Author: Bryan Walker

Waving, not drowning (yet)

I found myself hesitating over reporting a further attempt on the part of Oxfam to draw attention to the increasing plight of populations in poorer countries faced with the early effects of climate change. In this case it is Oxfam New Zealand’s Wave of Change campaign, highlighting climate impacts in the Pacific region.

Why was I hesitating?  Fear of overdoing a theme? Recognition that there is not absolute scientific certainty that a particular event can be attributed to climate change? Caution about compassion fatigue? Foreseeing reactions from some that this is just another begging strategy devised by the pesky poor? A general feeling of hopelessness about the likelihood of rich nations taking a sustained interest in the plight of others, even when their responsibility for that plight is established? Not wanting to be seen as a bleeding heart liberal?

 

All these elements, and others, were discernible when I interrogated myself. None of them justified ignoring the Oxfam news release sitting in my inbox.  All the more when I read George Monbiot’s latest Guardian article. His argument is more generally political than climate change related, and I don’t propose discussing it here in those wider terms. But his conclusion was entirely relevant to this post:

“People with strong intrinsic values must cease to be embarrassed by them. We should argue for the policies we want not on the grounds of expediency but on the grounds that they are empathetic and kind; and against others on the grounds that they are selfish and cruel. In asserting our values we become the change we want to see.”

So let me write briefly about the Wave of Change campaign. It’s timed as the Cancun conference comes into view.  There appears to be some slight hope that Cancun will see advance on the transfer of finance and technology from developed countries to help developing countries adapt to climate change. Oxfam intends that New Zealand politicians and negotiators are well aware of the seriousness of the need of our Pacific Island neighbours in this respect. The declaration opening the short video on their website:

“People of the Pacific are among those to be hit first and worst by climate change.”

This isn’t just about the future danger of islands disappearing as a result of sea level rise, as Oxfam’s Coordinator Anne-Marie Mujica pointed out when launching the campaign:

“Right now people are struggling with salt poisoning their staple food crops and polluting their drinking water.”

A Pacific Conference of Churches spokesperson underlines this when he  speaks on the video of the increase in the severity and frequency of extreme weather patterns.

“Salt water is now seeping into the food crops and the drinking water. Tropical storms are more fierce.”

One woman puts it simply:

“Seawater is coming. Every high tide I have water in my front yard.”

The campaign seeks a fair deal. Two Pacific Islanders on the video say it:

“Our Pacific urgently requires a fair deal on climate change.”

“We need to protect our Pacific regions. We need to speak out loud and clear for a fair and ambitious deal on climate change.”

Fair deal is the right note to strike since issues of justice are clearly involved when the effects of  emissions are felt by those least responsible for them.   One woman speaker says:

“Climate change is not just about science; climate change is about human rights.”

These are island voices. People alarmed by what they see happening where they live and asking for attention and fair treatment. Auckland is the most appropriate city in the developed world for their voice to be raised loud and clear.

Awareness-raising events taking place around Auckland this week are detailed on this Facebook page.

One of the campaign activities suggested is writing to the NZ Prime Minister. He should be open to the plea. New Zealand has signed up to the Copenhagen Accord and consequently no doubt expects to make a proportionate contribution to the funding targets outlined in that Accord to assist developing countries adapt to and mitigate climate change.

Last word to Oxfam’s Mujica:

“New Zealand may be a small country, but we’re a big player in the international climate talks. Our negotiators lead, or are members of, important working groups. It’s time to show the government that its citizens want them to do more to protect our Pacific.”

Money (that’s what I want)

I participated a few days ago in a Friends of the Earth urgent email action concerning US stances on the proposed Global Climate Fund through which developed countries will give financial assistance to developing countries in tackling the impacts of climate change. Friends of the Earth were alarmed by the US push for the management of the Fund to be handled by the World Bank rather than come under the aegis of the Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

They noted dryly that the World Bank has more experience causing climate change than preventing and addressing it.

”Despite the climate crisis and its devastating impact on developing countries, the World Bank loaned more money for coal in 2010 than it ever has before, with a 40-fold increase over the last 5 years”.

They also consider that the World Bank falls short on the important issues of democratic governance, sustainability, poverty alleviation, human rights and environmental integrity.

The other US position which Friends of the Earth took exception to was the threat at the Tianjin talks to block the establishment of a Global Climate Fund this year if US demands for more actions from developing countries like China are not met. They pointed out that the threat is unfair given that the US is the country most responsible for causing the climate crisis and among the world’s least active in addressing it.

Oxfam was another NGO last week expressing concern about the management of the Global Climate Fund.  They issued a report Righting Two Wrongs:  Making a New Global Climate Fund Work for Poor People which called for a new Fund to be set up at the UN climate summit in Cancun in December. In the Copenhagen Accord last year developed countries committed to a goal of mobilising US$100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries. Oxfam’s concern is that as much of the money as possible should be channelled through a single fund and that the fund should be “fairly governed, accountable and accessible to the groups, including women, who are on the front lines of climate change.”

Oxfam wants us to learn from the experience of recent years which shows that poor people in developing countries are not receiving an appropriate share of the climate funds disbursed. They are already having to adapt to severe effects of climate change and are not being supported as they should be. Currently money is being applied much more to mitigation in developing countries than to adaptation.

The report is typically detailed in its suggestions as to how the Fund should be set up and managed, and while it wants the populations most affected by climate change impacts to be much more involved in the process it also recognises the interest of the donor countries in being assured that the money is used transparently and wisely.

“New and additional” are the words the Copenhagen accord used to describe the funding they committed to. Some will no doubt try to simply divert existing development aid to climate projects, but they will have no basis to defend such attempts The new money will add up to a similar amount to that already spent on development aid, and Oxfam considers that at least 50% of it should be allocated to adaptation in vulnerable developing countries.

A sense of the urgency Oxfam feels behind the measured statements of their report was well communicated by their senior climate change advisor Kelly Dent when announcing its release:

“For many people around the world, this has been a year from sheer hell. We’ve seen floods, droughts, fires, storms and other extreme weather events that will only get worse as climate change intensifies. Some of the poorest people in the world have seen their crops wiped out and livelihoods destroyed – but we still haven’t caught on to their needs. Will we sow the seeds of resilience now or pay the price of failure later?”

[The Fabs]

Fixing the Sky

Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia Studies in International and Global History)

The notion that if it comes to the worst in climate change we can fall back on geoengineering  receives little credence in James Rodger Fleming’s new book Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate control. Fleming is a science historian and in the claims of some of today’s would-be climate engineers he sees a continuity with a long history of human attempts to control weather and climate. Most of the book traverses that history, which he urges we should understand and heed as we consider some of the proposed modern-day technological fixes to counter the effects of global warming.

He opens with the Greek myth of Phaeton who begged his father Helios to allow him to drive the chariot of the sun for one day but proved unable to hold the reins and keep to the middle course which Helios advised as safest and best. Only the intervention of Zeus with a fatal lightning bolt saved Earth from the consequent devouring flame. Fleming has something to say about the middle course when he gets to our own day, but in between he has many stories to tell in which hubris and ineptitude are combined, supported by “largely pathological” science, by opportunistic appeals to new technologies, and by “the false sense that macro-engineering will solve more problems than it creates”.

Rainmaking figures early and large in the book’s narrative. The first US government-employed meteorologist, James Espy (1795-1860), is well regarded in the history of science, but strayed from the scientific mainstream when promoting his  idea that significant rains of commercial importance could be generated by cutting and burning vast tracts of forest. Fortunately his grandiose plans were not supported. Other scientific rain kings of the 19th century used a variety of explosive means, sometimes with public funding, with very uncertain results. Fleming describes them as altruistic monomaniacs with a vision of a prosperous and healthy world if precipitation could be controlled. Not charlatans, but sincere albeit deluded. However charlatans did appear on the scene, mixing secret chemicals, preying on misguided hope and gullibility, and the book devotes an entertaining chapter to them.

One of the ironic characters of the story as it carries into the 20th century is Irving Langmuir (1881-1957), Nobel Laureate in chemistry and associate director of research at General Electric. Fleming comments that, brilliant though Langmuir was in chemistry, his extensive work in weather control exemplified his own warnings about pathological possibilities of science gone awry. Langmuir argued in a 1953 seminar that science conducted at the limits of observation or measurement may become pathological if the participants make excessive claims for their results. Yet he himself made highly dubious and unsupported claims for the efficacy of cloud seeding on a large scale. His biographer comments that he simply “did not appreciate the complexity of meteorology as a science”.

Weather control has had particular interest for the military; their entry into the issue brings “a darkening mood”. The book covers a variety of involvements, from the need to disperse fog from British airfields during the conflicts of WW2 (involving a massive and successful use of fire) to the “sordid episode” of attempted rainmaking during the Vietnam war to try to impede the passage of North Vietnam soldiers along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A UN Convention now prohibits military environmental modification techniques, though only if the effects are “widespread, long-lasting and severe”, a qualification insisted on by the US.

“Promethean possibilities” of climate tinkering using digital computing, satellite remote sensing, and nuclear power were part of the mid-20th century consideration of the subject. The scope of some of the dreams is startling – mega-construction projects to free the Arctic Ocean of ice or to lower the Mediterranean Sea, climate engineering to control weather vagaries.  Fleming describes many of them, and the seriousness with which some were taken, recording with some relief the words of Harry Wexler, chief of scientific services at the US Weather Bureau. Wexler was interested in purposeful intervention, but warned that it contained “the inherent risk of irremediable harm to our planet of side-effects counterbalancing the possible short-term benefits”.

Against the background of his “long and chequered history of weather and climate control populated by a colourful cast of dreamers and losers” Fleming moves to a consideration of the geoengineering proposals of today. Not surprisingly he views them with a jaundiced eye. He doesn’t deny the seriousness of human-caused climate change, but he sees little to recommend the various climate engineering schemes put forward. Indeed they are jointly characterised as “largely fantastic”.

None escape that characterisation. Aerosols, arrays of reflective material in space, iron fertilisation of the ocean, are readily swept aside. But it was a little surprising to see carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and biochar similarly treated. Admittedly there is much uncertainty surrounding CCS and it is more talked of than practised. It may indeed turn out to be impracticable, but it seems a little premature to condemn it as a possibility.  Biochar as a form of sequestration he claims would mark the end of composting and would generate a massive amount of the known carcinogen benzoapyrene.  I don’t know about the carcinogen, but I fail to see where the end of composting is involved. Klaus Lackner’s artificial trees are discussed in some detail and described as untenable.

Fleming advocates the “middle course” in dealing with climate change. That means reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases and adaptation to the measure of changing climate that we can no longer avoid.  The risks associated with moving into geoengineering measures are too great. To those who ask if that risk is worse than the risk of global warming he replies that it just might be, “especially if we neglect the historical precedents and cultural implications”. However he speaks approvingly of colleagues who support middle course solutions but also advocate responsible geoengineering research, so presumably his rejection is not as total as it sometimes seems. That was reassuring because as a reader I sometimes wondered whether he was fully cognisant of the magnitude of the threat from global warming.

However we surely need to be cautioned against those who rush to the grand fixes. Fleming is right to strongly reject economist William Nordhaus’s conclusion that “geoengineering produces major benefits whereas emissions stabilisation and climate stabilisation are projected to be worse than inaction”. He also does well to remind us of the inadequacy of “back-of-the-envelope” calculations to support geoengineering proposals. And to point to the fact that those who understand the climate system best are most humbled by its complexity and are among the least likely to claim that they have simple, safe, or cheap ways to fix it.

His book is often fascinating reading. Its comedic treatment of the history which comprises most of its content is nuanced and satisfyingly complex. What initially struck me as a lighthearted survey turned rapidly into a rewarding engagement with a gallery of characters, many of them intelligent and able, whose mistakes and failings we may learn from and hopefully not replicate.

[Buy at Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com, Book Depository (UK, free shipping worldwide).]

Days of future passed

The idea that a rise in global temperature of no more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels is a safe target for the world to aim for is widely accepted in political forums where the measures needed to stay within that range are considered. Not universally accepted though. The small island states and many others of the least developed countries already impacted by climate change are adamant that 1.5 degrees is the highest rise that should be considered safe.

Indeed one wonders what the reasoning of the more powerful nations has been in settling on the two degree target. When Mark Lynas trawled through predictions in scientific journals for his book Six Degrees (review here) he found plenty to disturb at two degrees, including  possible desertification and abandonment of agriculture over millions of square kilometres in the US, an extremely hot and drought-ridden Mediterranean Europe, an ice-free Arctic ocean with implications difficult to measure, the bleaching and likely death of many coral reefs, major loss of food production in India, serious population displacement in Bangladesh.

Now Chris Turney (pictured) and his University of Exeter colleague Richard Jones have reported their attempt to reconstruct the temperature during the Last Interglacial between 130,000 and 116,000 years ago. Their paper is published in the Journal of Quaternary Science.  Turney explains its significance in his blog, where he writes:

“Temperatures appear to have been more than 5˚C warmer in polar regions while the tropics only warmed marginally; strikingly similar to recent trends. Not only this, but taken together, the world appears to have been some 1.5˚C warmer when compared to the 1961 to 1990 average. If we take into account the rise in temperature that has happened since industrialization, we find the Last Interglacial was around 1.9˚C warmer. Furthermore, this period also shows the warming in the Indian and Southern oceans took place before that of the northern hemisphere, suggesting these regions may cause further global warming beyond that directly forced by increasing greenhouse gas levels.”

It’s important to recognise what impacts that level of temperature rise brought. Turney points out that we know there was a dramatic decrease in polar sea ice coverage while large parts of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melted. Critically, he says, the warmer temperatures appear to have helped global sea levels become some 6.6 to 9.4 metres higher than today, with a rate of rise of between 60 to 90 millimetres per decade, more than double that recently observed.

Let’s return to today’s “safe target” notion of no more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels.  Here’s one of the key messages from the EU reference document explaining the scientific background for that target:

“Global mean temperature increases of up to 2°C (relative to pre-industrial levels) are likely to allow adaptation to climate change for many human systems at globally acceptable economic, social and environmental costs. However, the ability of many natural ecosystems to adapt to rapid climate change is limited and may be exceeded before a 2°C temperature increase is reached.”

If Turney and Jones’ estimation of the temperature in the Last Interglacial is correct it suggests that  sea levels will rise significantly higher than anticipated. How a sea level rise six to nine metres higher than today could be adapted to “at globally acceptable economic, social and environmental costs” rather beggars the imagination.

So far as Turney is concerned, “The inevitable conclusion is emission targets will have to be lowered further still. Not a popular message.”

It has been apparent for some time that ice sheets are showing signs of less stability than was expected. It is not news that sea level rise this century looks likely to be higher than the IPCC estimates (a possibility recognised in the IPCC report itself). But what Turney and Jones add is evidence that the past may be offering us a specific guide as to what sea level rise we would need to  prepare for if we allowed a two degree temperature rise.

Turney is a geologist whose interest is in researching the past, particularly in relation to climate. His excellent book Ice, Mud and Blood was reviewed on Hot Topic last year. He has continued to figure from time to time on the site because of his connection with the New Zealand firm Carbonscape. We noted his recognition last year by the Sunday Times as one of the modern-day heroes of science and technology.

He finishes his blog with these words:

“Crucially, the scientific and policy implications of the Last Interglacial demonstrate it pays to look back to yesteryear. As the great poet and playwright Thomas Eliot once wrote, ‘Time present and time past, are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past.’ Fingers crossed these words are heeded.”

Fingers crossed indeed. Against the seemingly unstoppable drive to exploit fossil fuels we need some signs of hope that society’s leaders are going to wake up to the dangers we are heading for. There are glimmers, as I pointed to in my post yesterday, perhaps even gleams if William Hague is representative, but a far wider section of our political and economic leadership needs to become fully acquainted with the lessons from the past.

Gareth adds (because he was going to blog this, but Bryan got his post in first)]: The period that Turney and Jones are considering — the last interglacial (LIG), better known (at least to me, though Turney’s blog provides other names) as the Eemian, is interesting because it provides an example of where we may be heading. During the LIG CO2 peaked at under 300 ppm, and sea levels were 6m to 9m higher than present, with rates of sea level rise of at least 6cm to 9cm per decade. The last time CO2 was at 300 ppm was before Dave Keeling started taking accurate measurements in the late 50s (it was about 312 ppm in 1958, and we’re nudging 390 ppm at present). In other words, the equilibrium response (that is, the long-term — century to millennial scale — response, when the oceans and ice sheets have had a chance to catch up) to the greenhouse gas levels more than 50 years ago is sea level at least 6 metres higher than now — and as Turney and Jones find, a global average temperature 1.9ºC above pre-industrial. The 2ºC “target” being bandied around as “achievable” (50% odds only) at 450 ppm is likely to be a mirage — it might hold true in the short term, but 450 ppm commits us to something well beyond the LIG/Eemian, when, as you will not need reminding, there were crocs and hippos in the Thames. When James Hansen was looking at long term targets, he selected 350 ppm as compatible with a planet with ice sheets at both poles. Turney and Jones synthesis of data on the Eemian suggests that if that’s our goal we need to be looking at 300 ppm — and a much bigger task. Over to Bill…

Turney, C. S. and Jones, R. T. (2010), Does the Agulhas Current amplify global temperatures during super-interglacials?. Journal of Quaternary Science, 25: 839–843. doi: 10.1002/jqs.1423

[Moody Blues]

Anyway, anyhow, anywhere

Two modestly hopeful signs from the political world struck me when reading today’s Guardian news. One was the opening of the climate change talks at Tainjin in China aimed at refining possible goals for the Cancun talks in November-December. The comment of Oxfam observer Kelly Dent attracted my attention. Oxfam is a careful watchdog of climate negotiations.

“It was good, I was mildly surprised. At the risk of sounding like an optimist, what I saw today was a willingness to sit down and start working.”

Jonathan Watts’ report notes that the opening day formalities saw none of the histrionics and posturing that marked much of the Copenhagen conference. Expectations among the delegates are considerably lower than they were last year. A comprehensive, binding deal is not expected in Mexico, but some expressed hopes for progress on the protection of forests and the transfer of finance and technology to help developing countries adapt to climate change.

Continue reading “Anyway, anyhow, anywhere”