Climate Experts Tussle Over Details. Public Gets Whiplash.

When science is testing new ideas, the result is often a two-papers-forward-one-paper-back intellectual tussle among competing research teams. When the work touches on issues that worry the public, affect the economy or polarize politics, the news media and advocates of all stripes dive in. Under nonstop scrutiny, conflicting findings can make news coverage veer from one extreme to another, resulting in a kind of journalistic whiplash for the public.

This has been true for decades in health coverage. But lately the phenomenon has been glaringly apparent on the global warming beat.

Discordant findings have come in quick succession. How fast is Greenland shedding ice? Did human-caused warming wipe out frogs in the American tropics? Has warming strengthened hurricanes? Have the oceans stopped warming? These questions endure even as the basic theory of a rising human influence on climate has steadily solidified: accumulating greenhouse gases will warm the world, erode ice sheets, raise seas and have big impacts on biology and human affairs.

Scientists see persistent disputes as the normal stuttering journey toward improved understanding of how the world works. But many fear that the herky-jerky trajectory is distracting the public from the undisputed basics and blocking change. “One of the things that troubles me most is that the rapid-fire publication of unsettled results in highly visible venues creates the impression that the scientific community has no idea what’s going on,” said W. Tad Pfeffer, an expert on Greenland’s ice sheets at the University of Colorado.

“Each new paper negates or repudiates something emphatically asserted in a previous paper,” Dr. Pfeffer said. “The public is obviously picking up on this not as an evolution of objective scientific understanding but as a proliferation of contradictory opinions.”

Several experts on the media and risk said that one result could be public disengagement with the climate issue just as experts are saying ever more forcefully that sustained attention and action are needed to limit the worst risks. Recent polls in the United States and Britain show that the public remains substantially divided and confused over what is happening and what to do. Some environmentalists have blamed energy-dependent industries and the news media for stalemates on climate policy, arguing that they perpetuate a false sense of uncertainty about the basic problem.

But scientists themselves sometimes fail to carefully discriminate between what is well understood and what remains uncertain, said Kimberly Thompson, an associate professor of risk analysis and decision science at Harvard. And, Dr. Thompson said, the flow of scientific findings from laboratory (or glacier) to journal to news report is fraught with “reinforcing loops” that can amplify small distortions.

For example, she said, after scientists learn that accurate, but nuanced, statements are often left out of news accounts, they may pre-emptively oversimplify their description of some complex finding. Better, but more difficult, Dr. Thompson said, would be to work with the reporter to characterize the weight of evidence behind the new advance and seek to place it in context.

Click here to read the full NY Times article.

Decisions Shut Door on Bush Clean-Air Steps

Any major steps by the Bush administration to control air pollution or reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases came to a dead end on Friday, the combined result of a federal court ruling and a decision by the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the morning, a federal appeals court struck down the cornerstone of the administration’s strategy to control industrial air pollution by agreeing with arguments by the utility industry that the E.P.A. had exceeded its authority when it established the Clean Air Interstate Rule in 2005. The court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, said the rule, which set new requirements for major pollutants, had “fatal flaws.”

A few hours later, the E.P.A. chief rejected any obligation to regulate heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide under existing law, saying that to do so would involve an “unprecedented expansion” of the agency’s authority that would have “a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy,” touching “every household in the land.”
Taken together, the developments make it clear that any significant new effort to fight air pollution will fall to the next president.

The comments by the E.P.A. administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, reinforced a message that the administration had been sending for months: that it does not intend to impose mandatory controls on the emissions that cause climate change. John Walke, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group, said, “As a result of today, July 11, the Bush administration has failed to achieve a single ounce in reductions of smog, soot, mercury or global warming pollution from power plants.”

Mr. Johnson said he was “extremely disappointed” in the court decision “because it’s overturning one of the most significant and health-protective rules in our nation’s history.”
But on climate change, he said laws like the Clean Air Act were “ill-suited” to the complexities of regulating greenhouse gases.

Mr. Johnson’s comments appeared as a preface to a report by the E.P.A. staff sketching out how the emission of heat-trapping gases, particularly by vehicles, might be handled under the Clean Air Act. The report was intended to address a Supreme Court directive that the agency decide whether such gases threaten people’s health or welfare. But it also reflects the deep disapproval of controls on such gases by the White House and agencies like the Transportation, Agriculture and Commerce Departments.

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Richest Nations Pledge to Halve Greenhouse Gas

RUSUTSU, Japan — President Bush and leaders of the world’s richest nations pledged Tuesday to “move toward a low-carbon society” by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, the latest step in a long evolution by a president who for years played down the threat of global warming.
The declaration by the Group of 8 — the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia — was the first time that the Bush White House had publicly backed an explicit long-term target for eliminating the gases that scientists have said are warming the planet. But it failed to set a goal for cutting emissions over the next decade, and drew sharp criticism from environmentalists, who called it a missed opportunity.
On Wednesday, leaders of developing nations took up the climate change issue and said that they too supported “a long-term global goal for emission reductions,” but they were not specific and fell short of supporting the Group of 8 declaration.
In a sense, the Group of 8 document represents an environmental quid pro quo. In exchange for agreeing to the “50 by 2050” language, Mr. Bush got what he has sought as his price for joining an international accord: a statement from the rest of the Group of 8 that developing nations like China and India, which have not accepted mandatory caps on carbon emissions, must be included in any climate change treaty.
European leaders, who have long pressed Mr. Bush to take a more aggressive stance on global warming, said the declaration could enhance efforts to reach a binding agreement to reduce emissions when negotiators meet in Copenhagen next year under United Nations auspices.

Click here to read the full NY Times article.

Running in Circles Over Carbon

Cutting carbon dioxide emissions is a fine idea, and a lot of companies would be proud to do it. But they would prefer to be second, if not third or fourth.

This is not a good way to get started in fighting global warming.

As efforts to pass a global warming bill collapsed in the Senate last week, companies that burn coal to make electricity were looking for a way to build a plant that would capture its emissions. There is a will and a way — several ways, in fact — to do just that.

Capturing carbon from these plants may become a lot more important soon. Emissions from coal-fired power plants already account for about 27% of American greenhouse emissions, but as prices for other fuels rise, along with power demand, utilities will burn more coal. And if cars someday run on batteries, a trend that $4-a-gallon gasoline will accelerate, then the utilities will burn even more fuel to generate the electricity to recharge those batteries.

This could be good news, because controlling emissions from a few hundred power plants is easier than controlling them from tens of millions of house chimneys, or hundreds of millions of tailpipes. And in the laboratory, at least, there are three very promising systems for capturing carbon dioxide before pumping it underground.

But supplying electricity is not like most other businesses. Unlike the companies that make microchips, clothing for teenagers or snack foods, the companies that make electricity can see no advantage in going first. This is true for the traditionally regulated utilities that can charge everything to a captive class of customers (if regulators approve), and it is also true for the “merchant generators,” who build power plants and sell their output on the open market.

Click here full the full NY Times article.

Industrial Nations Vow to Cut Oil Use

The world’s leading economies and oil consumers are pledging greater investment in energy efficiency and green technologies to curtail petroleum use.

In a joint statement on Sunday, energy ministers from the Group of 8 countries, the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada, joined by China, India and South Korea, also urged oil producers to increase output, which has stalled at about 85 million barrels a day since 2005.

They also called for cooperation between buyers and producers. But with little prospect for a surge in production anytime soon, the focus of Sunday’s meeting was on what wealthy nations should do to rein in consumption, while reducing carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

Click here for the full NY Times article.

The Polar Bear Is Made a Protected Species

The polar bear, whose summertime Arctic hunting grounds have been greatly reduced by a warming climate, will be placed under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced on Wednesday.

The polar bear is being stressed by melting sea ice but scientists say the species would not vanish entirely for a century or more. But the long-delayed decision to list the bear as a threatened species may prove less of an impediment to oil and gas industries along the Alaskan coast than many environmentalists had hoped. Mr. Kempthorne also made it clear that it would be “wholly inappropriate” to use the listing as a tool to reduce greenhouse gases, as environmentalists had intended to do.

While giving the bear a few new protections — hunters may no longer import hides or other trophies from bears killed in Canada, for instance — the Interior Department added stipulations, seldom used under the act, that would allow oil and gas exploration and development to proceed in areas where the bears live, as long as the companies continue to comply with existing restrictions under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Click here to read the full NY Times article.

It's a Tidy Answer to Global Warming

The LA Times has reported on a air CO2 "scrubbing" system which would process the air's CO2 and then store it underground. Seems like the technology works on a bench scale in Tucson warehouse, but scale up will be EXPENSIVE. the article optimistically reports that to remove all 28 billion tons of CO2 released worldwide each year, would require spreading machines over a land area the size of Arizona. Then there's the expense...estimated at $200 a ton, which equates to an annual vacuuming bill of $5.6 trillion....hmmmm!

Here is the Los Angeles Times, 2008-04-29 article by Alan Zarembo:

Here's a simple solution to global warming: vacuum carbon dioxide out of the air.
Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University, said placing enough carbon filters around the planet could reel the world's atmosphere back toward the 18th century, like a climatic time machine.

After a decade of work, his shower-sized prototype whirs away inside a Tucson warehouse, each day capturing about 10 pounds of the heat-trapping greenhouse gas as air wafts through it.
Only a few billion tons to go. In the battle against global warming, technology has long been seen as the ultimate savior, but Lackner's machine is a clunky reminder of how distant that dream is.
He estimates that sucking up the current stream of emissions would require about 67 million boxcar-sized filters at a cost of trillions of dollars a year.

The orchards of filters would have to be powered by complexes of new nuclear plants, dams, solar farms or other clean-energy sources to avoid adding more pollution to the atmosphere.
Despite the scope of the proposal, the allure of high technology is irresistible for modern humans. Salvation has arrived again and again over the last century: the automobile, the jet, the Internet, the iPod.

That dream has pushed scattered groups of scientists to work on massive schemes to reengineer the planet. One idea is to block sunlight, either by constructing artificial volcanoes to blast sulfur particles into the atmosphere or by launching millions of tiny satellites into space and arranging them into a giant mirror.

Another concept is sprinkling iron over the oceans to nurture plankton colonies that would absorb carbon dioxide from the air and transfer it to the depths.

But while the science of dialing back the planet's thermostat is straightforward, the execution is fabulously expensive, complex and grandiose on a scale that boggles the mind. Nobody doubts it is possible to take CO2 out of the air," said David Keith, a professor of engineering and economics at the University of Calgary in Canada and one of several scientists around the world working on the problem. "The issue is, 'What does it cost?' "
Some policy experts argue that blind faith in technology is a harmful distraction from the hard sacrifices needed to control global warming.

"The temptation is to say, 'Let's get John Wayne on horseback or Bill Gates . . . and solve this problem,' " said Dale Jamieson, director of environmental studies at New York University.
But some scientists say that the potential of such ideas cannot be ignored given the world's political paralysis on controlling emissions and its myopic addiction to cheap and dirty coal. "There are not that many alternatives," Lackner said.

The attraction of a technological silver bullet lies in the failure of the world to solve global warming through the obvious solution: reducing emissions. The 1997 Kyoto accords were supposed to bring the world together to address the problem, but the two biggest polluters, the United States and China, have refused to cap their emissions, and Europe is failing to meet even its modest targets.

Worldwide annual emissions of carbon dioxide -- the main culprit in global warming -- have climbed 28% over the last decade, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The rise has been largely driven by industrializing countries, such as China and India, which argue that they have the right to exploit their coal reserves to catch up with the West.
It is clear that cheap energy is a drug that civilization will not give up. But big technological solutions could allow society to keep its drug.

Among the options, carbon filtering is the most direct and best understood. If industrialization is a process of transferring carbon stored in the earth to the atmosphere, filtering seeks to put it back. The technology is decades old. Bottled oxygen used in hospitals started out as plain air before nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other gases were filtered out. Space capsules and submarines extract carbon dioxide to maintain breathable air for crew members.
The process for removing atmospheric carbon involves putting one compound, usually a hydroxide, in contact with the air, setting off a reaction that grabs CO2 and incorporates its carbon atoms into a carbonate compound.

Then, in a reaction that requires a large input of heat, the carbonate compound is broken apart, reconstituting and trapping the carbon dioxide. Researchers propose pumping the captured CO2 into the ground, a practice already used to increase the pressure in oil wells. Geologists say there is room in subterranean rock formations to lock it away forever.

The beauty of carbon capture is that it scrubs the planet without intruding on it, unlike artificial volcanoes and sun reflectors, which could cause enormous planetary damage in the form of acid rain or giant shadows that stunt crops. The filters could be placed anywhere in the world, since carbon dioxide disperses throughout the atmosphere.

For all its appeal, the process is hideously inefficient. Carbon dioxide makes up less than 0.04% of the atmosphere, and removing climate-changing quantities of it requires filtering massive amounts of air. Lackner calculated that sucking up all 28 billion tons of CO2 released worldwide each year would require spreading out his machines over a land area the size of Arizona.

That seems like a reasonable sacrifice to save civilization, until you consider the expense.
Experts estimate that it would cost up to $200 a ton to filter and store carbon dioxide from the air. That means the yearly vacuuming bill could reach $5.6 trillion. Even filtering the greenhouse gas from smokestacks, where it is hundreds of times more concentrated and thus much cheaper to capture, is still deemed too expensive for commercial use.

The enormous cost raises the question: Who would pay?

It is the same impasse that has stymied efforts toward a global agreement to reduce emissions. China argues that the West should foot the bill because it created the problem over the last two centuries. The United States says China must accept its share of responsibility as the world's new top polluter.

The cost of the technology will surely fall over time, but without government action that is unlikely to happen soon enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
Without at least a 50% cut in emissions by mid-century, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the temperature rise will exceed 2 degrees, resulting in worsening drought, a dangerous sea level rise and widespread extinction of species.
Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, said that the failure to cut emissions might force the world to reshape the environment through drastic use of technology. The risks could be enormous, but the risks of failing to reduce emissions could be greater, he said.

Crutzen said that only out of a "sense of despair" had he come to favor the last-ditch option of spewing more than a million tons of sulfur a year into the air. It's a dirty proposition that, in some ways, is its own environmental crime. But it works, as shown by the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, which temporarily cooled the planet by almost 1 degree Fahrenheit. "It might be the last escape route from the problem," he said.

The power to reengineer the planet raises another question: Who gets to control the thermostat? Despite the perception that climate change is a global problem, it is in reality a series of regional transformations that benefits some places and harms others.
Countries in the far northern latitudes have less incentive than tropical countries to counteract the warming. Russia has already laid claim to the North Pole in hopes that the arctic thaw will open access to new oil reserves. Canada is pondering the possibility of its vast expanse of tundra becoming a breadbasket.

With enough carbon filters, a single country or even several rich individuals would have the power to set the world's temperature. "No matter how you go about it, there will be a lot of politics," Lackner said. For now, his machine, a solitary prototype, continues to hum away in the Tucson warehouse. With no good place to store the carbon dioxide it traps, the gas is simply released back into the air.

What's the Most Expensive Climate Policy? Doing Nothing

Policymakers are right to ask about the cost of climate change policy. But which path is more expensive: solving climate change or ignoring it? There is a growing understanding that ignoring climate change is the most costly and dangerous course for our economy.

But don't take our word for it. See what others are saying:

"Agriculture faces serious decline from global warming."
Center for Global Development report, 9/13/07

"Climate change impacts will place immense strains on public sector budgets."
University of Maryland study, 10/16/07

"If you don't take action on climate change, you can be sure that our economies will go down the drain in the next 30 years."
Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker

"Global warming threatens roads, rail lines, ports, airports and other important infrastructure." National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences, 3/12/08

"Climate change poses a serious threat causing widespread political instability."
Center for Naval Analysis report, 4/16/07

US oil imports will be $20 billion higher each year without action to cap greenhouse gas pollution. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) analysis, 2/25/08

In confronting climate change, there is no option without costs. But we do have choices. We can invest a modest amount now - less than 1% of GDP in 2030, according to a survey1 of independent economic analyses - and get cleaner air, greater energy security, new energy jobs, and a brighter future for our children.

Or, by choosing to do nothing, we can pay much more later in rising insurance rates, greater government spending to maintain public infrastructure, agricultural damage from droughts, the spread of insect-borne disease, increased international instability, and more intense hurricanes and storms.

Acting now will allow us to manage those economic risks, while also enabling the U.S. to win the race for the clean energy jobs and technologies that will power the 21st Century. The most expensive thing we can do about climate change is nothing. It's time to cap emissions.

Source: Environmental Defense Fund

The Human Side of Global Warming

Daniel Weiss and Robin Pam for The Center for American Progress have recently published an article that focuses on the human side of the global warming crisis.

They discuss the most severe health effects linked to global warming include the following:
1. More illness and death resulting from heat waves.
2. Worsening air pollution causes more respiratory and cardiovascular disease.
3. Vector-borne disease infections will rise.
4. Changing food production and security may cause hunger.
5. More severe and frequent wildfires will threaten more people.
6. Flooding linked to rising sea levels will displace millions.

The time to act is now.