Tag Archives: climate change

El Nino

Eric Holthaus continues his entertaining El Nino coverage in Slate:

El Niño means the tropical Pacific is warmer than normal, which improves the chances that typhoons will form. This week, a series of typhoons on both sides of the equator are helping to reinforce a big burst of westerly winds along the equator. These westerly wind bursts are a hallmark of El Niño, and help push subsurface warm water toward the coast of South America. If enough warm water butts up against Peru, the normal cold water ocean current there can get shut off, exacerbating the pattern.

Exactly how this all gets kicked off is an area of active research, but it’s clear that big El Niños need deviant trade winds to maintain the feedback loop. During especially strong El Niños, like this year’s promises to be, the trade winds can sometimes reverse direction—and this week’s off-the-charts wind surge is at record-strengthfor so early in an El Niño event. Since all this takes place in the tropical Pacific Ocean—the planet’s biggest bathtub—a fully mature El Niño has the power to shift rainfall odds worldwide and boost global temperatures. That’s exactly what’s happening this year.

Don’t worry, says Michelle L’Heureux at NOAA:

xWe are now nearing 1.5 degrees Celsius in the Niño-3.4 index for a 7-day or weekly average. Among the post-college age crowd who can remember it (yes, this officially means you’re old), the level of warmth in sea surface temperatures this time of year harkens back to 1997-98 El Niño, which ended up becoming a record strength event.

Are these weekly numbers impressive? Yes. But when a weekly value hits 1.5°C is El Niño instantly considered strong? I’d argue no. While a short-term (daily or weekly) number might be striking, it shouldn’t be used as an indicator of El Niño strength unless it is carefully placed into a larger context…

Weekly averages bounce around because… you know, weather. It is not unusual to see jumps of several tenths of a degree from week-to-week. This is because there are shorter-term changes in the ocean and atmospheric circulation that can be related to faster, non-ENSO phenomena, such as the Madden Julian Oscillation, which happens to be currently in place and isinfluencing the tropical Pacific. With short-term changes, we cannot be sure they reflect El Niño, which evolves more slowly.

June 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

Positive stories:

Alaska wildfires

Climate Central has an interesting report on a trend of increasing wildfires in the Arctic region of Alaska.

In the past 60 years, Alaska has warmed more than twice as fast as the rest of the country, with average temperatures up by nearly 3°F. By 2050, temperatures are projected to climb an additional 2-4 degrees, with the Arctic region seeing the most dramatic increases. These rising temperatures are expected to increase wildfire risks in Alaska, just as they have in the rest of the western U.S. Wildfires have been on the rise across the western U.S. since the 1970s, at the same time that spring and summer temperatures have increased dramatically, and average spring snowpack has declined substantially. Fires in Alaska don’t often make news in the lower 48, but they threaten vast expanses of forest, parkland, and tundra that store immense quantities of carbon. The state’s growing number of large wildfires have the potential to damage these ecosystems, and the people and wildlife that depend on them, while releasing a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere, further contributing to global warming. Wildfire emissions over these vast areas also threaten air quality in Alaska and beyond.

They attribute the trend to higher temperatures in May, June, and July, while at the same time there has been no clear trend in rainfall during these months. So it is getting hotter and, if not dryer, at least not any wetter. It makes sense that higher temperatures would dry out wood, dead vegetation, and organic soils, increasing the amount fuel available for fires. I don’t know what exactly starts the fires, maybe lightning. The scariest thing in this report is the idea of a self-reinforcing feedback loop between thawing permafrost, burning forests and organic soils, greenhouse gas emissions, and higher temperatures. I suspect if this is going on in Alaska, it is also going on in other parts of the Arctic – Canada, northern Europe, and Russia.

my pope post

Everybody seems to have a post about the pope, so here is mine.

The Pope and Climate Change, Biodiversity, Inequality, Technocracy, Anthropocentrism: He has a lot to say on all of these topics. Here is just a short quote:

We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting means of production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community. Or when technology is directed primarily to resolving people’s concrete problems, truly helping them live with more dignity and less suffering. Or indeed when the desire to create and contemplate beauty manages to overcome reductionism through a kind of salvation which occurs in beauty and in those who behold it. An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door.

The Pope, Philadelphia, and The Sharing Economy. He’s coming here in September. Philadelphia is a city of 1.5 million people, and nobody knows exactly how many additional people we need to plan for. Here are some facts and figures:

  • In 1979 , John Paul II attracted 1.2 to 2 million people. However, he made stops in half a dozen U.S. cities, whereas Philadelphia is the only stop this time.
  • John Paul II drew 1 million in Rio and 4-5 million in Manila. Francis has drawn 3 million in Rio and 6 million in Manila.
  • The 2008 Phillies World Series victory parade drew 420,000 to 750,000.
  • Obama’s inauguration drew 1.8 million to D.C., which they pulled off without major incident.
  • The U.S. Secret Service will protect the Pope while he is here.
  • The Philadelphia government, after refusing to either legalize or enforce against Airbnb for several years, has realized they can legalize it and tax it for this event, and make a fortune.
  • Rick Santorum, prominent science-denying Catholic presidential candidate from Pennsylvania, says the pope should “leave science to the scientists” and focus on things like morals. The pope has not responded to Rick, but he appears to see a connection between morals and not destroying our home planet.

climate change and the economy

Here’s another modeling study in Ecological Economics that looks at the effects of climate change on the global economy.

A demand-driven growth model involving capital accumulation and the dynamics of greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration is set up to examine macroeconomic issues raised by global warming, e.g. effects on output and employment of rising levels of GHG; offsets by mitigation; relationships among energy use and labor productivity, income distribution, and growth; the economic significance of the Jevons and other paradoxes; sustainable consumption and possible reductions in employment; and sources of instability and cyclicality implicit in the two-dimensional dynamical system. The emphasis is on the combination of biophysical limits and Post-Keynesian growth theory and the qualitative patterns of system adjustment and the dynamics that emerge.

DICE

This article in Ecological Economics reminded me of the DICE model from William Nordhaus at Yale.

In integrated assessment models (IAMs) economic activity leads to global warming, which causes future economic costs. However, typical IAMs do not explicitly represent the role of natural capital. In this paper, the DICE model by Nordhaus (2008) is expanded with a natural capital variable that is affected both by climate change and by depletive effects of economic activity. Due to a synergy between the two effects, the optimal policy of the expanded model features more and earlier abatement of CO2 emissions than DICE. Interestingly, the policy implications are different from what follows if one tries to capture the depletive effects on natural capital by simply reducing factor productivity growth in DICE. Acknowledging considerable uncertainty, simulations show that climate- and savings rate policies from the expanded model are more robust in the long term than policies that do not consider non-climatic depletion effects on natural capital.

The DICE model and a variety of papers related to it are freely available here.

The End Of Plenty: The Race To Feed A Crowded World

Here’s a new entry in the running-out-of-food genre.

I’ve embedded a Fresh Air interview about this book at the bottom of the post. You can find a transcript here. And here’s an excerpt:

And so suddenly, you had an instance where the world began consuming fairly consistently more of these major grains than it was producing, whittling down stockpiles to levels we haven’t seen since the 1970s. So, for example, in the 1970s, we consumed or utilized more grain than we ate only about four years out of the decade. In the drier ’80s, it was about five years. Since 2000, we’ve consumed or utilized more of these feed grains in eight of the first 12 years of the decade. So really, we’re starting to see the demand pressures outstrip our ability to produce food. All this while our yield gains, that have been spectacular since Norman Borlaug introduced the Green Revolution agriculture in the ’50s and ’60s, started to plateau.

So it – just as our demands are starting to rise, we’re starting to plateau in the amount of grain we’re getting per hectare, while things like climate change are really starting to hammer us. So we’re looking at, you know, these major disruptions of our food supply. Now, there was a heat wave in Europe in 2003 that killed, like, 73,000 people in Europe. And yet what – that one made headlines all over the world, but what people didn’t realize was that a third of the wheat and grain and fruit crops were decimated that year.

You know, Russia has had these enormous droughts events where they’ve lost up to a third to half of their crop. Here in the United States, we’ve had 2012-2013, you know, we had the worst drought since the Dust Bowl days – cost us $30 billion. So – and what we’re dealing with is sort of the new normal. You know, the researchers say that now we’re going to have to, because of the increased demand from population growth, increased meat consumption in developing parts of the world, that we’re going to have to double our grain production, our food production, by 2050 to make sure everyone’s reasonably fed. And yet, climate change is just starting to really hammer it down, so we’re in a bit of a pinch.

May 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

  • MIT says there is a critical long term decline in U.S. research and development spending, while spending is increasing in many other parts of the world.
  • Lake Mead, water supply for Las Vegas and several other major western U.S. cities, is continuing to dry up. The normal snowpack in Washington State is almost completely absent, while much of Oregon has declared a state of emergency. As the drought grinds on, recycled water (sometimes derided as “toilet to tap”) is becoming more common in Calfornia. This is not bad in itself – on the contrary it is an example of technological adaptation and closing the loop. It does have a cost in money and energy though, which are resources that are then not available for other things like education or infrastructure or whatever people need. In other words, drought makes us all a little bit poorer.
  • We’ve hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not just some places sometimes but pretty much everywhere, all the time.
  • There may be a “global shortage of aggregate demand“, and most countries are not dealing with it well. In many developed countries, increases in average longevity could lead to a trend of long-term deflation. This could eventually happen in almost all countries.
  • Climate change is going to make extreme weather more frequent and more damaging in U.S. cities. The 2015 El Nino could break records.
  • There just isn’t a lot of positivity or hope for better passenger rail service in the U.S.
  • Human chemical use to combat diseases, bugs, and weeds is causing the diseases, bugs and weeds to evolve fast.
  • Unfortunately there is no foolproof formula to make education work.

Positive stories:

  • Less leisure time could mean less sustainable outcomes, because people just have less time to think and act on their good intentions. I’m putting this in the positive column because although people in the U.S. and many other countries still work long hours, the trend so far is less work and more wealth for human population as a whole over very long periods of time. Obviously the transition is not smooth or painless for all workers all of the time.
  • I found a nice example of meta-analysis, which aggregates findings of a large number of scientific and not-so-scientific studies in a useful form, in this case in the urban planning field.
  • May is time to pull on the urban gardening gloves.
  • Melbourne’s climate change adaptation plan focuses on green open space and urban tree canopy.
  • Painless vaccines may be on the way.
  • The rhetoric on renewable energy is really changing as it starts to seriously challenge fossil fuels on economic grounds. Following the Fukushima disaster, when all Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down, the gap was made up largely with liquid natural gas and with almost no disruption of consumer service. But renewables also grew explosively. Some are suggesting Saudi Arabia is supporting lower oil prices in part to stay competitive with renewables. Wind and solar capacity are growing quickly in many parts of the world. Lester Brown says the tide has turned and renewables are now unstoppable.
  • Commercial autonomous trucks are here.
  • The UK may have hit “peak car“.
  • Seattle is allowing developers to provide car share memberships and transit passes in lieu of parking spaces.

doubling of El Nino

Nature Climate Change says El Nino frequency could double due to climate change. The result: “severely disrupted global weather patterns, affecting ecosystems4, 5, agriculture6, tropical cyclones, drought, bushfires, floods and other extreme weather events worldwide3, 7, 8, 9”

El Niño events are a prominent feature of climate variability with global climatic impacts. The 1997/98 episode, often referred to as ‘the climate event of the twentieth century’1, 2, and the 1982/83 extreme El Niño3, featured a pronounced eastward extension of the west Pacific warm pool and development of atmospheric convection, and hence a huge rainfall increase, in the usually cold and dry equatorial eastern Pacific. Such a massive reorganization of atmospheric convection, which we define as an extreme El Niño, severely disrupted global weather patterns, affecting ecosystems4, 5, agriculture6, tropical cyclones, drought, bushfires, floods and other extreme weather events worldwide3, 7, 8, 9. Potential future changes in such extreme El Niño occurrences could have profound socio-economic consequences. Here we present climate modelling evidence for a doubling in the occurrences in the future in response to greenhouse warming. We estimate the change by aggregating results from climate models in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phases 3 (CMIP3; ref. 10) and 5 (CMIP5; ref. 11) multi-model databases, and a perturbed physics ensemble12. The increased frequency arises from a projected surface warming over the eastern equatorial Pacific that occurs faster than in the surrounding ocean waters13, 14, facilitating more occurrences of atmospheric convection in the eastern equatorial region.

climate change impacts

Here are a couple projections of climate change impacts.

The World Health Organization projects “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress.” This sounds awful, and of course it is. But if you compare this to other preventable causes of death like traffic accidents, smoking and air pollution, you could probably save a lot more lives with a given amount of money focusing on the latter group than exclusively on climate change.

A more sobering projection, at least to me, comes from an organization called DARA.  Although the report includes some truly awful and incomprehensible infographics, there is a very clear graphic on p. 21. Under a “no action” scenario, climate change subtracts about 3% from world economic growth in 2050 and 7-8% in 2100. If you believe technology will lead to a massive acceleration of economic growth, we may be able to afford even this (although our children will be learning about Earth’s original native ecosystems in history class). If long-term growth stays in the sub-5% range where it has been recently, this will mean the decline and fall of civilization as we know it.