Category Archives: Peer Reviewed Article Review

hurricanes slowing down

Hurricanes appear to be slowing down. This might sound like a good thing, but no it means they could be dropping more rain in any one place, like Harvey did on Houston. In Nature:

 As the Earth’s atmosphere warms, the atmospheric circulation changes. These changes vary by region and time of year, but there is evidence that anthropogenic warming causes a general weakening of summertime tropical circulation1–8. Because tropical cyclones are carried along within their ambient environmental wind, there is a plausible a priori expectation that the translation speed of tropical cyclones has slowed with warming. In addition to circulation changes, anthropogenic warming causes increases in atmospheric water-vapour capacity, which are generally expected to increase precipitation rates9. Rain rates near the centres of tropical cyclones are also expected to increase with increasing global temperatures10–12. The amount of tropical-cyclone-related rainfall that any given local area will experience is proportional to the rain rates and inversely proportional to the translation speeds of tropical cyclones. Here I show that tropical-cyclone translation speed has decreased globally by 10 per cent over the period 1949–2016, which is very likely to have compounded, and possibly dominated, any increases in local rainfall totals that may have occurred as a result of increased tropical-cyclone rain rates. The magnitude of the slowdown varies substantially by region and by latitude, but is generally consistent with expected changes in atmospheric circulation forced by anthropogenic emissions. Of particular importance is the slowdown of 30 per cent and 20 per cent over land areas affected by western North Pacific and North Atlantic tropical cyclones, respectively, and the slowdown of 19 per cent over land areas in the Australian region. The unprecedented rainfall totals associated with the ‘stall’ of Hurricane Harvey13–15 over Texas in 2017 provide a notable example of the relationship between regional rainfall amounts and tropical-cyclone translation speed. Any systematic past or future change in the translation speed of tropical cyclones, particularly over land, is therefore highly relevant when considering potential changes in local rainfall totals.

stranded fossil fuel assets

An article from Cambridge (University, not Analytica) in Nature Climate Change estimates potential losses if renewables were to lead to a sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels.

Our analysis suggests that part of the SFFA would occur as a result of an already ongoing technological trajectory, irrespective of whether or not new climate policies are adopted; the loss would be amplified if new climate policies to reach the 2 °C target of the Paris Agreement are adopted and/or if low-cost producers (some OPEC countries) maintain their level of production (‘sell out’) despite declining demand; the magnitude of the loss from SFFA may amount to a discounted global wealth loss of US$1–4 trillion; and there are clear distributional impacts, with winners (for example, net importers such as China or the EU) and losers (for example, Russia, the United States or Canada, which could see their fossil fuel industries nearly shut down), although the two effects would largely offset each other at the level of aggregate global GDP.

So coal subsidies might be “making America Great Again”, but not for long. And they might not even have the desired effect according to this article, which argues they would primarily benefit nuclear. And solar energy, it turns out, is a growth industry creating jobs in many Republican districts.

 

climate change is going to cause some economic damage

A letter in Nature says climate change is going to cause economic damage, and meeting the UN’s emissions targets would reduce that damage. Here’s the abstract, and the article itself is open access.

 International climate change agreements typically specify global warming thresholds as policy targets1, but the relative economic benefits of achieving these temperature targets remain poorly understood2,3. Uncertainties include the spatial pattern of temperature change, how global and regional economic output will respond to these changes in temperature, and the willingness of societies to trade present for future consumption. Here we combine historical evidence4 with national-level climate5 and socioeconomic6 projections to quantify the economic damages associated with the United Nations (UN) targets of 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming, and those associated with current UN national-level mitigation commitments (which together approach 3 °C warming7). We find that by the end of this century, there is a more than 75% chance that limiting warming to 1.5 °C would reduce economic damages relative to 2 °C, and a more than 60% chance that the accumulated global benefits will exceed US$20 trillion under a 3% discount rate (2010 US dollars). We also estimate that 71% of countries—representing 90% of the global population—have a more than 75% chance of experiencing reduced economic damages at 1.5 °C, with poorer countries benefiting most. Our results could understate the benefits of limiting warming to 1.5 °C if unprecedented extreme outcomes, such as large-scale sea level rise8, occur for warming of 2 °C but not for warming of 1.5 °C. Inclusion of other unquantified sources of uncertainty, such as uncertainty in secular growth rates beyond that contained in existing socioeconomic scenarios, could also result in less precise impact estimates. We find considerably greater reductions in global economic output beyond 2 °C. Relative to a world that did not warm beyond 2000–2010 levels, we project 15%–25% reductions in per capita output by 2100 for the 2.5–3 °C of global warming implied by current national commitments7, and reductions of more than 30% for 4 °C warming. Our results therefore suggest that achieving the 1.5 °C target is likely to reduce aggregate damages and lessen global inequality, and that failing to meet the 2 °C target is likely to increase economic damages substantially.

My head gets just a little twisted around thinking of reduced damages. This means the economy, and presumably our grandchildren’s quality of life, will be worse than it could have been if we started making an effort and investment now. But this doesn’t tell us if they will be absolutely better or worse off in a “future baseline” scenario compared to now, just that they will be worse off relative to that future baseline if we don’t take action than if we do. I think the various (very eye catching) graphs in this paper probably contain the answers to these questions, but I didn’t get it after an admittedly short few minutes staring at them, and I admit I didn’t read every word in the paper.

The other thing here is that we are taking a given climate scenario (1.5 or 3 degrees C warming for example), and talking about the benefits of those two future scenarios against each other. What I don’t see is the cost to the current generation if we choose to make this sacrifice, or even if it is a sacrifice at all. What investment would we have to make to achieve 1.5 vs. 3 degrees, and are there alternative investments we could make that could have a bigger payoff. I am not arguing against climate action, I am just questioning how this paper is communicating about costs and benefits in the present and in the future.

cognitive bias

This open access article has a nice summary of cognitive bias research.

Black swans, cognition, and the power of learning from failure

Failure carries undeniable stigma and is difficult to confront for individuals, teams, and organizations. Disciplines such as commercial and military aviation, medicine, and business have long histories of grappling with it, beginning with the recognition that failure is inevitable in every human endeavor. Although conservation may arguably be more complex, conservation professionals can draw on the research and experience of these other disciplines to institutionalize activities and attitudes that foster learning from failure, whether they are minor setbacks or major disasters. Understanding the role of individual cognitive biases, team psychological safety, and organizational willingness to support critical self‐examination all contribute to creating a cultural shift in conservation to one that is open to the learning opportunity that failure provides. This new approach to managing failure is a necessary next step in the evolution of conservation effectiveness.

dystopian Schumpeter meets Keynes

This article is about a serious attempt to consider climate change in a traditional economic model. Where does the dystopian part come in? Well, it sounds like the model suggests we are not going to innovate our way out of the consequences of climate change.

For these reasons, we develop the Dystopian Schumpeter meeting Keynes (DSK) model, which is the first attempt to provide a fully-fledged agent-based integrated assessment framework. It builds on Dosi et al. (2010, 2013, 2016) and extends the Keynes+Schumpeter (K+S) family of models, which account for endogenous growth, business cycles and crises. The model is composed by heterogeneous firms belonging to a capital-good industry and to a consumption-good sector. Firms are fed by an energy sector, which employ dirty or green power plants. The production activities of energy and manufacturing firms lead to CO2 emissions, which increase the Earth surface temperature in a non-linear way as in Sterman et al. (2013). Increasing temperatures trigger micro stochastic climate damages impacting in a heterogeneous way on workers’ labour productivity, and on the energy efficiency, capital stock and inventories of firms.

The DSK model accounts both for frequent and mild climate shocks and low-probability but extreme climate events. Technical change occurs both in the manufacturing and energy sectors. Innovation determines the cost of energy produced by dirty and green technologies, which, in turn, affect the energy-technology production mix and the total amount of CO2 emissions. In that, structural change of the economy is intimately linked to the climate dynamics. At the same time, climate shocks affect economic growth, business cycles, technical-change trajectories, green-house gas emissions, and global temperatures…

Simulation results show that the DSK model is able to replicate a wide array of micro and macro-economic stylized facts and climate-related statistical regularities. Moreover, the exploration of different climate shock scenarios reveals that the impact of climate change on economic performances is substantial, but highly heterogeneous, depending on the type of climate damages. More specifcally, climate shocks to labour productivity and capital stocks lead to the largest output losses and the highest economic instability, respectively. We also
find that the ultimate macroeconomic damages emerging from the aggregation of agent-level shocks are more severe than those obtained by standard IAMs, with the emergence of tipping-points and irreversible catastrophic events.

abrupt ecological change

Being able to forecast abrupt ecological change might be a good idea.

Abrupt Change in Ecological Systems: Inference and Diagnosis

Abrupt ecological changes are, by definition, those that occur over short periods of time relative to typical rates of change for a given ecosystem. The potential for such changes is growing due to anthropogenic pressures, which challenges the resilience of societies and ecosystems. Abrupt ecological changes are difficult to diagnose because they can arise from a variety of circumstances, including rapid changes in external drivers (e.g., climate, or resource extraction), nonlinear responses to gradual changes in drivers, and interactions among multiple drivers and disturbances. We synthesize strategies for identifying causes of abrupt ecological change and highlight instances where abrupt changes are likely. Diagnosing abrupt changes and inferring causation are increasingly important as society seek to adapt to rapid, multifaceted environmental changes.

how fish will move under climate change

It seems to me that fish might be able to adapt to climate change a little easier than other species, because they can just swim to a new part of the ocean that is now like what their old part of the ocean used to be like.

Projecting shifts in thermal habitat for 686 species on the North American continental shelf

Recent shifts in the geographic distribution of marine species have been linked to shifts in preferred thermal habitats. These shifts in distribution have already posed challenges for living marine resource management, and there is a strong need for projections of how species might be impacted by future changes in ocean temperatures during the 21st century. We modeled thermal habitat for 686 marine species in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans using long-term ecological survey data from the North American continental shelves. These habitat models were coupled to output from sixteen general circulation models that were run under high (RCP 8.5) and low (RCP 2.6) future greenhouse gas emission scenarios over the 21st century to produce 32 possible future outcomes for each species. The models generally agreed on the magnitude and direction of future shifts for some species (448 or 429 under RCP 8.5 and RCP 2.6, respectively), but strongly disagreed for other species (116 or 120 respectively). This allowed us to identify species with more or less robust predictions. Future shifts in species distributions were generally poleward and followed the coastline, but also varied among regions and species. Species from the U.S. and Canadian west coast including the Gulf of Alaska had the highest projected magnitude shifts in distribution, and many species shifted more than 1000 km under the high greenhouse gas emissions scenario. Following a strong mitigation scenario consistent with the Paris Agreement would likely produce substantially smaller shifts and less disruption to marine management efforts. Our projections offer an important tool for identifying species, fisheries, and management efforts that are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts.

Climate Change and Global Child Health

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics:

Climate change threatens to reverse the gains in global child health and the reductions in global child mortality made over the past 25 years. There is broad recognition that greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are causing climate change. The problem of climate change transcends geopolitical boundaries and will have extensive impacts on child health and security. With implications for all of humanity, climate change will disproportionately affect children and the poor, magnifying existing disparities in social determinates of health.

I don’t know if “reverse” means we stop making gains, or if child mortality rates actually revert to where they were 25 years ago. Either way, it kind of suggests the amazing progress of recent decades may have peaked, at least for the time being.

dematerialization and decoupling

This paper is called Dematerialization, Decoupling, and Productivity Change. These are all buzzwords that will catch my eye. It makes a distinction between relative (ecological footprint is growing slower than the economy) and absolute (ecological footprint is not growing or is shrinking) decoupling. If you accept the concept that ecological footprint cannot grow forever, the distinction is important! This paper seems to cast doubt on the idea that there is any soft landing where absolute decoupling occurs automatically or by choice without significant pain.

The prospects for long-term sustainability depend on whether, and how much, we can absolutely decouple economic output from total energy and material throughput. While relative decoupling has occurred – that is, resource use has grown less quickly than the economy – absolute decoupling has not, raising the question whether it is possible. This paper proposes a novel explanation for why decoupling has not happened historically, drawing on a recent theory of cost-share induced productivity change and an extension of post-Keynesian pricing theory to natural resources. Cost-share induced productivity change and pricing behavior set up two halves of a dynamic, which we explore from a post-Keynesian perspective. In this dynamic, resource costs as a share of GDP move toward a stable level, at which the growth rate of resource productivity is typically less than the growth rate of GDP. This provides a parsimonious explanation of the prevalence of relative over absolute decoupling. The paper then presents some illustrative applications of the theory.

climate-friendly investing as a stag hunt

No, the idea is not that killing and eating stags has a lower carbon footprint than beef (although it might, but if everyone did it would there be enough stags to go around?). The stag hunt is a game studied by game theorists similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. Players can maximize their outcome by cooperating, but there is a risk in assuming other players will also cooperate, and therefore an incentive to make choices that are low-risk for individuals but sub-optimal for everyone.

Green Investment and Coordination Failure: An Investors’ Perspective

To achieve the goal of keeping global warming well below 2 °C, private investors have to shift capital from brown to green infrastructures and technologies and provide additional green investment. In this paper, we present a game-theoretic perspective on the challenge of triggering such investments. The question of climate change mitigation is often related to the prisoner’s dilemma, a game with one Nash equilibrium. However, the authors perceive investment for mitigation and adaptation as a coordination problem of selecting among multiple equilibria. To illustrate this, we model a non-cooperative coordination game, related to the stag hunt, with a brown equilibrium with lower payoffs that can be achieved single-handedly and a green equilibrium with higher payoffs that requires coordination. As multiple experiments show, in such games actors often fail to coordinate on a payoff dominant equilibrium due to uncertainty. Thus, we discuss how uncertainty could be reduced along two options: one that concerns a change in the payoff structure of the game and another that concerns subjective probabilities.