Warning signs

Rebecca Rosen over at The Atlantic presents a graphic which illustrates the climate crisis in worrying detail:

More from Rosen’s article:

Higher temperatures today are the result of higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide. In 1880, when the study’s temperature record-keeping begins, the concentration of carbon dioxide was 285 parts per million. Today it is more than 390 parts per million and rapidly increasing. Many top climate scientists, including NASA’s James Hansen, have argued that a level not exceeding 350 parts per million is necessary “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.”

The bold was added by me for emphasis as I believe that Mr. Hansen’s words are a succinctly stated warning for us all.

The never-ending negotiations

This editorial cartoon made me smile and nod because it is so true. Climate change negotiators left Durban while patting themselves on the back for their ‘historic achievement.’ If only such an historic achievement were up to the historic challenge that the human species faces in climate change. The world’s nations have agreed to more flapping of the gums while consigning us all to an avoidable fate. May future generations have mercy on us.

Disappointment in Durban

The negotiations seem to be at an impasse in Durban over a new climate change accord. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has stated that a replacement for the Kyoto Accord which expires next year “may be out of reach” and now the chances of an extension of even the Kyoto Accord may be dwindling. This is from The Guardian:

But the global north, responsible for 75% of accumulated CO2 emissions, has made far less substantial pledges than the south, which is least responsible for climate change but whose people are the most at risk. It’s unlikely that India will agree to binding commitments. The issue is a potential deal-breaker.

The EU has linked it to another hypersensitive issue on which Durban could founder, the Kyoto protocol. This imposed a modest 5% emissions cut on the north. Despite some flaws, including an over-reliance on markets, Kyoto differentiates between the north and south’s responsibility for climate change and mandates that the north repay its climate debt.

But Kyoto’s effective, early phase, called “first commitment period”, ends next year. A second period must be negotiated if Kyoto is to survive. Russia, Japan and Canada are vehemently opposed to such an extension, and the US seems to be working quietly to kill Kyoto, which it never ratified.

And that very thin string that holds the sword of Damocles over the world unravels even more…

The consequences of complacency

Some stiff medicine is needed when it comes to the general public’s attitude toward the threat of climate change here in America. And UC Berkeley Scientist Dr. John Harte (JH) seems more than happy to administer it. Here in an interview with Forbes’ Michael Charles Tobias (MT) he pushes back against the unfortunate complacency:

MT: Climate has varied throughout Earth’s history as a result of natural processes — why should we be inordinately concerned about the current warming that our species is currently unleashing/triggering/producing?

JH: This enormous irony, if you will, apparently confuses many of those who deny the findings of climate science or, for other reasons, argue for complacency. First of all, some deniers ask “what’s the big deal with 5 or 10 degrees of warming? We see such changes daily. “

MT: Right, floods in Manhattan, a drought across half the U.S. this Summer; temperatures in Texas exceeding three digits week after week after week. Some people are simply packing their bags and moving to Oregon, or wherever they are betting it’s going to be cooler.

JH: Well, one way to think about that is to note that when earth’s average temperature was just ten degrees cooler in the last ice age, a 300-foot thick ice sheet covered much of North America and Europe!

MT: OK? Go on?

JH: Other deniers argue that Earth has changed that much in the past and life survived. True, but previously, Earth warmed much more slowly than it is now, giving animals and plants many millennia to adapt or migrate through wilderness — wilderness undisturbed by exploding populations of people who now occupy much of the planet’s former natural habitats.

“This is how high the sea is going to get?”

Worst case scenario. A melting of all ice on Earth leading to a sea level rise of 66 meters (or around 217 feet) over the coming centuries. Hundreds of millions have homes today that would be underwater.

Thankfully the current estimate by the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research is for a sea level rise of 1-2 meters (or 3-6 feet) by 2100. But with a current atmospheric concentration of CO2 reaching 391ppm we are well past the point where action on a global scale is urgent to prevent a worst case scenario, right?

And finally, this may be of interest to you, the Union of Concerned Scientists has an interactive map (Climate Hot Map) where you can find out the effects of climate change in your region. The beetle infestations of local forests and the melting of large ice masses at Glacier National Park are among two of the effects of climate change in Montana.

The Heat Waves Cometh

Chris Hedges over at Truthout, appropriately IMHO, continues to ring the climate change alarm bell:

Those who concede that the planet is warming but insist we can learn to live with it are perhaps more dangerous than the buffoons who decide to shut their eyes. It is horrifying enough that the House of Representatives voted 240-184 this spring to defeat a resolution that said that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” But it is not much of an alternative to trust those who insist we can cope with the effects while continuing to burn fossil fuels.

Entering the Anthropocene

The effect of humankind on its environment has been so profound as to mark the beginning of a new geological epoch. Such a statement with its assigning of large fault in human activity with respect to environmental change is at the crux of the argument over the importance and implications of climate change. But what will this new epoch be called? The modern iteration of an ancient primate born during the Holocene epoch has now seen the dawn of the Anthropocene?

Lee Billings over at SEED Magazine reviews:

In 2000, as the green shoots of spring cracked through winter’s icy grip on the northern hemisphere, a letter from the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and his colleague Eugene Stoermer appeared in the news bulletin of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. In it, Crutzen and Stoermer made the case that the Holocene, the geological epoch that had held sway on Earth for the past 12,000 years, was at an end. In its place, with a start date pegged to the late 18th century commercialization of James Watt’s steam engine, was the Anthropocene, an epoch defined by the influence of humanity’s collective actions.

Climate change tipping points and 391PPM

Dr. James Hansen is a personification of the importance of sustained and adequate funding for NASA. Hansen is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the most respected advocates for concerted action to address climate change. In an article with the New Zealand news site, Scoop, Hansen describes and compares the climate change tipping point and the personal tipping point where each of us becomes an activist:

What the science clearly shows, Dr Hansen states, is that we are in an emergency. Such an emergency requires urgent action, but this urgency isn’t present in either public action or government policy.

Dr. Hansen seems to suggest we’ve already passed a critical tipping point with respect to the amount of CO2 already present in the atmosphere:

Hansen suggests that this 350ppm level is a maximum, and that 300-325ppm might be necessary to stabilise ice sheets. Because the current carbon dioxide concentration is 391ppm and still rising, the world is already in the dangerous range, according to Dr Hansen, and we need to take ourselves out of it as quickly as possible if we want to avoid environmental and social collapse. To reach the goal of 350ppm, Dr Hansen says a substantial and continually rising price on carbon emissions is needed. Just slowing down emissions is not enough, though, he says, and this can only mean one thing: most fossil fuels must be kept in the ground. All of our efforts to be green will be in vain if we burn more carbon. In addition to this, Dr Hansen states that we also need to begin drawing down carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, through forest preservation, massive reforestation projects and improved agricultural practices.

Humankind and the next mass extinction

According to a study in the journal Nature the Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the past 540 million years of Earth’s history may be commencing and this time it is driven by the actions of humankind. The numbers:

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Endangered Species contains some 18,000 species currently listed as endangered. Of those almost 2,000 are considered “critically endangered” which means that within three generations their numbers will have dwindled by 80%.

Climate change is not just a threat to the well-being of the human species but a threat to the biodiversity of our planet.

Sunday music: Krister Linder-Look at Me

Recently saw the movie Metropia. It’s a dark movie that contemplates excessive corporate power due to the atrophying of the nation-state, climate change and multiculturalism in Europe. The ending is a let-down but for art’s sake it is an intriguing watch. There is one scene involving the characters of Stefan and Roger that eerily reminds me of the movie “The Lives of Others” where the “overseer” comes to identify intimately with the “overseen”. The Swedish singer Krister Linder provides the uplift behind the somber theme. Here is his instrumental piece “Look at Me”.

A surprise in Cancun

Few were expecting much out of the climate change negotiations being conducted in Cancun this month between representatives of some 193 nations. These low expectations have been obliterated by news yesterday morning of an agreement that environmental groups are hailing as a significant step toward a binding international climate change accord to replace the Kyoto Protocol. According to the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail, the agreeement includes the following:

-Developed countries agreed to set up a “Green Climate Fund” that would manage most of the $100-billion (U.S.) per year promised to poor countries by 2020. It would be initially managed by the World Bank.
-[The agreement] sets up technology-transfer programs to help poorer countries adopt renewable energy technologies, and finance projects to reduce deforestation and encourage tree planting.
-Countries also committed to limiting the increase in the global average temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and pledged that they would consider strengthening the long-term goal to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees.

On second thought…

…and third and fourth thoughts I have reconsidered participating in the climate change training in Indonesia. Not because I don’t want to. I am sure it would be an experience that I would treasure for a lifetime. But it seems counterproductive to travel thousands of miles via one of the most environmentally harmful methods of transportation in order to train on how to educate my fellow world citizens on the threat of climate change.

I calculated it. I had planned (would I have succeeded in raising the funds) on travelling out of Los Angeles to Jakarta. That is a flight covering 18,020 miles with somewhere between 40 and 72 hours in the air depending on the particular flight I chose. According to the emissions calculator site Atmosfair that would put an additional 11,000 kgs of CO2 into the atmosphere which is the equivalent of 5 years worth of carbon emissions for the average driver. So in just three days I would have put five years of carbon into our atmosphere. That just doesn’t seem smart and I am embarrassed that I didn’t think of the inherent contradiction there sooner.

So I will wait until The Climate Project here in the US hosts another training session and apply for it. Hopefully I will be accepted again and I’ll take the train.

I need your help.

I don’t usually send out mass fundraising appeals particularly not for something that directly involves me but I have an important opportunity, which I need your help in order to take advantage. I recently applied to participate in a three-day climate change training led by former Vice President Al Gore in Jakarta, Indonesia. To my great surprise, my application was approved and I now may be joining climate change activists from around the Asia-Pacific region to receive training to help raise public awareness of the grave threat that climate change represents to human civilization.

So now, I am working on finding the money for the flight to Jakarta, getting an expedited passport in Seattle. It appears that I need to raise somewhere between $1700 and $2300 all within the next two weeks in order to participate. The question I have for you? Can you help? Fifty cents, twenty dollars or a thousand…no amount is too small to garner my unending gratitude for helping me help fight to rally the attention and wherewithal for action necessary to address the fundamental issue, I believe, of our generation.

Contact me at copebh@gmail.com if you are able to help and please note that I can pay back all donations within the next six months and provide any information concerning the climate change summit in Indonesia scheduled to occur 8-10 January, 2011.

“The New North” and a warming climate

The impending effects of climate change are hard to imagine but there is a growing body of evidence that it will devastatingly negative impacts on regions of the planet least able to adapt to such effects. But there is another side to the story apparently. The Arctic Rim including nations such as the US, Russia, Canada, Iceland and Greenland may experience rising power and prosperity due to the increased capability to access natural resources that may result from a warming global climate. UCLA Geography professor Laurence Smith makes the case for both positive and negative effects for different parts of the globe due to climate change:

His argument is that there will be winners as well as losers from climate change and the other forces shaping our future. The Arctic rim will be transformed by climate change into a new economic powerhouse. As the ice recedes, ecosystems extend and minerals and fossil fuels are discovered and exploited, the Arctic will become a place of “great human activity, strategic value and economic importance.” The eight nations of the Arctic rim – the US, Canada, Russia, Greenland, Iceland, Finland, Sweden and Norway– will become increasingly prosperous and powerful, he says.

Smith does not just crunch numbers and peer into his crystal ball, however. He has been traveling across the Arctic, bringing stories of how his global forces are playing out on this new front line. While he was writing, Russia placed a flag on the sea bed at the north pole, in anticipation of tapping the mineral and hydrocarbon reserves beneath the ice. Meanwhile, Pentagon types have been predicting future wars over Arctic resources.

Smith finds miners moving north. He discovers that western Siberia, rather than Saudi Arabia, is now the world’s leading producer of oil and natural gas. And he remembers that the Arctic tundra has as much water flowing through it as the tropical rainforests. For many years, the Soviet Union planned on tapping Siberian rivers to refill the shrinking Aral Sea in central Asia and to sustain its vast cotton plantations. California once craved the waters of the Canadian north. In a water-scarce world, such madcap megaprojects may seem increasingly vital.

“Radical changes” for the UN?

Well this is interesting. Regional rivalries have characterized China’s campaign for reform of the UN Security Council but now the UK has entered the melee. Tomorrow, deputy PM Nick Clegg will unveil the UK’s new push for an enlarged Security Council as a part of a package of reform proposals described as “radical” including enlargement of the Security Council and a strengthened Human Rights Council. Not radical enough in my humble opinion but a nice step forward from one of the permanent members (P-5) of the Security Council.

Also in the UK, the Labour Party leadership election is tomorrow. The Brothers Milliband (David and Ed) are the frontrunners but there are three other contestants in the race: Diane Abbott, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham. Ed Milliband’s service as a cabinet secretary responsible for Britain’s addressing of climate change and environmental stewardship lead me to hope for his victory tomorrow. He is the underdog though with the latest poll putting him 8 points behind his older brother in a run-off.

Giant FAIL

As one of the leading energy consumptive and carbon-emitting nations America continues to fail in meeting its obligations in order to address the serious challenges presented by climate change globally. David Roberts over at Grist gives an excellent review of the unfortunate demise of the variously-purposed climate change/energy/oil spill bill which has been pared down to stultified pulp.

Roberts notes:

“Not only will the bill not contain any restrictions on greenhouse gases — not even a watered-down utility-only cap — it won’t even contain the two other key policies that would have moved clean energy forward: the Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) and the energy efficiency standards.”

And he assigns blame where is very deserved.

The generations that follow will not forgive us if we continue to fail to address this challenge.

Loopholes, the rich and Copenhagen

Analysis from the Stockholm Environment Institute and Third World Network indicate that developed nations are taking advantage of loopholes that could allow for an increase of up to 9% in carbon emissions above 1990 levels (the standard set in Kyoto and more recently in Copenhagen). The Guardian noted this in a story posted today:

Developing countries have argued strongly for minimum 40% emission cuts from industrialised nations by 2020. But new analysis from the Stockholm Environment Institute and Third World Network (TWN), released at the latest UN climate talks in Bonn, showed that current pledges amounted to only 12-18% reductions below 1990 levels without loopholes. When all loopholes were taken into account, emissions could be allowed to rise by 9%.

And there is even more damning information from the story:

In a separate submission to governments, Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN, claimed that industrialised countries were filling all the available atmosphere with carbon pollution, and preventing poor countries from developing. Solon quoted peer-reviewed research by leading NASA scientist Jim Hansen and the German government’s Advisory Council on Global Change which, he said, showed that the world had a “budget” of 750 gigatonnes of CO2 over the next 40 years if it sought a 66% chance of holding temperature rises to under 2C. The world had a smaller budget of just 420GT of CO2 if it wanted to stay below 1.5C, as more than 100 countries have so far demanded.

The “period of consequences” that Churchill mentioned in one of his most fateful speeches is fast approaching.

Lowering your carbon footprint

The site Carbon Footprint has a neat tool to estimate your personal carbon footprint based on home energy use, your automobile, air flight history and secondary preferences such as your diet, clothing and purchases. Just calculated mine and it is 2.34 metric tons of carbon dioxide. At first glance that seemed like a large amount of carbon dioxide but the average American’s carbon footprint is 20.4 metric tons (we really do live unsustainably large) and the worldwide average is 4 metric tons. Now if you are wondering what the worldwide average for carbon emissions needs to be in order to counteract climate change it’s 2.0 metric tons. The site also offers some ways based on your survey answers to offset (or decrease) your own carbon footprint. I suspect the reason for my low carbon footprint is the fact that I have no car, am vegetarian and have an average commute but carpool with three co-workers. Just .34 metric tons to go…

Of interest: readings on climate change and international governance

Found a couple of nice readings. The first is a 2005 issue of Monthly Review article entitled “Organizing Ecological Revolution” by John Bellamy Foster:

My subject—organizing ecological revolution—has as its initial premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the web of life of the entire planet is threatened and with it the future of civilization.

This is no longer a very controversial proposition. To be sure, there are different perceptions about the extent of the challenge that this raises. At one extreme there are those who believe that since these are human problems arising from human causes they are easily solvable. All we need are ingenuity and the will to act. At the other extreme there are those who believe that the world ecology is deteriorating on a scale and with a rapidity beyond our means to control, giving rise to the gloomiest forebodings.

The second is from Andrew Strauss entitled “On the First Branch of Global Governance” which outlines a proposal for the strengthening of global governance structures through a coalition of 20 nations convened an international treaty process.

Wonderings on our crisis

I am about to buy Erwin Schrodinger’s 1944 lecture collection What is Life? because it makes an intriguing proposal that we view the history of humankind and the evolution of life in general through the lens of the second law of thermodynamics and entropy–or the apparently natural pattern of life as “order-from-disorder” as a form of negative entropy or syntropy. The issue which presents the most important challenge to the survival of human civilization is climate change. And apparently climate change, in my undereducated opinion, is a presentation of runaway disorder within the overarching life system on the planet. The challenge of managing climate change is really a challenge to human beings to find more efficient and sophisticated methods of maintaining our own order without causing disorder within the larger system we inhabit. In short of finding a syntropic equilibrium.

Eh, just some wonderings on this Sunday as my head is in the clouds again.