Category Archives: Climate science

Posts relating to climate science

Clinton on climate deniers

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton recently spoke out about the problem of conservative politicians in the United States denying the reality of climate change:

Former president Bill Clinton on Tuesday lambasted the field of Republican presidential contenders for their resistance to climate change science – and argued that their skepticism on the topic was making America look like “a joke.”

The former president, speaking at an event kicking off the Clinton Global Initiative’s seventh annual conference in New York City, urged Americans to force the collective acknowledgment of climate change among conservative politicians.

As I have argued before, if we are to succeed in dealing with climate change, it cannot be an issue that is taken seriously by the political left but ignored by the political right. It needs to become post-partisan.

Religion and the Keystone XL pipeline

One interesting element of the Keystone XL protest in Washington was the composition of the group of people who came to participate. There was a big First Nations presence, and there was a specific day in which the First Nations played a prominent role in the whole event. There was also a large religious delegation arrested on the same day as NASA climatologist James Hansen. If I recall correctly, that was the Monday after the weekend when the organizers were jailed, and that was the day when momentum really returned, with numbers over 100.

Personally, I am deeply skeptical about religion. I think the factual claims made by religious texts and officials are often demonstrably false, and that makes me question why they should be considered an authority on any subject. I also worry that belief in an omniscient god may stop people from believing that we could wreck the world by burning fossil fuels. You certainly have to wonder what a benevolent god would have been thinking in making fossil fuels so useful and abundant, but adding a deadly hidden catch that would not make itself obvious for several centuries. If you don’t have any concern about the possibility of catastrophic outcomes, there is much less reason to be concerned about climate change. If a friendly god is watching over us, surely we will not accidentally cook the planet.

But, I digress.

The religious delegation definitely helped the protest, both in terms of numbers and in terms of legitimacy. There is something about getting arrested with a bunch of prominent religious figures – apparently including someone who was the equivalent of a bishop in the United Church – that makes it seem obvious that your ‘crime’ was defensible and probably praiseworthy. If the movement to stop dangerous climate change is to succeed, we need allies who see climate change as one important issue among many. If there are religious organizations that have or can work climatic protection into their theology, I think those in the climate change community should encourage and appreciate their help.

James Hansen arrested, taken to Anacostia jail

In front of the White House today, NASA climatologist James Hansen got arrested along with 139 other people. They were calling upon President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Canada’s oil sands down to the refineries of the US Gulf Coast. In particular, he highlighted the fact that burning all that oil would contribute substantially to climate change, which will already occur to a dangerous extent because of human greenhouse gas emissions.

As has been the case for every day since September 21st, those arrested in front of the White House were taken to the Anacostia jail, which is the headquarters of the Park Police. Within a few hours of being arrested, all the protesters were released.

It is a bit dispiriting that a scientist of Hansen’s calibre feels the need to get arrested in protest. You would hope the American political system would be able to incorporate scientific knowledge in a more ordinary way, and that concerns like abrupt or runaway climate change would be incorporated into undertakings like the U.S. State Department’s environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Unfortunately, the American political system continues to ignore the seriousness of climate change and the policies that are necessary to reduce the risk of it becoming a catastrophe. Hopefully, this action will help to alert Barack Obama to what needs to be done, and he will take an important first step by blocking this pipeline.

Climate scientists opposing the Keystone XL pipeline

A group of climate scientists have sent a letter to Barack Obama advising that building the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s oil sands would be against the public interest, largely because of how it would contribute to climate change:

The tar sands are a huge pool of carbon, but one that does not make sense to exploit. It takes a lot of energy to extract and refine this resource into useable fuel, and the mining is environmentally destructive. Adding this on top of conventional fossil fuels will leave our children and grandchildren a climate system with consequences that are out of their control. It makes no sense to build a pipeline system that would practically guarantee extensive exploitation of this resource.

The letter is part of a general campaign of opposition to the pipeline, culminating in a sit-in protest in Washington D.C. later this summer.

Sounding a warning

Some of the advice given to Canadian Environment Minister Peter Kent has now been made public through an access to information request. In part, the material reads: “Climate change is the most serious environmental issue facing the world today and carries with it significant impacts on human health and safety, the economy, natural resources, and ecosystems in Canada and throughout the world.”

Objection: China is worse

People look at the oil sands and say: “Yes, Canada is profiting off the destruction of the whole world, but we are a small part of the problem. China is doing so much worse, building new coal-fired power plants every week. Why should we deprive ourselves, when others will produce ruin for us all anyhow?”

There are many problems with this analysis. For one thing, China is pursuing its current model of development because it seems to have worked for countries like Canada, the United States, and Japan. If the richest and most technologically able countries get serious about a zero-carbon energy system, and they show that it can be done, countries that are developing rapidly now will have a new model to at least consider. Given the many disadvantages of fossil fuels, from air pollution to dependence on exports from volatile regions, a development strategy that is both credible and focused on renewables could have a lot of appeal in places like China, India, and Brazil.

Secondly, there is a suicide pact mentality that accompanies the decision to keep emitting greenhouse gas pollution recklessly because others are doing so. It is true that if just Canada abstains, and suffers lost resource revenues because of it, climate change will probably proceed to about the same extent as it would if Canada just kept cashing in on oil and gas. But the behaviour of other states is not independent of our behaviour, and other people care about the reasons for our actions. If Canada said: “We are going to leave fossil fuels underground, for the good of all humanity. We urge you to do the same.” it would at least advance the international discussion and focus attention on the key question of what proportion of all the world’s fossil fuels we choose to burn.

Thirdly, Canada’s impact is not trivial. When politicians boast about how the oil sands are a reserve as large as those of Saudi Arabia it should make us worried. Burning massive reserves of fossil fuel produces massive amounts of greenhouse gas pollution, even if you do manage to avoid causing too much local air and water pollution in the process of digging those fuels up. Canada’s giant fossil fuel reserves are a threat to the whole world, insofar as they are capable of making climate change that much more dangerous.

Canada cannot avert disaster on its own. Nobody can. But universal disaster is nonetheless an outcome we must avoid, and achieving that requires overcoming a status quo system that remains determined to burn all the world’s coal, oil, and gas and only then start thinking seriously about what energy sources will replace them. We need to do better than that, and one way to contribute to that effort is to refuse to use the bad behaviour of others as an excuse to continue to behave badly ourselves.

Key Climate Questions #2: How much will sea level rise?

Despite the strong consensus that human beings are dangerously altering the climate, there are many important scientific questions about climate change that remain unanswered, or where additional research would be valuable. Improved scientific understanding of these questions can help guide appropriate policy-making. This series of posts identifies what some of these questions are and provides information on the scientific work that has been done on them so far.

For a number of reasons, increasing global temperatures cause sea levels to rise. Ocean water expands when heated. Also, melting icecaps and glaciers contribute to the rise.

Significant increases in sea level could have major consequences for humanity. Some countries are highly vulnerable to sea level increase, such as Bangladesh and the Netherlands. In addition, many of the world’s cities are built near sea level and responding to a significant increase could be exceptionally expensive or even impossible.

Key Climate Questions #1: How long will the effects last?

Despite the strong consensus that human beings are dangerously altering the climate, there are many important scientific questions about climate change that remain unanswered, or where additional research would be valuable. Improved scientific understanding of these questions can help guide appropriate policy-making. This series of posts identifies what some of these questions are and provides information on the scientific work that has been done on them so far.

The various greenhouse gases (GHGs) being produced by human activities persist in the atmosphere for different lengths of time. For instance, carbon dioxide (CO2) has a longer atmospheric lifetime than methane (CH4). In addition, the effects that arise from these emissions have differing lifetimes. Some may endure for long spans of time regardless of what humanity does in the future. For instance, if the West Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets experienced significant melting, the resulting sea level rise could be expected to endure for a long span of time.

The answer to this question has important moral implications. Many future generations will live with the consequences of climate change. As such, the choices we make now affect a great many people. Exactly how many depends on how long the effects last.

Related posts:

Basic information on methane in permafrost

The National Snow and Ice Data Center has an accessible information page about methane in permafrost. Some of the questions listed include:

  1. How much carbon is stored in frozen ground?
  2. What will happen to the frozen carbon if permafrost thaws?
  3. How will additional methane from permafrost affect global warming?

As mentioned before, the methane in permafrost has major significance for climate change policy. If we warm the planet by burning fossil fuels, we could melt the permafrost and release large amounts of methane. That would, in turn, cause still more warming. How much methane would be released for any particular level of warming is an important question, and one that bears upon the question of what portion of the planet’s remaining fossil fuels humanity can safely burn.

Climate change and heavy precipitation

A few months ago, the journal Nature published the work of some Canadian scientists: Seung-Ki Min, Xuebin Zhang, Francis Zwiers and Gabriele Hegerl. The paper is entitled “Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes” and is available online to subscribers.

The researchers conclude that:

Extremes of weather and climate can have devastating effects on human society and the environment. Understanding past changes in the characteristics of such events, including recent increases in the intensity of heavy precipitation events over a large part of the Northern Hemisphere land area, is critical for reliable projections of future changes. Given that atmospheric water-holding capacity is expected to increase roughly exponentially with temperature—and that atmospheric water content is increasing in accord with this theoretical expectation—it has been suggested that human- influenced global warming may be partly responsible for increases in heavy precipitation. Because of the limited availability of daily observations, however, most previous studies have examined only the potential detectability of changes in extreme precipitation through model–model comparisons. Here we show that human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas. These results are based on a comparison of observed and multi-model simulated changes in extreme precipitation over the latter half of the twentieth century analysed with an optimal fingerprinting technique. Changes in extreme precipitation projected by models, and thus the impacts of future changes in extreme precipitation, may be underestimated because models seem to underestimate the observed increase in heavy precipitation with warming.

Supplementary information is available in an 8.8 megabyte PDF.