The environment – Page 87 – a sibilant intake of breath

Does Canada see the north as a colony?

Writing in The Globe and Mail, Doug Sanders makes the interesting and probably not inaccurate observation that Canada treats the far north like a colony:

We own the Arctic but, unlike most of our northern neighbours, we are not Arctic. Rovaniemi is a serious city of 60,000 people, with a major university, a large airport and important ties to the mainstream of Finnish life. Like the Arctic cities of Tromso, Norway (60,000) and Murmansk, Russia (325,000), it’s a major centre of business, learning and tourism.

So when Canada tried to impress the world’s finance ministers and media with its Arctic identity by holding a summit in Iqaluit, a remote and somewhat inaccessible town of 7,000 just below the Arctic Circle in Nunavut, it didn’t completely work. “It looked like the Canadians had just arrived there – they didn’t seem to know the place any better than we did,” one European official told me.

What those leaders realized, and what Canadians instinctively know, is that we relate to the Arctic not as a part of our identity or culture or traditional economy, but as a foreign, faraway land we happen to control. The Far North is, in short, our colony.

To me, it does seem plausible that both Canadian decision-makers and the Canadian public at large see the north through the twin lenses of romance about the place and excited anticipation about what good things we are going to be able to do with it, once that ice is less of a problem and we can get at the shipping routes and fossil fuel resources.

The profound transformation of the Arctic is now all-but-inevitable, probably to an extent that few people realize. It will be interesting to see whether the inhabitants start taking a stronger and more visible stance once it becomes inescapably obvious that the whole region is being transformed, or whether they will just take that as a given and start scrambling for a share of oil and gas revenues.

Blog on the psychology of denial

Climate Change Denial is a group blog that really impresses me. It is focused on the question of where climate change denial comes from, and why it has been so successful at diminishing public support for effective climate change policies.

One especially good post is about how climate change campaigners may be in denial themselves, about the scope and seriousness of the problem and the difficulty of addressing it in the time we have left.

It is a site I will continue to read with interest.

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.

‘Rotten’ multi-year ice

Because of the tilt of the Earth, the polar regions will always be cold in the winter. What is changing in the Arctic is the amount of ice that can endure through the summer months. Ice that has survived two winters is said to be ‘multiyear’ ice. Because more salt has been forced out from it, it is harder than younger ice. That makes it more durable, as well as a greater hazard to ships. While the decline in the overall extent of Arctic sea ice has been dramatic, the decline in the extent of multiyear ice has been even more so. This animation shows it vanishing over the past 30 years.

Furthermore, at least some scientists believe that most of the melting taking place has been from the bottom, and anecdotal reports from people operating icebreaking ships suggest that the multiyear ice still out there isn’t the same thing as what existed before. It is riddled with brine channels and weaker, and sometimes just consists of a thin layer of young ice covering small chunks of old ice. As such, it is more vulnerable to melting. This weak and vulnerable ice can provide a false impression of strength, when viewed from space. David Barber, Canada’s Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, has explained to Parliament that “we are almost out of multiyear sea ice in the northern hemisphere.”

While the loss of sea ice may be welcome to those seeking a transpolar shipping route, or the chance to drill for oil and gas, it is definitely bad news for the charismatic megafauna with lifestyles critically dependent on sea ice. Seals need it in order to rear their pups, while polar bears need it to hunt seals. The total loss of summer sea ice would probably spell the doom for both species in the wild.

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.

Sea ice monitoring in Canada

I recently had occasion to learn a bit about how the Canadian Ice Service operates: tracking ice and oil slicks in the Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic oceans. They rely on a couple of satellites – RADARSAT I and II – which are primarily synthetic aperture RADAR instruments (though they also passively observe microwave emissions from ice, which are useful for differentiating young ice from the harder multi-year sort). They also have three aircraft to cover gaps between satellite passes, as well as collect evidence of ships discharging oil, for later prosecutions. They are also the ones who put the beacon I mentioned earlier on the ice island that calved from the Petermann Glacier.

As the Arctic continues to lose old ice and summer ice, their role will only become more important. Sea traffic of all sorts is likely to increase, particularly if a trans-polar route opens up in summertime (not through either channel of the Northwest Passage, but straight across the pole) or if major oil and gas discoveries occur in the increasingly clear Arctic ocean.

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.

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.

Latent heat and storms

When energy is used to heat something up, the temperature does not increase smoothly as the energy is put in. Most significantly, this is because causing matter to change states takes energy in itself, above and beyond the energy that goes into warming. Imagine a big block of ice at 0°C. A lot of energy has to go into it before it becomes a pool of water at 0°C. The same is true for turning 100°C water into 100°C steam. Latent heat has been discussed here before.

Because of climate change, the overall trend in global air temperatures is going upward. As anyone who has visited a steam room or had a camera fog up when coming inside on a cold day knows implicitly, warmer air can hold more water. As well as being an important feedback effect (since water vapour is a greenhouse gas), warmer more air-laden water contains more of the latent heat that provides the energy for thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hurricanes. The increase in the average amount of latent heat in a body of air increases the probable strength of future storms, a fact that becomes especially worrisome when you acknowledge how the damage caused by storms increases in a non-linear way. Winds that are 10% faster have a third more destructive potential.

The extra water in the air will also increase the quantity of precipitation and the likelihood of floods. Furthermore, melting ice sheets will cool sea water, increasing the temperature differential between the equatorial and polar regions. This will increase the strength of mid-latitude cyclones, as air currents cooled by melting ice sheets (latent heat, again) collide with ever-warmer masses of air, containing ever-more water. The level of melting in the ice sheets is already significant enough to measure using sensitive gravitational data from satellites like GRACE. Greenland is losing about 100 cubic kilometres of ice per year, while West Antarctica is losing it at a somewhat smaller rate. The ‘wet’ process of ice sheet disintegration suggests that the rate of ice loss could increase dramatically, one the ice sheets are pushed past a critical point by warming.

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.