Tag Archives: climate change

January 2015 in Review

I’m dropping my “Hope for the Future Index” this year. If anyone out there is particularly attached to it, you can let me know.

Negative trends and predictions:

  • According to Mikhail Gorbachev, “Today’s key global problems – terrorism and extremism, poverty and inequality, climate change, migration, and epidemics – are worsening daily.”
  • Exxon predicts the rate of greenhouse gas emissions will stop growing…by 2030…at a level that will still cause atmospheric concentrations to continue rising. They try to present this as good news, but it is clearly a pathway to collapse if you think about it just a little bit.
  • Johan Rockstrom and company have updated their 2009 planetary boundaries work. The news is not getting any better. 4 of the 9 boundaries are not in the “safe operating space”: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).
  • By several measures, 2014 was the hottest year on record.
  • The Doomsday Clock has moved from 5 minutes to 3 minutes from midnight due to “climate change and efforts to modernize nuclear weapons stockpiles”.

Positive trends and predictions:

  • Taxi medallions have been called the “best investment in America”, but now ride-sharing services may destroy them. I put this in the positive column because I think the new services are better and this is a good example of creative destruction.
  • Remote controlled, robot-assisted surgery is here.
  • The ongoing tumble in oil prices was of course a big story throughout the month. We won’t really be able to say until we look back years from now whether this was just a short-term fluctuation or the reversal of the decades-long trend toward higher energy prices. My guess is the former.
  • It is starting to seem politically possible for the U.S. to strengthen regulation of risk-taking by huge financial firms.
  • Robots can learn to perform physical tasks by watching videos.
  • Howard T. Odum was a genius who invented a “system language” that, if widely understood and applied, might give humanity the tools to solve its problems. Unfortunately, so far it is not widely understood or applied.
  • There may be a realistic chance for a de-escalation of the Middle East nuclear arms race.

more on the western U.S. drought

I knew about low rainfall and depleted groundwater in California, loss of snowpack in Colorado, and the not-at-all-surprising lack of water in Las Vegas. I didn’t know that Oregon is in the early stages of beginning to feel the drought. From Wired:

Snow-starvation might seem like a PR tactic invented by Oregonians to dissuade out-of-staters keen on moving in, but it’s a real problem. Though known for rain, most of the state relies on snowpack to sate its thirst throughout the year. But Oregon’s last three winters have been too warm, and the much of the expected snow has instead fallen as rain, devastating more than just the state’s ski industry. (To be fair to Oregonians, a busted ski season is a huge bummer.) Without melting snow, the rivers are coming up short, and many farmers are having to rely on groundwater. But even in soggy Oregon, there isn’t always enough to go around.”The way water is portioned out in the American west is that if you got here first you get to use it first,” says Kathie Dello, a climate researcher at Oregon State University. When there’s a shortage, then farmers with so-called “junior rights” get their water use cut off early in the season. This has led some farmers to look south for clues about what their future might be like.

All this comes to a head because Oregon is currently the peak influx of any state in the nation. “The biggest fear of most Oregonians that Californians are going to flood the state,” says Dello. (Not a water-flood; a people-flood.) But the fear of being bred out by Golden State refugees might soon be supplanted by an even worse threat: being invaded by California’s drying climate.

The Sixth Extinction

Here’s a half hour Fresh Air interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, who wrote the book The Sixth Extinction. Her descriptions of ocean acidification and amphibian extinction are particularly eye-opening. The whole thing is worth a listen (better to listen than try to read this transcript), but I especially liked this exchange:

GROSS: So this is going to sound like a horrible question, but, you know, I don’t get to see barrier reefs. I don’t get to see coral. I live in the city. What impact does it have on my life if coral reefs can’t grow anymore and if they start declining because of the acidification of the oceans?

KOLBERT: Well, I guess I’d give you two answers. The first answer is, you know, we are effectively undoing, you know, the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world, which has taken tens of millions of years to reach this point. We’re sort of unraveling that. And if that is something that you just say, well, I don’t care about, then I guess I’d say, well, what do you care about?

(LAUGHTER)

KOLBERT: But on another, on a more, you know, personal sort of like, OK, I want to know how – you know, what’s it mean to me, I guess my answer would be we’re not sure. You know, no one’s – we haven’t done this before. You don’t get to sort of see this experiment run over and over again. So we’re doing, it’s often said, a massive experiment on the planet, and we really don’t know what the end point’s going to be.

hottest year on record

Thank you, junky weather site wunderground.com for this headline: 2014: Hottest Year in Recorded Human History. Actually this is a pretty good post with a lot of interesting graphs that you can stare at for a long, long time.

According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, global surface temperatures in 2014 were 1.24°F (0.69°C) above the 20th century average, highest among all years in the 1880-2014 record, easily breaking the previous records of 2005 and 2010 by 0.07°F (0.04°C). Using independent measurement techniques but mostly the same set of surface stations, NASA also rated 2014 as the warmest year on record, as did the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA).

This article talks briefly about the idea that “The rate of global warming since 2000 has been slower than in the 1980s and 1990s…” If you stare at the graphs long enough, you can understand how both of these things are true. From around 1980 to 2000, air temperatures got a lot hotter. From 2000 to now, they have stayed about the same, which is to say constantly very hot. So it is easy for a given year to edge a tiny bit higher than the year before and be the new hottest year ever.

 

Planetary Boundaries 2

Johan Rockstrom and company have published a sequel to their original “planetary boundaries” work. Here’s a summary from the Stockholm Resilience Center:

Four of nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed as a result of human activity, says an international team of 18 researchers in the journal Science (16 January 2015). The four are: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).

Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are what the scientists call “core boundaries”. Significantly altering either of these “core boundaries” would “drive the Earth System into a new state”.

“Transgressing a boundary increases the risk that human activities could inadvertently drive the Earth System into a much less hospitable state, damaging efforts to reduce poverty and leading to a deterioration of human wellbeing in many parts of the world, including wealthy countries,” …

Nine planetary boundaries
1. Climate change
2. Change in biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and species extinction)
3. Stratospheric ozone depletion
4. Ocean acidification
5. Biogeochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles)
6. Land-system change (for example deforestation)
7. Freshwater use
8. Atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms)
9. Introduction of novel entities (e.g. organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics).

And for the video watchers, here is Mr. Rockstrom himself on Youtube:

Gorbachev

Here is Mikhail Gorbachev‘s list of key global problems:

Today’s key global problems – terrorism and extremism, poverty and inequality, climate change, migration, and epidemics – are worsening daily. And, as different as they are, they share one key feature: none has a military solution. Yet political mechanisms to solve these problems are lacking or dysfunctional, even as the continuing global crisis should persuade us to seek – without delay – a new model that can ensure political, economic, and environmental sustainability.
What is his suggestion for a new model?
Years ago, former German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, former US National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and other policymakers proposed creating a Security Council, or Directorate, for Europe. I agreed with their approach. Along the same lines, during Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency, he called for the creation of a mechanism for European preventive diplomacy and mandatory consultations in the event of a threat to any state’s security. Had such a mechanism been established, the worst events in Ukraine could have been averted.

December 2014 in Review

At the end of November, my Hope for the Future Index stood at -2.  I’ll give December posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-12):

  • When you consider roads, streets, and parking, cars take up more space in cities than housing. (-2)
  • The latest on productivity and economic growth: Paul Krugman says there is risk of deflationary spirals in many countries, and the U.S. economy is nothing to right home about. (-1)
  • There are a few legitimate scientists out there warning of sudden, catastrophic climate change in the near future. (-1)
  • Automation (meaning robots and AI) is estimated to threaten 47% of all U.S. jobs. One area of active research into automation: weaponry. Only one negative point because there are also some positive implications. (-1)
  • Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood is a depressing but entertaining reminder that bio-apocalypse is possible. (-2)
  • Before the recent rains, the drought in California was estimated to be a once-in-1200-years event. Major droughts in major food growing regions are not good news, especially with depletion of groundwater, and loss of snowpack and glaciers also in the news. (-2)
  • William Lazonick argues provides evidence that the rise in the gospel of shareholder value correlated with the growth slowdown that started in the 1970s – his explanation is that before that, retained earnings were a cornerstone of R&D and innovation in the economy. Loss of a point because it’s good to hear a dissenting voice, but the economy is still run by disciples of the profits for now. (-1)
  • Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are warning that the U.S. financial system may still be dangerously unstable. (-2)

Positive trends and predictions (+6):

  • There are some new ideas out there for teaching computer programming, even to young children: Loco Robo, Scratch, and for-profit “programming boot camps”. (+1)
  • You can now get genetically customized probiotics for your vagina. (+1)
  • There are plenty of ideas and models out there for safe, walkable streets, some as simple as narrower lanes. But as I point out, the Dutch and Danish designs are pretty much perfect and should just be adopted everywhere. (+1)
  • I linked to a new video depicting Michael Graves’s idea for “linear cities“. These could be very sustainable ecological if they meant the rest of the landscape is left in a mostly natural condition. I am not as sure about social sustainability – done wrong, they could be like living in a mall or subway station. This was one of my all-time more popular posts. (+1)
  • There are new algorithms out there for aggregating and synthesizing large amounts of scientific literature. Maybe this can increase the returns to R&D and help boost innovation. (+1)
  • There will be several international conferences in 2015 with potential to make real progress on financial stability and sustainability. The phrase “deep decarbonization” has been uttered. (+1)
  • Some evidence suggests that the oceans have absorbed a lot of global warming over the past decade or so, preventing the more extreme range of land surface warming that had been predicted. This is a good short- to medium-term trend, but it may not continue in the long term. (+0)

change during December 2014: -12 + 6 = -6

Hope for the Future Index (end of December 2014): -2 -6 = -8

best of best of 2014

This time of year, you pretty much have to do a “best of” post. I’ll get to a review of some of my own posts eventually, but in the meantime here are a handful of “best of” posts. I actually don’t know if they are the best of the best of, but they are just a few that caught my eye.

  1. from Wired, The Best and Worst in a Tumultuous Year for Science: Despite the annoyingly un-reader-friendly slide show format, there are some serious eye openers here, such as synthesis of completely new, man-made DNA base pairs; custom-designed monkeys with a “gene-editing system”; a potentially huge breakthrough on diabetes; and a study concluding that the number – not the number of species, but the actual number of wild animals – has decreased by half in the last 40 years.
  2. Longreads Best of 2014: Business Writing: This links to some great articles on education reform, the status and future of Microsoft, and Airbnb. But be warned, these are some seriously long reads!
  3. Economist Money talks podcast, End of year edition. I would always rather read the transcript, but still this goes through some major trends from the year like oil prices, financial regulation, Uber and Lyft, and is worth a listen.
  4. from Wired again, The Best Science Visualizations of the Year. Some interesting ones depict “genetic activity of ocean bacteria”, loss of Arctic summertime sea ice, and the origin and early spread of AIDS.
  5. From Urbanful, Film’s 6 coolest (fictional) hydrid cities. Yes, the Los Angeles version of Blade Runner makes it. So do Gotham City and Metropolis, which are described as “New York by night” and “New York by day”. Finally, “Big Hero 6, the first collaboration between Disney and Marvel, takes place in the futuristic city of San Fransokyo, a fusion of San Francisco, California and Tokyo, Japan.”
  6. One more from Wired: The Craziest Sci-Fi Fantasies That Got Closer to Reality This Year. There’s plenty of Star Wars vs. Star Trek here, but my favorites are that you can now get your dog cloned in South Korea, and a “cheetah robot”.

Happy new year!

sea vs. land warming

According to a guy named Ka-Kit Tung, we have seen less land surface warming than expected in the last 15 years because the heat has gone into the oceans instead. He thinks the trend of land surface warming will eventually resume. Is he worried about some sudden reversal where the heat trapped in the ocean would suddenly be released? No.

Nobody knows how long the current pause will last. Nonetheless, at some point, the natural cycles will shift; the oceans will cease to absorb the bulk of the planet’s warming; and surface temperatures will begin to climb again. When they do, we can expect the increase to resume the rapid pace observed during the late twentieth century, when surface temperature rose by about 0.17 degrees Celsius every ten years.

In the meantime, whether the overall risk to our environment has been reduced by the pause remains an open question. Some argue that what went down will eventually come back up. The sloshing back and forth of warm and cold waters – El Niño and La Niña – in the shallow layer of the equatorial Pacific Ocean will continue to produce fluctuations in surface temperatures every year. Over longer periods, however, the risk that the heat currently stored in the deep ocean will resurface is remote.

Who is this guy? He is “a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, is Professor of Applied Mathematics and an adjunct professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington.”

If we are saying some end of year thank yous, I would just like to say, thank you, ocean, for keeping our planet habitable for another year.