that none of the stolen e-mails or errors bring into question the science supporting climate change. To conclude otherwise is to misunderstand the process and power of science, and to dismiss the need to draw on the best available evidence and consensus to guide national policies.

Science is not a cold body of facts, but an organized system of inquiry, discovery, evaluation and learning. Science not only welcomes the correction of errors, its key attribute is that it is self-correcting over time. As new research arises, old hypotheses gain or lose support. While this process never stops, generally accepted conclusions do accumulate, based on the overwhelming weight of evidence. The fact and threat of anthropogenic climate change are clearly among those conclusions.

It is encouraging to see such an effective rebuttal printed to Margaret Wente’s misleading recent column, though it remains dispiriting that The Globe and Mail is still happy to give a platform to people as irresponsible and scientifically illiterate as Wente and Rex Murphy. Wente’s column is a prime example of a position that – on first glance – appears prudent, in suggesting that we shouldn’t take serious action while there still seem to be scientific uncertainties about climate. Unfortunately, the known characteristics of the climate system make this position irresponsible. The full effect of emissions today will take decades to fully manifest, and the climate system has the capacity to amplify small changes into much larger outcomes. What we know about the history and character of Earth’s climate tells us we need to take action now, not at some future point when the faulty claims of deniers have finally been deflated in the eyes of the public.

I suspect that, a few decades from now, people will be puzzled about why we were so unable to separate signal from noise, when it came to hearing what scientists were saying about climate change. Part of that is surely the result of actions taken in bad faith by those seeking to prevent policy action (people quite capable of exploiting the peculiar phenomenon that arise at the intersection of science and the media). That said, much of the explanation has to lie with the complacency of a public happy to hear that no action is required at the moment, no matter how thin the credibility of those making this announcement.

Another shot at shutting down InSite

Disappointingly, the federal government is going to the Supreme Court to try to shut down InSite – Vancouver’s safe injection site (mentioned here before). It seems astonishing to me that any government would want to emulate the hard anti-drug stance embraced in the United States, given the extent to which drug prohibition has wrecked their justice system. It defies both evidence and logic to suggest that the proper response to drug use is to lock up the people doing it.

Here’s hoping the Supreme Court rules that facilities of this sort are permissible, given the proven success of harm reduction programs in diminishing the negative effects of drug addiction. Giving InSite a clear legal mandate to exist could encourage the emergence of similar programs in other areas where drug problems are a major concern.

[Update: 10 February 2010] There is a good post about InSite and the Conservative government over on Knitnut: Ideology trumps evidence: Conservative drug policy.

Cash versus goods donations

Over on the RedCrossBlog, Claire Durham has an interesting post on why non-cash donations are unhelpful. It seems important, given the continued willingness of people to send things that are less than useful, expensive to transport, and liable to jam up logistical systems. Providing some guidance to those trying to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti also makes sense at this time.

As an example of how non-cash donations can be useless or even harmful, Durham highlights how donated pharmaceuticals often end up being worse than useless:

Drugs that are not required, those that have expired or have no expiry date have to be destroyed. Incineration is preferred as this prevents the hazard of land filled medicines contaminating water supplies or drugs being collected and sold on the black market. In Eritrea after the war of independence, seven truckloads of expired aspirin took six months to burn. The real tragedy is the cost of this process. In the Venezuela floods in 2000, seventy percent of donated pharmaceuticals had to be destroyed. To be able to cover this cost, a support line to provide psychological support to the survivors had to be shut down.

None of this is overly surprising. The chaotic and uncoordinated efforts of the general population, being undertaken after a disaster has occurred, is no substitute for the strategic pre-positioning of plans and resources. In addition, longer-term planning allows for greater standardization (easing training difficulties), cost effectiveness, and the matching of goods to local tastes and needs. Providing regular funding to professional organization with the skills to do this well is probably the single best thing ordinary people can do to lessen the human suffering that accompanies disasters.

Climate change and animal migrations

In the wake of recent scandals in climate science, many people seem to have forgotten that unambiguous evidence for climate change is everywhere: including in the changing locations of species. The locations of thousands of species have been tracked, including plants, animals, and insects. Since 1950, they have been moving northward at a rate of about 6.5 kilometres per decade. Meanwhile, the lines denoting regions with a given temperature range (isotherms) have been shifting north at 56 km per decade. Gardeners and birdwatchers can tell you that the climate is changing.

A colony of Galapagos sea lions have migrated 1,500 km. Meanwhile, other plants and animals are moving poleward and uphill. When species get pushed to the edges of continents or the top of mountains, they will be in grave danger. Likewise, when animals are forced to move northward faster than the plants they depend on can do so, it strains food webs.

Say what you will about the personal conduct of climate scientists, the evidence of a changing climate is everywhere. Hopefully, human beings will understand this and begin to curb it before too many species are pushed to the wall, and before our own becomes too threatened.

What Republicans believe

The Daily Kos has an interesting post up, with results from a survey of 2,000 self-identified Republicans in the United States.

Many of the statistics are depressing. Only 42% of those surveyed are confident that Barack Obama was born in the US. 24% think he “wants the terrorists to win.” 53% think Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president. There is plenty more homophobia, anti-science sentiment, and so forth.

Unfortunately, there don’t seem to have been any questions about climate change, or the environment in general. The results certainly suggest that conspiracy theories play a significant role in US public opinion.

Storms of My Grandchildren

Writer Robert Pool has defined a ‘witness’ as “someone who believes he has information so important that he cannot keep silent.” In the preface to his book, Storms of My Grandchildren, climatologist James Hansen identifies himself using the term. It is truly worrisome to be living in an age when such a prominent climate scientist sees his role in this way – and sees himself as having uncovered information of such importance that he cannot remain an adviser on the political sidelines. Storms of My Grandchildren is the most frightening thing I have ever read, and may end up being one of the most important.

James Hansen explains why we know as much as we do about the climate: not from computerized climate models, but from the evidence of climatic history laid down in ice cores and sediments. The story they tell is one of a dynamic system capable of amplifying small initial changes, and one in which rapid swings have taken place. Hansen identifies the greatest risks from climate change as the destabilization of ice sheets and the loss of biodiversity accompanying the many effects of climate change. On sea level rise, he explains:

If humanity burns most of the fossil fuels, doubling or tripling the preindustrial carbon dioxide level, Earth will surely head toward the ice-free condition, with sea level 75 meters (250 feet) higher than today. It is difficult to say how long it will take for the melting to be complete, but once ice sheet disintegration gets well under way, it will be impossible to stop. (p. 160 hardcover)

Hansen also highlights how positive feedback effects could lead to a runaway climate change scenario, and how the methane locked up in permafrost and methane clathrates has the potential to stack a second gigantic warming on top of the anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming, in the event they ever substantially melt:

[T]he world, humanity, has reached a fork in the road; we are faced with a choice of potential paths for the future. One path has global fossil fuel emissions declining at a pace, dictated by what the science is telling us, that defuses the amplifying feedbacks and stabilizes climate. The other path is more or less business as usual, in which case amplifying feedbacks are expected to come into play and climate change will begin to spin out of our control. (p. 120 hardcover)

In the most extreme case, in which all coal and unconventional oil and gas are burned, the stacked-up positive feedbacks could be sufficient to boil away the oceans, eventually leaving Earth in a state similar to that now inhabited by Venus, a planet formerly adorned with liquid water before a brightening sun induced runaway climate change there.

In addition to the scientific story, Hansen tells some of his own: about the censorship he witnessed at NASA, about his recent civil disobedience actions against mountaintop removal coal mining, about is perceptions of American politics, and about the grandchildren whose prospects have left him so concerned. Sometimes, these asides can seem secondary to the main thrust of the book, though they do underscore the extent to which this is an impassioned personal plea, not a technical scientific assessment. The insight into the scientific process and the operation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are also interesting.

The most dubious part of the book may be Hansen’s optimism for fourth-generation fast breeder reactors. He highlights their possible advantages, namely in terms of stretching our uranium fuel supplies, but doesn’t give serious consideration to the practical and economic issues with a massive nuclear deployment. He is also overly pessimistic about renewable forms of energy. I would recommend that he take a look at David Mackay’s excellent book on different routes to a zero-carbon energy future. People who read Hansen’s book may also be well-advised to do so.

Hansen makes some key points about climate policy: notably, that emissions targets and cap-and-trade schemes are meaningless, if governments continue to allow coal use and the exploitation of unconventional oil and gas to continue. Those are the fuels that contain enough carbon to threaten all life on Earth; meaningful climate policy must, among other things, ensure that they remain underground. As an alternative to cap-and-trade schemes that are potentially open to manipulation and which offer no incentive to cut faster than prescribed by the cap, Hansen endorses a fee and dividend system where a tax is applied to all fossil fuels at the point of production or import. His overall view is not so different from the fantasy climate change policy I wrote earlier, though I hadn’t been fully aware of all the risks Hansen enumerates when I wrote it.

In the end, Hansen has provided as clear and compelling a warning as anybody could ask for. We are putting the planet in peril and endangering the lives and prospects of future generations in a deeply immoral way. Governments are misleading people with the sense that they are handling the problem when, in reality, even states taking climate change seriously are doing nowhere near enough to ensure that catastrophic or runaway climate change goes not occur. We need to change the energy basis of our society, and keep the carbon in coal and unconventional fossil fuels in the ground. In so doing, we may be able to stop the warming we are inducing, before it generates the devastating feedbacks that are the key message of Hansen’s book.

Those interested in reading this book should consider taking me up on my offer for a free copy. For those unwilling to commit the time to go through a 275-page book, Hansen has a more concise presentation online in PDF form.

Partly prompted by this book, I am in the middle of starting up a new personal project, intended to help with the planet-wide coal phaseout that is necessary. I will make more information on it public, once it is developed further.

[16 February 2010] Now that I have a fuller understanding of the importance of not burning coal and unconventional fossil fuels, because of their cumulative climatic impact, I have launched a group blog on the topic: BuryCoal.com. Please consider having a look or contributing.

Tackling coal emissions

Speaking of taking action against climate change, a strong case can be made that the single most important thing we can do to reduce the chances of catastrophic climate change is to phase out coal. Coal is the one fossil fuel that is definitely abundant enough to cause catastrophic climate change. As such, we need to:

Prevent the construction of new coal plants that emit carbon dioxide, including in the developing world
Convert existing coal plants to run on biomass, greatly reducing their net climate impact
Encourage the early shutdown of existing coal facilities, partly through a carbon price
If possible, develop carbon capture and storage technologies

What actions can we as individuals undertake to advance the decline of emissions-intensive coal, both in Canada and around the world?

Is runaway climate change possible? Hansen’s take

Back in 2008, I wrote about whether ‘runaway’ climate change might be possible on Earth. At one point, Venus had liquid water on its surface. Then, the sun grew brighter and Venus warmed. Its oceans evaporated and huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) got baked out of the crust. The heat made the water break up into hydrogen and oxygen: the oxygen bonded with carbon to make more CO2, and much of the hydrogen escaped into space. Venus became permanently hostile to life, with surface temperatures of 450°C.

Could burning all of Earth’s fossil fuels produce the same outcome?

Some people take comfort from the fact that there have been times in the history of the planet when greenhouse gas concentrations were much higher than now. The world was very different, but there was no runaway greenhouse and life endured. James Hansen devotes the entire tenth chapter of Storms of My Grandchildren to considering whether this assessment is valid. Three things give him pause:

The sun is brighter now than it was during past periods with very high greenhouse gas concentrations. The 2% additional brightness corresponds to a forcing of about 4 watts per square metre and is akin to a doubling of CO2 concentrations.
For various reasons, the greenhouse gas concentrations in past hot periods may not have been as high as we thought.
We are introducing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere far more quickly than natural processes ever did. This might cause fast (positive) feedback effects to manifest themselves forcefully, before slower (negative) feedback effects can get going.

He also explains that the sharp warming that took place during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) were not caused by fossil fuels (which remained underground), but rather by the release of methane from permafrost and clathrates. If human emissions warm the planet enough to release that methane again, it could add a PETM-level warming on top of the warming caused by human beings.

Hansen’s conclusions are, frankly, terrifying:

The paleoclimate record does not provide a case with a climate forcing of the magnitude and speed that will occur if fossil fuels are all burned. Models are nowhere near the stage at which they can predict reliably when major ice sheet disintegration will begin. Nor can we say how close we are to methane hydrate instability. But these are questions of when, not if. If we burn all the fossil fuels, the ice sheets almost surely will melt entirely, with the final sea level rise about 75 meters (250 feet), with most of that possibly occurring within a time scale of centuries. Methane hydrates are likely to be more extensive and vulnerable now than they were in the early Cenozoic. It is difficult to imagine how the methane clathrates could survive, once the ocean has had time to warm. In that event a PETM-like warming could be added on top of the fossil fuel warming.

After the ice is gone, would Earth proceed to the Venus syndrome, a runaway greenhouse effect that would destroy all life on the planet, perhaps permanently? While that is difficult to say based on present information, I’ve come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty.

To re-emphasize the point, averting catastrophic or runaway climate change is the most important ethical and political task for those alive now, even if most politicians don’t yet realize it or don’t yet understand what that involves.

That last line also offers something to throw back, next time someone says the billions of dollars of revenue from exploiting the oil sands are simply too valuable to not collect.