Author: Bryan Walker

Global Warring

Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map

Geopolitics don’t stop because climate change and other environmental pressures confront the global society.  Cleo Paskal in her book Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map offers little hope of human societies setting aside their differences to confront the common threat. Not that she’s sceptical of climate change – quite the opposite – but as a Chatham House Fellow she has a lively sense of how rooted we are in our perceived national and economic interests and how that may play out as climate change begins to bite. It won’t preclude co-operation, but it won’t exactly facilitate it either.

The first section of her book looks at the internal vulnerability of the US and other Western countries to environmental change. The West is foolish to consider itself relatively insulated from the worst effects. Katrina was a good example of the unpreparedness of the US for the sort of environmental crises likely to become more common. Damages were estimated at more than $100 billion, in a year when the spending on the Iraq war amounted to $87.3 billion. The US is not preparing itself adequately. The key organisation, the US Army Corps of Engineers failed in New Orleans. The Corps is used by politicians to steer jobs and money to their constituents, and lacks executive-branch oversight. The National Flood Insurance Program, which steps in when private insurers deem areas too risky to cover, is resulting in people continuing to live in hurricane pathways and flood zones. The military is not trained to manage repeated major domestic disasters. Voters are not made aware of some of the already unavoidable impacts of environmental change.

Europe too has its set of problems. The UK government is far ahead of the pack when it comes to assessing specific climate impacts such as flooding, but is so far not tackling them.  Food and energy security are looming as major problems.  Given the existing vulnerabilities in the developed world she finds it unsurprising that stability may soon hinge on the environment.  Her complaint throughout the section is that shortsighted, narrow policies are undermining a home front threatened by climate and other environmental change. Those policies are also eroding the West’s position in the global balance of power.

Paskal devotes the next section of her book to changes in the Arctic environment. They may be a tragedy for the people trying to live there, but others see opportunities for resource extraction and for the much shorter transportation routes opening up for travel between the Atlantic and the Pacific.  The Russian Northeast Passage has been clearing faster than the Canadian Northwest passage, providing Russia with a head start and bringing Russia and Asia much closer to each other. Melting in the frozen tundra poses infrastructure problems, some of which may be eased by a switch from pipelines to tankers. However most of her attention is focused on the Northwest passage and the failure of the US to support Canada’s bid for control over it. She sees the US preference for an international strait as bound up with the ambiguity with which the US has long regarded their northern neighbour, and thinks it runs the risk of destabilising the West. Until Canada’s claim to the Passage is recognised and defendable it is difficult for Canada to talk to other countries, including Russia, on an equal basis about the orderly development of the opportunities offered by the Passage.  Instability threatens as a consequence.

The book moves to a lively section on the Asian giants India and China. Both face very serious environmental threats and both are likely to play an increasingly strong geopolitical role globally.  Paskal differentiates the two countries’ handling of environmental problems. India benefits from grassroots initiatives but lacks cohesive central support. However with good management the author sees the possibility of India ending up more resilient to environmental change than many other great powers, including China. The Chinese Communist Party applies its massive levers of state to challenges, sometimes without a real grasp of on-the-ground realities; it has political will but lacks ground-level information to assess the real vulnerabilities and flexible and innovative policies to counter them.  Increasingly both countries will, like the West, try to shore up home deficiencies by securing resources and geopolitical support from abroad. If the two countries muddle along allowing their competing interests to interfere with critical issues such as environmental change, there will be economic, political and security costs for everyone, including the West. Paskal considers various loose alliance arrangements which would avoid this. She has worked in India and puts some hope in the West discovering more respect for India and more ways of cooperating with her than heretofore. That’s her preferred path towards stability in a time of change.

What of the states which disappear beneath the rising sea?  In a section partly given to political discussion of the manoeuverings of the powers for influence in Pacific nations Paskal asks whether the ocean territory of drowned states can remain in the ownership of their dispersed population.  She discusses the possibilities in international law, which she acknowledges at base is largely a matter of international politics. Bangladesh has already achieved a fixed coastline under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Retaining ownership of the exclusive economic zone by those whose homeland has disappeared could soften the impact of relocation, allowing the refugees to come into a new home as a kind of state within a state with something to offer their host, rather than as downtrodden and dislocated. The Maldives and India is offered as an example which could work to the benefit of both.

This is a book about adaptation to environmental change. Not that the author is ruling out mitigation of worsening effects, but she recognises that the impacts already being felt or in the pipeline represent a pervasive attack on the status quo. It is her view that no country is prepared.  Sudden shocks can find the developed nations among the most wanting of protective measures. She compares the shambles of Katrina in the US with the way Mumbai coped with a great flood around the same time, and the relatively successful evacuation procedures in China in the summer of 2006 when eight typhoons hit the southeast coast. Nations can learn from one another.  Economies which don’t have the political will and don’t come up with good basic engineering, long-term planning, and sustained funding, will suffer. More environmentally adaptive countries will rise, as will countries with less expensive infrastructures that can take hits and still stay functional, like India.

Paskal’s book is spirited and interesting. Her background in journalism probably contributes to the light touch with which she conveys some potentially heavy geopolitical material.  Her insistence that climate and other environmental change demands a much higher level of preparedness than we have yet seen is plain commonsense for anyone understands the changes that are currently well under way.  Her perceptions of how those changes will also help shape future geopolitical developments are worth attention, though I can’t help fearing that the disruptions may be more profound than she or any of us would wish.

IPCC’s Pachauri fights back

“We have a very apt saying in Hindi, which essentially translates as: ‘When a jackal is threatened, he starts moving toward the city.’ In other words, he becomes more visible. I think some of these guys are speaking out volubly because they read the writing on the wall.”

That was IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri in an interview nearly a year ago, speaking of the increase in the decibel level of contrarians.  Even so he was probably not prepared for the strength of the attack they mounted as the year proceeded.

But he is more than ready to defend the IPCC against the attacks it has been receiving.  The Guardian has just published a forthright article written by him.

“To dismiss the implications of climate change based on an error about the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting is an act of astonishing intellectual legerdemain. Yet this is what some doubters of climate change are claiming. But the reality is that our understanding of climate change is based on a vast and remarkably sound body of science – and is something we distort and trivialise at our peril.”

He reminds readers of the scale of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). The IPCC mobilised 450 scientists from all over the world to write it. An additional 800 contributing authors gave specialised inputs and about 2,500 expert reviewers provided 90,000 comments.

“In this mammoth task, which yielded a finished product of nearly 3,000 pages, there was a regrettable error indicating the Himalayan glaciers were likely to melt by the year 2035. This mistake has been acknowledged by the IPCC.”

He reaffirms that the major thrust of the report’s findings provides overwhelming evidence that warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and draws attention to our responsibility to ensure that future generations do not suffer the consequences.

“We cannot ignore the fact that the impacts of climate change, which are based on actual observations, are leading to ‘increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global sea levels’…

“Altered frequencies and intensities of extreme weather, together with sea level rise, are expected to have mostly adverse effects on natural and human systems. Even more serious is the finding that human-induced warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible. For instance, partial loss of ice sheets on polar land could imply metres of sea level rise, major changes in coastlines and inundation of low-lying areas, with the greatest effects in river deltas and low-lying islands.”

He acknowledges that the choices for stakeholders and the economy are difficult, but they should not ignore the IPCC’s findings, which are the work of thousands of scientists from across the world who “have worked diligently and in an objective and transparent manner to provide scientific evidence for action to meet the growing challenge of climate change.” Ignoring those findings “would lead to impacts that impose larger costs than those required today to stabilise the Earth’s climate.”

Pachauri moves on and presumably refers to Senator James Inhofe when he speaks of

“… the effort of some in positions of power and responsibility to indict dedicated scientists as “climate criminals”. I sincerely hope the world is not witnessing a new form of persecution of those who defy conventional ignorance and pay a terrible price for their scientifically valid beliefs.”

Inhofe is a long-standing climate sceptic, who last month called for a criminal investigation of climate scientists. He published a minority report from the Senate committee on environment and public works that claimed climate scientists involved with the controversy over emails from the University of East Anglia “violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, may have violated federal laws”. He named the scientists, who included Phil Jones and Keith Briffa from the University of Esast Anglia and Peter Stott of the UK Met Office.  Michael Mann was, of course, among the US scientists named.

Mann, in response, as reported in the Guardian, has quoted President Harry Truman way back in 1948 in the dark age of McCarthyism:   ’Continuous research by our best scientists … may be made impossible by the creation of an atmosphere in which no man feels safe against the public airing of unfounded rumours, gossip, and vilification.’

Mann added:

“I fear that is precisely the sort of atmosphere that is being created, and sure, it impacts research. The more time scientists have to spend fending off these sorts of attacks and dealing with this sort of nonsense, the less time is available to them to actually do science, and to push the forefront of our knowledge forward. Perhaps that is the intent?”

But to return to Pachauri.  He has not had an easy time himself in the wake of the acknowledgement of the error in the report. I have no interest in the personal accusations made against him, but it’s worth setting the record straight about his “voodoo science” comment.  It was not made in relation to the discovery of the error in the IPCC report, but in relation to a discussion paper authored last year by a retired official of the Geological Survey of India which said it would be premature to state the glaciers were retreating as a result of periodic climate variation until many centuries of observation were available. It concluded by raising the possibility that the retreat of Himalayan glaciers today was a delayed reaction to the Medieval Warm Period rather than a response to current warming.

However almost anything that Pachauri has ever said or done will become grist to the denialist mill. It is good to see him seemingly not dismayed and steadily persisting in conveying the message that there is every reason to trust the IPCC reports and it would be a dereliction of responsibility not to heed their warning.

Defending the indefensible: Guardian responds to RC critics

RealClimate has given James Randerson, editor of the Guardian’s environmental website, the opportunity to respond to two RealClimate posts on the Guardian’s “investigation” into the hacked CRU emails.  I found his response disappointing. He points to the Guardian’s climate change credentials. They are certainly for the most part good, though in view of the overwhelming scientific evidence that ought not to be remarkable in a newspaper pitched to an educated readership. However in this time of intellectual chaos in the media’s relationship to science we have to be thankful for what we ought to be able to take for granted.

But Randerson doesn’t seem to comprehend that the series of Fred Pearce’s articles on the emails frequently fell far short of the journalistic standards the Guardian normally sets. He speaks of the strong public demand for an in-depth journalistic account of what the emails tell us about how climate scientists operate, and paints the Guardian’s response as unparalleled.

“No other media organisation has come close to producing such a comprehensive and carefully researched attempt to get to the bottom of the emails affair.”

I wrote about one of those “carefully researched” articles here on Hot Topic. On the sketchiest of evidence, and a prejudiced reading at that, it managed to imply that Phil Jones and Michael Mann were guilty of improper behaviour, damaging to the publication of scientific papers.

Randerson goes on to provide a justification for the exercise:

“…only by looking thoroughly under every rock can those of us pressing for action on climate change maintain with confidence that the scientific case remains sound. Fred’s investigation shows that confidence is indeed well placed…”

Thank you Fred, but we knew that already.  Why, along the way to this conclusion, did you feel the need to throw doubt on the integrity of some of the scientists doing the work?  Well, says Randerson, there were “troubling issues” in the emails, and if you can’t see that there’s something wrong with you:

“… but to claim that the emails do not throw up some troubling issues looks like the inward-looking mentality that is sometimes (perhaps understandably) expressed in the emails themselves.”

Randerson then claims four significant results from the Guardian investigation. One is the matter of the siting of Chinese rural weather stations that figured in a paper Jones wrote in 1990 (twenty years ago!). It’s a complicated story, which I won’t try to retell here, but Jones has since said that he now realises that some of the stations had moved their sites and that he would think about the possibility of submitting a correction.

Randerson claims credit:

“To our knowledge, no other media organisation or blogger had used the emails to shed light on the controversy over the 1990 paper so a correction would not be on the table without the Pearce investigation.”

Randerson’s second claim also relates to the same highly damaging article on the China temperature data, in which Pearce wrote:

“It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming.”

Randerson doesn’t reassert this, but denies that they were supporting the climate sceptic Douglas Keenan in their pursuit of the question.  They weren’t in as many words, but in terms of the general tone of the article most readers could have been forgiven for thinking they were.

His third claim is that in spite of having made three corrections to their original article on the hockey stick graph this did not change the main point the article was making, which was that in 1999, Mann’s hockey-stick reconstruction was the subject of intense academic debate amongst climate scientists. When I first read the article it seemed a good deal more slanted than that.  The sub-heading reads: “Pioneering graph used by IPCC to illustrate a compelling story of man-made climate change raises questions about transparency.”

Randerson’s final claim related to the Freedom of Information Act, which he describes as a serious issue worthy of discussion and debate.  So it is, provided the discussion includes the fact that the requests for information were clearly orchestrated and overwhelming in their demands.  That deniers’ tactic has obviously spread to the US.   In a recent email James Hansen writes:

“We are continually burdened by sweeping FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, which reduce our ability to do science and write it up (perhaps this is their main objective), a waste of tax-payer money.  Our analyses are freely available on the GISS web site as is the computer program used to carry out the analysis and the data sets that go into the program…

“The material that we supplied to some recent FOIA requests was promptly posted on a website, and within minutes after that posting someone found that one of the e-mails included information about how to access Makiko Sato’s password-protected research directory on the GISS website…Within 90 minutes, and before anyone else who saw this password information thought it worth reporting to GISS staff, most if not all of the material in Makiko’s directory was purloined by someone using automated “web harvesting” software and re-posted elsewhere on the web. The primary material consisted of numerous drafts of webpage graphics and article figures made in recent years.

“It seems that a primary objective of the FOIA requestors and the “harvesters” is discussions that they can snip and quote out of context.”

Back to Randerson on RealClimate. He considers that by inviting comment from qualified people on the email articles the Guardian has succeeded in creating a definitive account of the emails and the intention is to expand it into a book.

“This represents an extraordinary commitment to transparency that we believe is unique in journalism. What other news organisation would open itself to direct criticism in this way including, for example, annotations that read “this is absolutely false” and “this is really bad”?

The best thing the Guardian could now do is to reflect that those annotations may well be the correct verdict and let the idea of a book quietly die.

Amazongate closes on Sunday Times: Simon Lewis fights back

Jonathan Leake and the Sunday Times got a lot of mileage out of his disgraceful Amazongate article, which I wrote about in February. It was pleasing to read yesterday in Climate Progressthat tropical forest researcher Simon Lewis has lodged an official complaint to the UK’s Press Complaints Commission (PCC).

The IPCC wrote:

“Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation.”

Jonathan Leake opened his article:

“A startling report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.”

Simon Lewis writes in the course of his 31 page PCC complaint (pdf, published by ClimateProgress.org):

“Specifically, I consider this article to be materially misleading. I am the scientific expert cited in the article who was asked about the alleged “bogus rainforest claim”. In short, there is no “bogus rainforest claim”, the claim made by the UN panel was (and is) well-known, mainstream and defensible science, as myself and two other professional world-class rainforest experts (Professor Oliver Phillips and Professor Dan Nepstad) each told Jonathan Leake.”

 

Lewis wrote this to Leake prior to the article: “The IPCC statement itself is poorly written, and bizarrely referenced, but basically correct.”  Leake, with the help (“research” they called it) of well-known denialist Richard North, strove to give the impression that the statement was scientifically dodgy and by highly selective reporting implied, by omission, that Lewis agreed with them.

Lewis posted a comment on the Sunday Times website saying that he was the expert referred to and that the article was misleading. His comment was deleted. He also wrote a letter to the editor, early enough to allow publication the following Sunday. The letter was neither acknowledged nor published.

However, the PCC complaint appears to have caused some reaction. As told on Climate Progress today Lewis had a message on his answerphone from the letters editor saying it has been recognised that the story is flawed and offering to print his letter, nearly two months old.  Lewis will not now agree to the publishing of his letter, since it would mean that he was associated with a “flawed” article.  He says to Joe Romm that the article ought to be taken down from the website and an apology be issued in its place, or that the PCC complaint should run its course.

Romm comments:

“I agree that this is no time for yet another uber-lame, after-the-fact correction/letter on a dreadful piece of disinformation that has ricocheted through the media and blogosphere, disinformation that has probably been seen by well over 10 times as many people as would ever see the correction or letter.

“The Sunday Times should simply take the piece down and issue a retraction and apology.  At the very least, now that they have admitted the story is ‘flawed’, they should take the piece down until the PCC issues its ruling.”

It’s good to see a scientist fighting back against deliberate misrepresentation which starts in one newspaper and then takes wings in the media. It would take some time to prepare a complaint of the length that Lewis has written, and is no doubt a considerable distraction from his work. But dignified silence from scientists who are misused or attacked plays into the hands of the denialists and the uncritical media who have loosed the extraordinary torrent of misinformation which has been abroad in recent months. Lewis is to be applauded for his action.

Late addition: Evidently the renewable energy industry in the UK is also considering making a complaint to the PCC regarding a misleading story Leake has written about wind farms. He cherry-picks the worst performing wind farms to make a case that wind farms are a “feeble” source of electricity. Tim Lambert at Deltoid has the details.

What makes sea level rise uneven

An illuminating article by Michael Lemonick just published in Yale Environment, which I summarise here, communicates some of the developing understanding of just how uneven sea level rise is likely to prove.  It will vary greatly by region. There are a number of reasons for this.  One is that the land is actually rising in some places, including northern Canada and Scandinavia, which are still recovering from the crushing weight of the Ice Age glaciers, albeit from 10,000 years ago. Their sea-level increases are less than the global average would suggest, since their land areas are rising a few millimeters a year.   On the other hand land around the periphery of where the glaciers sat, such as Chesapeake Bay and the south of England, was squeezed upwards by the downward pressure nearby and has been sinking back by a few millimetres a year ever since, so sea level rise is greater than average in these regions. Land is also subsiding in coastal places where massive oil and gas extraction has occurred such as Louisiana.

 

A larger effect is from changes in prevailing winds, which can push water consistently toward the land or keep it at bay. The trade winds that blow west across the tropical Pacific, for example, boost average sea levels by as much as 24 inches on the western side of the ocean — in places such as the Philippines — compared with those in northern South America. If those winds shift with climate change, so would local sea levels.

Ocean currents also affect sea level rise. If the Gulf Stream were to slow, for example, that would force water to pile up behind what amounts to a partial blockage of the overturning current. That could force sea level along the U.S. coast to rise another 8 or so inches over the next century beyond the global average, given a medium-emissions scenario.

But the “gorilla in the room” according to Ronald Stouffer, of the U.S. Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton NJ, is gravitation. The extra gravitational attraction of an undersea mountain range pulls water toward it, creating a literal, permanent bump on the surface of the sea, while the deficit of gravity near an undersea valley creates a depression in the water up above. A coastal mountain range pulls the water in its direction, raising sea level nearby. So do the massive icecaps that smother Greenland and Antarctica. They keep sea level higher than it would otherwise be for thousands of kilometers around both land masses, and correspondingly lower elsewhere.

If the polar ice sheets shrink, though – as they’re currently doing, especially in Greenland and West Antarctica –  their gravitational pull weakens and so does their hold on the surrounding water. Their loss of mass not only contributes to overall sea level rise through meltwater but also allows some of the water held by their diminishing gravitational pull to go elsewhere – including the threatened east coast of the US.  And it’s not a small effect. In Hawaii, for example, Stouffer estimates that a seven metre sea level rise caused by the disappearance of the Greenland ice sheet would have an extra two or three metres added to it. Whereas a beachfront property in Iceland would end up with more beach.

Jerry Mitrovica, a Harvard geophysicist who is working with Stouffer, comments that when he gives talks about this people don’t believe him. He doesn’t blame them. “It’s just wacky when you think about it, completely counterintuitive,” he says. “But it’s true.”

Mitrovica recalls that when he started looking at regional effects, some climate change deniers were noting that sea-level rise was happening at different rates in different regions, arguing that this proved there was no global trend, and thus no global warming. That was already a bogus argument, but now that he and others have begun investigating the gorilla in the living room, it’s even more absurd. The science is so straightforward, he says, that “if you saw that sea level was rising uniformly around the world, it would be proof that the big ice sheets are not melting.”

One wonders what the Christchurch City Council might make of all this. They’ve settled for planning for a 50 cm rise. “We’re following the Government’s advice and we’re not going out on a limb,” their spokesperson said primly.  Apart from the fact that 50 cms is now inadequate advice for the century, the dynamics of regional variation suggest that an already  complex set of considerations when planning for  future sea level rise may have to be open to even more complication. Nick Smith will surely have to descend from his high horse: “The Government is not going to consider adjusting its policy every week.”  Not that I’ve heard anyone asking for weekly adjustment – but annual reconsideration might be sensible.