Tag: Hansen

Do you remember the first time?

NZETS.jpgThere’s a first time for everything, and today it was making an oral submission to a parliamentary committee — the ETS Review committee. I made my written submission public a while ago, so I won’t repeat that here, but in my 15 minute slot (5 mins for initial presentation, 10 mins for questions), I chose to emphasise four key points:

  • That the effects of climate change are being observed now, ahead of expectations. I quoted from the recent Copenhagen conference closing statement in support: For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.
  • That the emissions reductions New Zealand will have to make are likely to be much steeper than currently envisaged, because the science is beginning to suggest we need to move beyond stabilisation of GHG levels into active sequestration (I mentioned Hansen and 350 ppm), and because simple equity demands that the developed world adopts a “cap and converge” approach to emissions in order to engage China and India.
  • That the climate commitment — the fact that we have 20 to 30 years of warming in the pipeline whatever we do means that New Zealand has place considerable emphasis on adaptation. We need to build resilience to the direct impacts of climate change here (which with luck won’t be too bad), and to the actions that other countries take to address change (counter food miles arguments and so on).
  • Finally, that early action on reducing emissions would be significantly less costly than making drastic forced changes later.

I closed by reiterating my first recommendation: that the government should seek to build a consensus of business and consumer interests on both the need for action, and the direction to be followed.

The questions were interesting. Charles Chauvel, Labour’s climate spokesman, asked me to elaborate on the matter of targets. John Boscawen (ACT) commented that my evidence flatly contradicted the previous submitter, Dr Bruce McCabe (which appears to have been along the lines of “cooling since…”), and asked if I would examine that evidence and explain to him why it was wrong. Peter Dunne asked me to do that on behalf of the whole committee, and I happily agreed. Should be an interesting exercise… 😉 Jeanette Fitzsimons (Green) then asked me to explain the significance (if any) of 8 year trends in climate data — obviously making a point to Boscawen. Finally, Nicky Wagner (National) asked me to elaborate a little on why regulatory action was required to complement the emissions trading scheme: I mentioned efficiency measures.

Looking at the full list of submitters the committee is hearing (available at Carbon News), it’s clear that more than a few of the usual crank suspects have got through: Bryan Leyland’s there, as is Vincent Gray and the NZ CSC. Plenty of debunking to come, as their submissions are made public… 😉

[Pulp]

Has it come to this?

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning

James Lovelock is renowned for his Gaia theory: using metaphor to illuminate science, he has argued that the earth is a living planet, a self-regulating system made up of organisms, surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere interacting to provide conditions favourable for life. Three years ago, in The Revenge of Gaia, he declared that our burning of fossil fuels, our replacement of too many eco-systems with farmland and our overload of human population had put Gaia under threat and badly impaired her ability to produce conditions comfortable for life and we will suffer dire consequences.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning is a follow-up and the little shreds of hope that one could sometimes discern in its predecessor are even less apparent, at least from the perspective with which I view life.  Lovelock himself is almost lyrical in his final vision of a future Gaia adjusted to a hotter state, populated by the remnant of human survivors from the disasters ahead, survivors strong in mind and body and ready to start a new evolution in which our intelligence will be beneficial to Gaia and may make of her an intelligent planet. (I don’t pretend to understand what he means by that.) I’m afraid my attention is on the billions who fail to make it to the lifeboat and I derive no consolation at all from Lovelock’s vision.

However that’s at the end of the book. An early remark perhaps suggests how he gets there. He describes himself as a scientist who works independently of any human agency:  ”Independence allows me to consider the health of the Earth without the constraint that the welfare of mankind comes first.”

He is critical of the IPCC and its reliance on models, not because he is a contrarian or lacks respect for the scientists involved but because its models are not correctly forecasting the course of climate change revealed by observation.  They have underestimated the rate of sea level rise and the rate of melting sea ice in the Arctic. They have not taken into account the progressive decline in the population of ocean algae, which act to cool the Earth in a number of ways. They do not in his opinion make use of the Gaia theory predictions of climate change but still act from within the various scientific specialisations as if Earth were a dead planet.  He produces a simple model of his own based on Gaia theory which shows an abrupt 5 degree rise in global mean temperature at an atmospheric CO2 level of between 400 and 500 parts per million.  The smooth path of slowly and sedately rising temperatures predicted by the IPCC will not be borne out in reality. There will be spells of constancy followed by jumps to greater heat.

Lovelock records with approval James Hansen’s call for a far greater reduction in CO2 than that suggested as adequate by the IPCC reports. He notes that Hansen’s concern is based on recent observations and on the Earth’s climate history and thinks this means that Hansen himself must have doubts about the adequacy of models based on atmospheric physics alone.

In fact Lovelock’s view of the possible changes ahead does not seem radically different from those of many other scientists who freely acknowledge that the IPCC predictions are proving too conservative.  The scientific consensus notion against which Lovelock rails does not seem to prevent them from pointing out inadequacies in the models. My understanding is that those working with the models are constantly seeking to improve them and are well aware of their limitations. The positive feedback potential from the loss of land-based ecosystems, the desertification of the land and ocean surfaces, and the loss of polar ice is frequently discussed by scientists I have read.

Where Lovelock differs most markedly from scientists equally aware of the dangers he points to is in the fact that he seems to think those outcomes already inescapable. So strongly is he convinced of this that he is roundly dismissive of many attempts at mitigation, especially if they carry a green tinge. Reducing carbon footprints and planning to drastically lower emissions are at best romantic nonsense and at worst a dangerous distraction from the real task.  We can’t save our familiar world.  What we need to do is to prepare for the coming changes in what will be a human world of lifeboat islands (the UK and NZ prominent among them) and a few continental oases in favourable latitudes. Greens who put their faith in renewable energy, and especially those who view negatively the development of nuclear energy, are sabotaging the future of the lifeboat societies.  He is particularly scornful of wind turbines, allowing they may perhaps be of some use in some places, but certainly not in his part of the world. Unexpectedly he presents solar energy in a favourable light on the grounds that it is not visionary – he even attaches the word hope to it, though any hope the book offers is always severely qualified.

He does allow for some geo-engineering possibilities, though without much conviction. Various schemes to manipulate the planetary albedo – sunlight reflected back to space – are acknowledged. Karl Lackner’s proposals to strip CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it as described in Broecker and Kunzig’s Fixing Climate is treated with respect. Fertilisation with iron to encourage algal blooms that would cool the Earth by removing CO2 may be effective. He explains his own suggestion, in collaboration with Chris Rapley, of large pipes set vertically in the ocean to draw up cooler, nutrient-rich water to encourage algal blooms.  Most promising of all would be the widespread use of biochar. However he checks any undue optimism by recalling that whatever we do as geoengineers is unlikely to stop dangerous climate change or prevent death on a scale that makes all previous wars, famines and disasters small. Geoengineering would be better than business as usual, but that’s about the most that can be said for it.

The crux for Lovelock is that there are far too many people living as we do. Gaia has too many humans.  He briefly acknowledges that vegetarian diets and food synthesis by chemical and biochemical industries might help, but is pretty sure it will never happen this way. The effects of prolonged and unremitting drought, the greatest threat to humanity from global heating, will mean food and water shortages which will kill off most of us. Gaia will save herself by severely culling us.

Lovelock is a compelling writer. His prose is elegant and clear and his books packed with intelligent insights.  One can’t help but pay him attention. He is an able exponent of the worst case, but that doesn’t make his depressing prognostications right.  He himself praises the work of James Hansen, Tim Flannery and Al Gore among others, people who are not at all ready to give up on mitigation. I’m with them, and hope we can yet avoid the catastrophic and deeply depressing human future Lovelock foresees, through a combination of the means by which he sets little store.

Climate Code Red

Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action

This week I watched a short video clip of climatologist James Hansen inviting people to join an act of civil disobedience on March 2 at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington DC which  powers Congress with coal-based energy. In his laid-back but serious way he remarks it is hard to realise that climate change is an emergency.  This is the realisation that Melbourne-based authors David Spratt and Philip Sutton invite in their book Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action. The book was launched in July 2008 by the Governor of Victoria, Professor David de Kretser and has been commended by Hansen himself and many others.  It was also the basis of a 52-page advocacy report Climate Safety (pdf) issued by the Public Interest Research Centre in the UK in November and commented on warmly by George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, Fred Pearce and many others.

The authors paint a sombre picture. They point out that the predictions of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change in its report last year are already being shown as too conservative. The loss of Arctic sea ice, thought likely to take a century, appears to be happening in a much shorter space of time. Rapid sea ice disintegration will mean less reflectivity, greater regional warming, and permafrost melt with release of uncertain levels of carbon dioxide and methane.

The way in which the pace of climate change can quicken as its early effects trigger amplifying consequences is carefully explained for the general reader. Thus we face the possibility of faster disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet than has before been thought likely, vulnerability in the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the likelihood of much higher sea rises than anticipated, as well as widespread species and eco-system destruction.

The authors lament the limitations of the IPCC system, ascribing them partly to pressure from vested interests harboured by some countries, partly to the long process of gathering the information from published material and the early cut-off date for reports, and partly to scientists being uncomfortable with estimates based on known but presently unquantified mechanisms.  It adds up to a process so deficient as to be an unreliable and even misleading basis for policy-making.

The book looks at what the atmospheric targets for a safe climate need to be.  Where we are now, if methane and nitrous oxide are included, is equivalent to 455 parts per million of CO2.  They estimate this indicates a global temperature rise of 2.1 degrees centigrade, at present delayed by the heat being used to warm the oceans (minus 0.6 degrees) and the short-term net cooling effect of aerosols (minus 0.7 degrees) to give today’s warming of 0.8 degrees.

They discuss the target of two degrees of global warming regarded by some as tolerable.  To stop at two degrees probably means a CO2 equivalent level of 400 ppm. We have already exceeded that level, but the climate system’s inertia would enable us to not exceed two degrees if we returned to 400 ppm after an overshoot.

But in their view two degrees is too dangerous, and the three degrees cap effectively being advocated by Australia’s government and others is a recipe for devastation. The book looks at what a safe climate means and what action is required to achieve it.  A safe climate includes such features as: retaining the full summer Arctic sea-ice cover, the full extent of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the full extent of the mountain glacier systems, including the Himalayas and the Andes; maintaining the ecological health and resilience of the tropical rainforests and coral reefs, with no loss of area or species;  maintaining the health and effectiveness of the natural carbon sinks; capping ocean acidity. To do this we need to cool the globe we have heated.

At this point they introduce the 2008 paper (pdf) by Hansen and others which considers a CO2 level of 300-325 ppm may be needed to restore Arctic sea ice to its area of 25 years ago.  They note that this would also be a reasonable boundary for achieving the other features of a safe climate.

Since the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already too high we must not only stop its emission but also draw carbon out of the atmosphere. Some geo-engineering with aerosols may be temporarily required, but only as a complement to ceasing emissions.

So far as the science is concerned we have an emergency. At this point the authors turn from the science to the political action required. Political pragmatism collides with scientific necessity. Current political targets are reckless. The book explores and rejects all the reasons given for inadequate responses ranging from hopelessness through claimed uncertainty to the impossibility of a full solution. Compromise will not do. There is no lack of technical or economic capacity to cut greenhouse gas emissions to close to zero, only of political and social will. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere can be reduced by greatly enhancing natural sinks such as tree and other biomass planting on a large scale and by agricultural charcoal stored in soils. But such measures are unlikely under politics as usual.  The authors counsel moving into emergency mode to produce the economic restructuring needed, using the example of wartime US when the economy was rapidly turned to service the war effort.  Against those who protest that action on climate change will cause economic harm they note that in wartime US unemployment fell, wages grew faster than inflation and company profits boomed.

The book pulls no punches, and that is probably its chief value.  It assembles the latest science and shows how we are preparing a possibly cataclysmic future if we carry on as usual. It makes it clear that the threat can’t be countered by partial measures, as many politicians still seem to think. To those who declare it impossible that the political world will ever gather enough resolution for the steps required it replies that politicians will find resolution enough if they recognise we face an emergency. In other words, the economics and politics must be guided by the science, which is stark and inescapable.
A slightly off-topic postscript:  The Heartland Institute also saw the Hansen videoclip mentioned at the beginning of this review.  Here’s their excited response:

“Demands for the firing of NASA astronomer and global-warming fear-monger James Hansen are spreading rapidly through the World Wide Web.

“Hansen’s latest escapade – a YouTube video in which the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences invites the public to “please join us” in forcibly occupying a D.C.-based coal-burning power plant – resulted in The Heartland Institute Monday calling attention to the growing chorus of voices urging President Barack Obama to fire Hansen. The astronomer has a tawdry record of doctoring climate data to fit his theory that the Earth is in a global-warming crisis, and he has demanded that scientists who disagree with him face a Nuremberg-style trial.”

Mark Bowen’s Censoring Science, recently reviewed on Hot Topic is obviously still relevant.

Re-Make/Re-Model

dunne.jpgAccording to Carbon News (also at Scoop), the extension of the deadline for submissions to the ETS Review committee last week came at the request of major emitters who feared that committee chair Peter Dunne’s refusal to listen to arguments about climate science would mean their views would be ignored.

Sources say that the Greenhouse Policy Coalition – whose members include New Zealand Aluminium Smelters, New Zealand Steel, Fonterra, the Coal Association, Carter Holt Harvey, Norske Skog Tasman, Winstone Pulp, Pan Pacific Forest Products, SCA Hygiene, Business New Zealand, Solid Energy and Methanex – realised that it was in danger of not being heard because its submission failed to meet Dunne’s criteria.

The organisation asked for more time to come up with an acceptable submission, and it is understood that several members of the coalition then also asked for extensions. (Business New Zealand chief executive Phil O’Reilly has confirmed to Carbon News that his organisation asked for more time).

The clear inference is that the GPC and its members had prepared submissions that included attempts to call the basic science of global warming into doubt — or would at the very least fall foul of Dunne’s insistence that he would not hear arguments from “groups wanting to re-litigate the science of climate change”. Some of New Zealand’s largest corporates were prepared to stand up in front of the review committee and argue — what? That the world’s cooling? That the risks are overstated? That CO2 is not a greenhouse gas? The intellectual dishonesty of a group apparently prepared to line up with the cranks and argue black is white in order to defend its narrow economic interests beggars belief.

Meanwhile, lest the Greenhouse Policy Coalition forget the reason why emissions reductions are important and urgent, a prominent climate scientist not called Hansen has warned that climate change is proceeding faster than projected in the IPCC’s Fourth Report [BBC, Reuters]. Chris Field, a professor of biology and of earth system science at Stanford, and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference last week that recent studies showed that:

…in a business-as-usual world, higher temperatures could ignite tropical forests and melt the Arctic tundra, releasing billions of tons of greenhouse gas that could raise global temperatures even more—a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control by the end of the century.

Field also considers that aggressive action to reduce emissions brings multiple benefits:

“What have we learned since the fourth assessment? We now know that, without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought. If you look at the set of things that we can do as a society, taking aggressive action on climate seems like one that has the best possibility of a win-win. It can stimulate the economy, allow us to address critical environmental problems, and insure that we leave a sustainable world for our children and grandchildren. Somehow we have to find a way to kick the process into high gear. We really have very little time.”

That should be required reading for the CEOs of the companies that fund the Greenhouse Policy Coalition. Unless, of course, they define their economic interests as more important than the survival of our civilisation.

[Roxy Music]

Censoring Science

Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming

It’s Official: Griffin is Gone. That’s the heading on Mark Bowen’s blog on 27 January.  He forbore to add the exclamation mark that tempted him. You would understand this as a noteworthy piece of news if you’d read Bowen’s book Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming published in January as a Penguin paperback. (The hardback edition appeared in 2008.)  In his book Bowen is clearly suspicious of the role that Michael Griffin, appointed Administrator of NASA in 2005, played in the attempt to censor James Hansen which the book details. Incidentally, Bowen has recently set out very clearly in this long entry on his website the case against Griffin in a more connected way than he was able to establish when writing the book.

To turn to the book. The author, a writer, has a doctorate in physics and wrote a much-praised climate change book Thin Ice in 2005. Bowen’s mountain-climbing expertise enabled him to join climatologist Lonnie Thompson in some of his heroic expeditions to high and remote ice caps to gather ice core records. The association with Thompson opened his mind to the clear and present danger of global warming.   In Censoring Science he moves to the work of another distinguished climatologist, though this time one he hasn’t had to follow into forbidding terrain.  James Hansen directs the research at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), much of which is centred on factors affecting climate change. Twenty years ago he delivered a now famous congressional testimony showing early models predicting increased global warming, and he has remained at the forefront of scientific understanding of the effects of increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Irony attends the scientific realisation of the dangers of anthropogenic global warming:  many of the finest scientists engaged in it are American, yet America (and for a time its faithful shadow Australia) is the one developed country which long refused to treat the question as of moment for the future of humanity.  The irony is no accident.  Bowen’s book describes some of the workings of an administration which not only denied or ignored the science but also tried to prevent the public being made aware of it. Much of his investigation centres around events in late 2005 when Hansen gave a lecture to an American Geophysical Union meeting in which he set out the possibilily of tipping points ahead if fossil fuel CO2 emissions continued at their current rate.  He spoke of the vast scale of losses due to world wide rising seas under such a scenario, and called for prompt action to keep further global warming under one degree centigrade.  He added a comment that it seemed to him that special interests had been a roadblock wielding undue influence over policymakers. Two days later the GISS global temperature results for 2005 were posted, showing it to be one of the warmest years on record.  It’s beyond the scope of a short book review to detail the consternation amongst political appointees to the staff at NASA, and the steps that were taken to try to ensure that Hansen was put on a short leash.  To follow it closely would also require a better knowledge of the workings of NASA administration and agencies than I have.  But the thrust of Bowen’s careful narrative is clear There was an attempt, not only then but at other times, to muzzle Hansen and other scientists and to tamper with the conclusions to which their scientific work pointed.  The White House itself appears to have have been a driving influence in the background.   It is part of the widespread suppression of science under the Bush administration, much of it centred on climate change, but extending into other fields as well.

It’s a disturbing story. NASA’s mission statement was quietly altered in February 2006 to drop the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet”, ostensibly to square it with Bush’s focus on pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.  This went hand in hand with cuts to funding of earth science projects such as those which depend on satellite measurements to provide critical information about Earth processes.  Funding cuts are an obvious way of stifling scientific discoveries.

Hansen did not submissively accept restrictions on his ability to communicate with the general public. He is not a person to shrink from what he sees as a duty, albeit expressed in modest terms. “I don’t want, in the future, my grandchildren to say, ‘Opa understood what was going to happen but he didn’t make it clear.’ And so I’m trying to make it clear.”

Thankfully Hansen’s combativeness meant that the authorities failed.  He remained in his position and continued to work as the scrupulous scientist he is, sharing his science and his concerns with a wider public when he feels he needs to.

Much of the book is devoted to Hansen himself, his work, the progress of his thinking over time, his background and character.  Bowen builds a picture of a relaxed but dedicated man who spends long hours in the science which has absorbed him for years. These parts of the book provide a narrative of Hansen’s growing understanding of the complexities of global warming and awareness of its latent dangers.  Bowen himself is well equipped to understand the science and his explanations are clear and helpful.

The book’s story ends in 2007.  Since then Hansen has if anything become more involved, in his capacity as a private citizen, in seeking to prod governments into activity.  He has also continued to do solid scientific work, which has included recently his and nine others’ paper Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim? which suggests that we need a reduction from the present level of 387 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 ppm or less if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.

Is it naivety which guides Hansen in his expectations of how the public will react to the scientific picture if only they understand it?  Bowen quotes approvingly journalist Bill Blakemore who thinks it’s something closer to what Yeats calls ‘radical innocence’, a kind of transparent integrity. Whatever it is, long may it continue.