Climate classic: Kolbert’s Field Notes

Field Notes from a Catastrophe: A Frontline Report on Climate Change

When the full seriousness of climate change began to dawn on me I read some books directly on the subject.  The first was Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe: A Frontline Report on Climate Change which had just been published. I’ve reread it for this review. It’s an admirable work.  I was impressed at how up to the mark it still is, three years on from publication. It remains a book which one could confidently recommend to anyone wanting to become quickly familiar with the issues. The writing is of the highest order of journalism, an intelligent mixture of relaxed narrative and clear, succinct summations.

Kolbert conveys the reality of global warming by recounting visits she was able to make to a variety of places and people. Not a large number, but each one significant, and Kolbert well able to show why. Her clear grasp of the basic science provides a thread through the experiences and meetings she describes. The Arctic figures strongly. She spent time with a geophysicist and permafrost expert in Alaska. The evidence of melting permafrost is unambiguous, and not affected by weather variations as air temperature is. In Greenland Kolbert stayed for a time at Swiss Camp, not far from the Jakobshavn glacier.  Scientists have worked there over many summers to try and get a handle on what is happening to the Greenland ice. The Jakobshavn in 1992 flowed at 3.5 miles per year; by 2003 it had increased to 7.8 miles per year.  The Arctic section of the book ended in Iceland at a scientific symposium in 2000, where it was already clear that whatever uncertainties there were about the effects of global warming there was no questioning at all of the relationship between carbon dioxide and rising temperatures.

From the Arctic Kolbert moves to butterflies, mosquitos, toads and other species showing evidence of species migration under the influence of global warming. She meets and speaks with individuals studying in these fields.  The extinction risk from global warming is significant even for species with the capacity for mobility, and high for those more tethered to their environment.  The prospect of everything changing its distribution and new biological communities needing to be formed carries unknown consequences for the services of our natural ecosystems.

Moving on to the human response to climate change Kolbert frames her treatment with reminders of how devastating drought has proved to human civilisation in the past.  Those droughts reflected the climate’s innate variability, but the climate shifts predicted for this century are attributable to forces whose causes we know and whose magnitude we will determine.  At this point she visits James Hansen and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, the NASA outpost he directs.  She provides a lucid account of how climate models work and the forcings they focus on.

The Netherlands provides a brief case study of how a country under threat from flooding is preparing to adapt to what lies ahead and the context for a discussion of what constitutes dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system. Although when Kolbert was writing her book policy studies were often taking 500 parts per million of CO2 as the threshold she points to many climate scientists then considering 450 ppm as a more objective estimate of danger, with some arguing that the threshold should be 400 ppm or lower. The Vostok core from Antarctica shows that the present level of CO2 in the atmosphere is unprecedented in recent geological history. She remarks that the last time CO2 levels are believed to have been comparable with today’s level was three and a half million years ago, during the mid-Pliocene warm period.

The fearful prospect of business as usual led Robert Socolow to think about how CO2 emissions could be stabilized. Kolbert visited him on her return from the Netherlands to discuss the now famous stabilization wedges that he and Princeton colleague Stephen Pacala proposed as substitutes for CO2 emitting processes. She records his comments that the issue is similar to some in the past where something looked extremely difficult, and not worth it, and then people changed their minds.  Slavery was one such: “Something happened and all of a sudden it was wrong and we didn’t do it any more.”  His answer to questions about practicality: “Whether it’s practical or not depends on how much we give a damn.”

It’s hard to believe the Bush administration gave a damn. Kolbert’s interview with Paula Dobriansky, the Under Secretary charged with the unenviable task of explaining the Bush administration’s position on global warming, is a classic. Asked how the US justified its position on Kyoto to its allies: “Basically and fundamentally we have a common goal and objective, but we are pursuing different approaches.”  Three times in response to three different probing questions she repeated the mantra: “We act, we learn, we act again.”  John McCain characterised Bush’s position to Kolbert as MIA (missing in action).

In a 2006 afterword for a further edition of the book Kolbert notes that continuing new studies were pointing to the fact that the world is changing more quickly and dramatically than anticipated. She highlights melting Arctic sea ice, ocean acidification, increases in the rate of CO2 rise in the atmosphere, increased ice loss from Greenland, and evidence of Antarctic ice loss.  It’s all depressingly familiar still.  What she couldn’t point to in 2006 were changes in US political will.  They now appear to have happened, we must hope profoundly enough to soften the verdict of her final sentence: It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

 

Too Little, Too Late

Toolittletoolate

The frustrations of a House of Commons backbench politician who takes anthropogenic climate change seriously are well reflected in Colin Challen’s recently published book Too Little, Too Late: The Politics of Climate Change. He opens with a memorable verbatim account (from his notes) of a two hour “ping pong match” at the 2007 Bali conference in which the Chinese finally overcame developed world opposition to a modest proposal about how technology transfer should be discussed in future. It was enough to make one wonder how on earth any significant agreement can come at Copenhagen. But realist though Challen is, he’s not a quitter and his book plugs away at the issue.

He turns to the 1930s and Churchill’s persistent warnings about the threat of fascism as a possible analogue to the climate change situation today. Defining the four phases leading up to the Second World War as denial, appeasement, phoney war and total war, he wonders whether some countries, such as China, are now at the stage of appeasement – trying to ameliorate a problem one is nevertheless decisively doing nothing to stop; others such as the UK and the EU may have begun the phoney war – setting targets which might go some of the way to sorting the problem out but whose performance has yet to be proven.  The wartime theme appears from time to time throughout the book.

His detailed discussions cover many aspects of the political approaches to climate change, particularly in the UK.  Grand global promises he eyes with some suspicion, citing the 1970 commitment from developed countries to devote 0.7% of their GDP to overseas development, a target honoured by only five countries by 2008 and well missed by most.  Carbon markets and emissions trading schemes he is also wary of, pointing to the ease with which they may not actually lead to any reductions in emissions. The markets will need to be ruled with an iron discipline if they are to deliver.  Contraction and convergence frameworks provide the discipline which most appeals to him.

In discussing renewable energy Challen compares the contradictory ways in which the UK has moved (or not moved) towards renewable energy with the focused German approach and its much more successful outcomes both environmentally and industrially.  Photovoltaics may not seem the best bet for German power generation, but it has served to get ahead in R&D, export opportunities and employment growth.  The feed-in tariff, which pays a guaranteed price for every KWh produced from a renewable energy source, decreasing over the 20 year period of the guarantee, has served to finance renewable energy in most EU member states, but the UK has shied away from the government role required for such a system.   Challen has an interesting discussion of the 19th century railroad mania which started in the UK in 1844.  There has been no equivalent in modern times of such a major investment scheme accounting for so much of a country’s economic activity, though there might be a comparison with the allocation of resources to Britain’s defence during the second world war.  Why not a renewable energy “mania” today? asks Challen. He notes with approval the new sense of engagement that has come in recent times from Ed Milliband, with the joining of government responsibilities for energy under the same roof with climate change in the Department of Energy and Climate Change.  (I thought while reading this of our benighted Minister of Energy  in New Zealand who complains that energy policy has been captured by climate change policy and needs to be separated!)  There is also some readiness under Milliband for the UK to look more favourably at feed-in tariffs.

His chapter on nuclear power speaks of “the great nuclear delusion” and is scathing of the claims made for it as an energy solution.  Currently it supplies 18% of the UK’s electricity supply.  There can be no new sources from nuclear building until the existing plants are rebuilt. This would likely be by about 2020, a date well after emissions have to start falling.  Concentration on a nuclear solution takes attention and money away from more significant measures.  He quotes an analysis which claims that keeping nuclear alive means diverting private and public investment from the cheaper market winners – cogeneration, renewables and efficiency – to the costlier market loser.

Challen is a strong advocate of personal carbon allowances. They fit very well with the contraction and convergence framework he favours.  In this context he has an illuminating discussion of whether emissions should belong to the producer or the consumer.  The UK’s emissions may have lowered, but the emissions embedded in their imports have risen quite dramatically.  Not surprising in view of the fact that in 2005 the top 10% of the world’s population was responsible for 59% of its consumption (and the bottom 50% for 7.2% of consumption).  He asks pertinently on whose carbon inventory China’s emissions should appear in view of such figures.  He sees personal carbon allowances as “a concept of brilliant simplicity, a predictable and orderly reduction of GHG emissions year-on-year, with flexibility in an enclosed system, independent of taxation and providing complete transparency between goals and delivery”.  The powers that be go no further than describing the concept as “an interesting thinkpiece” and “ahead of its time”.  Challen grimly notes that rationing was accepted without significant opposition once war was under way in 1939 and 1940.

Challen, a Labour MP,  founded the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group. He discusses failed attempts to get cross-party consensus, though records some successes, including agreement that the UK’s goal should be to take a fair share of the responsibility for keeping the global temperature increase to within two degrees and that the 2050 emissions reduction target should move to 80%.

It can be a dispiriting picture.  Challen comments that the UK has not hesitated to spend nearly 1% of GDP on resuscitation of the consumer binge economy with all that implies for greenhouse gas emissions. Dealing with climate change could be achieved with not much more than that.  He sees the urgent need for us to use less while we still have the choice as a society, but is profoundly aware of the vested interests which sap political will and of the materialist definition of self-esteem which currently holds sway in society.

Nevertheless the battle for change must be joined.  It’s a battle Challen will be fighting outside parliament after the next election – he is leaving to devote his time to climate change matters, and expects to work in Africa and focus on the economics of global warming, with Sir Nicholas Stern.

 

The Carbon Age

The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat

Journalist and science writer Eric Roston’s book The Carbon Age, highly praised when it was first published last year, is now available in paperback.  It’s about carbon in the universe and the essential part it plays in life on Earth. It’s also about climate change, as its subtitle suggests: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilisation’s Greatest Threat.

Roston begins by offering two basic observations that are explored through the book. The first is that Earth’s temperature and the carbon content of the atmosphere are correlated on every geological time scale. The usual sequence is temperature rise first, then elevated carbon content. The reverse is the case today. The second observation is that humans have accelerated the geological carbon cycle to at least one hundred times faster than usual. Man-made global warming is a geological aberration, nearly meteoric in speed.

The first half of the book explores the origins of carbon and life. On earth carbon is “the ubiquitous architect, builder, and most basic building material of life.” Roston follows it into many of its functions and manifestations in fascinating detail. He discusses how carbon’s ability to bond, unbond, and rebond with the other atoms of life makes it a central element in many of life’s necessary components. He considers how the course of evolution both influenced and was influenced by the global carbon cycle. Living matter since its inception has helped regulate the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and seas and on land, conditions that in turn influence evolution. Roston uses the story of cyanobacteria to illustrate how evolution hit on an innovation – an organism which exchanged atmospheric carbon dioxide for atmospheric oxygen. It threw the carbon cycle as it was then into catastrophic disarray and forced its re-invention.

In a chapter on the ocean carbon cycle Roston includes attention to coccolithophores, microscopic shelled algae that colonised the open ocean for the first time after the Permian extinction 250 million years ago. As their shells passed to the seafloor they left their mark in the world’s chalk formations which accumulated from about 100 million to 65 million years ago, at the rate of a millimetre a century. Today they form a vital part of both the marine food chain and carbon’s transport from the ocean surface to the seafloor. They have been remarkably resilient to shocks, but the threat of ocean acidification this century is large enough to threaten their continuance.

A further chapter describes the part played by trees in storing carbon as cellulose and lignin and the formation of coal and oil deposits as carbon burial in the Carboniferous period. The gingko tree and its powers of survival features here. The author comments in relation to our discovery and use of fossil fuels that we are burning part of the pre-Carboniferous greenhouse back to the skies, where the Earth  – at least our Earth – no longer needs it. We are rebuilding the greenhouse Earth decimated by trees more than 300 million years ago.

A brief but interesting chapter on the human body’s conversion of fuel energy into motion concludes Part I of the book on the natural processes of the play of carbon in the evolution and functions of life. Roston then moves on to cover the last 150 years and explains how scientists, industrialists and consumers created what amounts to an industrial carbon cycle — something he characterises as the flushing of millions of years of geological sediment back into the atmosphere. Here he explores a selection of activities, ranging from the development of cars, through synthetic chemistry, to bullet-proof clothing, all followed through in satisfying detail. For the purposes of this review I’ll pause on the chapter which centres on the hundredfold acceleration of the carbon cycle through industry. The flow of carbon through living things has entwined evolution with the inanimate forces of nature. But there is no evidence before now to suggest biology has ever accelerated the long-term carbon cycle on to a short-term path. Only meteorite impacts can compare with the speed with which our industry has interacted with geology. Roston quotes a paleobotanist: “We are plate tectonics!”

But it’s possible to slow down our impact on the carbon-cycle without sacrificing our industrial fire, if we move fast. Technological investment in new energy and materials industries could remake the way we make things. At this point Roston discerns an obstacle in politicians and economists. “What scientists describe as well beyond their danger zone, economists and politicians treat as the bottom of the potentially achievable.” Chemistry gives way to a discussion on economics with the conclusion that as long as we are pegged to an economic orthodoxy that equates well-being with per capita income we are unlikely to address the fundamental drivers of climate change: materialism, crass commercialism, and waste made easy by cheap, plentiful fossil fuels. He considers that industrialised nations can transfer civilisation on to an energy system that will not scorch the earth, though finds it a big ask for a narcissistic generation. Hope springs eternal.

Roston’s book is packed full of investigations and explanations of the chemistry of carbon. I have selected parts where he makes the connection with global warming explicit and in so doing have not done justice to the scope of the book. But it was what I understood to be the depth of his concern over global warming that attracted me to the book in the first place as worth reviewing on a climate change website.  The illuminating explorations into the chemistry of carbon were a bonus.

Heatstroke

algae

Anthony Barnosky is a Berkeley University paleoecologist deeply concerned about what lies ahead for Earth’s ecological systems if we persist in heating the globe. His recently published book Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming explains his concerns. Global warming with its own method of ecosystem demolition has joined the three other factors — habitat loss, introduced species and population growth — by which human activity has impacted badly on ecologies.

Yes, climates have changed in the past and species and ecologies have changed with them.  Many scales of climate change have occurred, from slow tectonic to the fast changes embedded within glacial and inter-glacial times.  Why should an ecologist worry about today’s global warming which is just one more scale? Barnosky has two reasons: one is the rate of change, which is way faster than anything in the past, the other is that the new climate will be hotter than that in which homo sapiens and many other animal species evolved.

Barnosky’s book is packed with examples of what is already happening and what it points to. As the climate warms many species already have to move to survive.  He quotes the result of one survey which showed a set of 99 species of birds, butterflies and alpine herbs which within ten years had shifted on average 6.1 kilometres poleward or 6.1 metres upward in elevation. Dying out on mountain tops is the fate or likely fate of the latter. He traces many other factors, such as the subtle interactions between climate, vegetation, and reproductive success for species such as reindeer, or the change of climate conditions to favour the fungus which kills harlequin frogs – in the tropical mountains of Central America they are now dying in unprecedented numbers because of this new interaction between species. Synchronisations which have served some species well are no longer able to be relied on – marmots in the Colorado Rockies are coming out of hibernation earlier, but heavier snow is taking longer to melt and the green shoots the emaciated marmots need to feed on are not ready. In the ocean he details many instances of marine ecosystems under serious stress from the double whammy of traditional human impacts such as pollution and overfishing now followed by global warming. Corals are a clear example.

Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks, Kruger Park in Africa and Tambopata Nature Reserve in Peru, are among places Barnosky selects for closer attention. Small mammal species in Yosemite have changed how they live in the park, in a way that indicates some may be on the way out. Amphibians in Yellowstone are in decline. In Kruger between 13 and 20 of the 87 mammal species there today are projected to disappear by 2080. The Tambopata rainforest, along with many rainforests throughout tropical South America, has a 75% chance of being mostly savannah by 2080.

Barnosky devotes a fascinating chapter to what began as his big moment of realisation in a deep cave in the Colorado mountains in 1985. That moment turned into a fifteen year project for four large institutions, more than two dozen scientists and hundreds of volunteers.  They retrieved thousands of fossils deposited over nearly a million years by bushy-tailed wood rats who have the convenient habit of collecting odd objects they find lying around and bring them back to their nests. Among their favourite items are bones, some of them encased in the pellets regurgitated by birds or defecated by carnivores. In the eight feet of excavated layers in that cave was an invaluable record of the changing makeup of local species through the climate changes of the Pleistocene. The story of how the various layers were interpreted and dated is another of those intricate detective operations which mark the scientific interpretation of so many of the clues from the past still embedded in discoverable form.

Barnosky is always considered in his appraisals.  He gives due weight to the resilience of ecologies, and nowhere rushes to judgment. But he thinks we are in a time of accelerated extinction of species, and warns that it could be very large indeed. There were already pressures enough driving us towards dwindling biodiversity.  Global warming increases greatly the speed of the train on its way to mass extinction.

A sober chapter discusses the possibility of climate change acting as a selective force to stimulate the building of new species.  In the past, times of slow climate change seem to correlate with bursts of speciation.  But Barnosky points out that climate change today is at a rate which outpaces mutation rates of most animal and and plant species by a far greater margin than we have ever seen. Recombination within gene pools offers some possibility of evolutionary change, but it is limited without sufficient mutation. At the end of this discussion, engrossing for any lay reader with an interest in evolutionary processes, he concludes: “Global warming is not only doing its part to diminish biodiversity substantially within a century or so, it is also limiting the future evolutionary potential of Earth.”

Barnosky nevertheless insists on hope.  His final chapter centres not only on slowing down global warming but also on a programme for wilderness protection.  First we need to keep what we already have – the 12% of Earth’s surface now protected in some fashion to preserve nature. Second, climate-connection corridors must be provided for species movement. Third, new initiatives are required to minimize high-impact human land use, to create marine-based reserves before it is too late, and to consider the conceptual division of reserves into two functions – one kind devoted to the preservation of individual species and certain assemblages of species, the other devoted to the preservation of wilderness.

The alternative for humanity is the technological “termite-life” of ecological loss.

Barnosky writes with an easy style, combining clarity with a near-conversational level of communication with the reader.  His book offers many insights into the nature of ecological communities and why it is that they matter so deeply.  It is also further evidence if we need it of how profound the effects of anthropogenic global warming are set to be if we do not change our ways.

Disagreeing with Hulme

Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity

Ultimately there’s an opacity in Mike Hulme’s recently published book Why We Disagree About Climate Change.  We are too much engaged with the idea of fighting climate change as a physical reality, he concludes. We are science-saturated but spiritually impoverished. We need to engage with climate change in ways which focus on what we want to achieve for ourselves and humanity.  Climate change is not an environmental problem to be solved so much as an idea which we can use to examine our cultural values and renegotiate our wider social goals about how and why we live on this planet.

Hulme is a climatologist who during the 1990s was actively engaged in the study of climate change, particularly in work on modelling.  He says that he accepts the reality of anthropogenic global warming and that its risks are important and serious.  From 1999 he spent seven years leading the Tyndall Centre, established as an interdisciplinary enterprise where scientists, economists, engineers and social scientists, work together to develop sustainable responses to climate change. He describes this as the time when he began to see that climate change meant very different things to different people, depending on their political, social and cultural settings. The book is largely an exploration of that phenomenon.

Early in the book Hulme seeks to delineate the space legitimately belonging to science and to point to its limits. He specifies three limits in particular. Science always speaks with a conditional voice. Further, when scientific knowledge becomes a public commodity it will have been shaped to some degree by the processes by which it emerges into the social world and through which is subsequently circulates.  Finally, we must not hide behind science when difficult ethical choices are called for. Some of our decisions will be beyond the reach of science.

Applied to climate change it’s not clear to me that any of this affects the core message of the science.  I don’t detect any undue certitude in the scientists I have read.  Uncertainties are usually highlighted, and insufficient knowledge recognised.  Certainly the science can receive some rough and ready treatment when the media fails to convey some of its complexities or hypes up some of the possibilities, but most people who take the subject seriously should be able to make allowance for that. And evading ethical decisions by appealing to the science is an accusation rather too easily made.  If science has been driven to the conclusion that our actions in burning fossil fuel are causing global warming and if some of the possible outcomes are threatening human well-being now and in the future, a fairly immediate ethical imperative surely follows. Much of what Hulme says about the scientific process is unexceptionable, but he presses it harder in relation to climate science than I would have thought current practice requires.  He is, for example, “uncomfortable that climate change is widely reported through the language of catastrophe and imminent peril”. Does this mean he considers there are no catastrophic possibilities associated with climate change?  No imminent peril for those living in low-lying river deltas or islands?  Is he accusing some scientists of overstatement? Or does he regard such a presentation as a distraction from the spiritual challenges which climate change presents and which he considers we are avoiding?  I suspect the last, but he doesn’t really declare himself on what is a fairly crucial point.

Much of the book explores various dimensions of our lives related to human values, human psychology, and political concerns, with a strong focus in each of them on the reasons which make for disagreement over how to respond to climate change. In these chapters Hulme draws on the social sciences and offers interesting enough surveys of the factors which may predispose us to varying responses and disagreements.

The grounds for disagreement are not hard to find.  The hope that many of us cling to is that in the face of the perils of climate change we may be able to transcend those differences and find enough comon cause to lessen the threat posed by anthropogenic global warming.

Hulme holds out little such hope.  He criticises many of the goals which many of us would look to. It’s a comprehensive list. It includes the attempt to establish a universal policy target for greenhouse gases which avoids ‘dangerous’ climate change (his quotation marks); the desire for a single carbon market with worldwide trading; the desire to rethink ideas of consumption, growth and capitalism; the desire to minimise poverty worldwide; the desire to move research and development investment in zero-carbon energy on to a ‘wartime’ footing; the desire to establish a single global policy regime as a means of global climate governance; the promotion of geo-engineering technologies.  In his opinion such goals overestimate the abilities of economics or politics or technology to tame and master our changing climate.

He also criticises the notion that climate change is the overriding project of our generation. George Monbiot is quoted in this context, not with approval: “If we fail in this task, we fail in everything else.”  On the contrary, says Hulme, we should not place ourselves in a fight against climate change as the greatest problem facing humanity, which seeks to trump all others.

So what should we do?  This is the point at which to my mind he dissolves into a kind of spiritual generality.  I have no quarrel with someone who looks for deeper levels of personal engagement with the phenomenon of climate change or seeks a wider outcome than emission reduction, which is admittedly a rather prosaic matter.  But I don’t see why that should rule out our seeking common cause in a common sense attempt to lessen a looming, and yes possibly catastrophic, danger. As  I see it Hulme is exploring a byway.