Connecting climate change to everyday life: Guest blogger Christine Shearer
I regularly meet new people through this blog. Recently Christine Shearer contacted me to look over some paragraphs in her forthcoming book. Christine is a sociologist working on climate change. As my readers know, I believe that perspectives from many different fields are what we need to move our addressing climate change forward. I asked, and she agreed to write a guest blog.
Connecting climate change to everyday life by Christine Shearer
One of the interesting things, sociologically, about climate change science is just how political it has become. It is not, however, that people merely fall on different sides on the issue, depending upon their views concerning government regulation. In many ways this divide was socially engineered. In their research, sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap track how those opposed to climate change regulations helped transform growing national understanding and concern over global warming into a “nonproblem”, creating a political climate conducive toward the US Congress rejecting the binding greenhouse gas limits of the Kyoto Protocol. Regulation opponents did this by borrowing tactics from Big Tobacco: demanding certainty as the only acceptable standard for action, while simultaneously funding research to deliberately create uncertainty. Historian Naomi Oreskes has traced how many of the same scientists that questioned the science on smoking also went on to question acid rain, ozone depletion, and climate change. These efforts are aided by the media, which too often confuse balanced journalism with presenting various views on an issue, ignoring the weight of scientific consensus.
After Kyoto, public perception of global warming as a problem shrank among U.S. Republicans, marking the beginning of a growing partisan divide concerning global warming and the need for action. Conservatives are arguably exposed to more media sources that question climate change, such as the recently leaked memo of a Fox News editor ordering its journalists to always state that climate change data has been called into question when discussing the topic. Gallup surveys also suggest there has been a measurable decrease since Kyoto in just how severe a problem much of the U.S. public – Republicans and Democrats – regard climate change.
This has been the brilliance of the climate change “doubt” campaign – to tame down the urgency with which people wanted action on climate change, and to create pockets of the US population that are absolutely convinced the entire issue is a hoax.
More concerning is that this is happening while the information on climate change is growing more alarming, with glaciers melting more rapidly than many models had predicted, with new studies suggesting carbon dioxide may stay in the atmosphere for longer than had been previously estimated, and with increasing signs that many of the world’s carbon sinks are growing stressed. The disconnect between scientific research and mainstream public opinion is huge, with many scientists quietly acquiescing that we should be performing small-scale experiments of geoengineering, since the social dynamics concerning climate change look so unlikely to change anytime soon.
That is why many organizations like 350.org have been calling for a social movement on this issue, to create the large-scale response needed to push social change. Activists have been trying to argue that action on climate change is a win-win-win: we clean up our environment, stimulate the economy with new technologies and jobs, and remove our dependence on unstable fuels.
What this movement needs, however, is some urgency. Research on climate change and risk perception show people think of climate change as a distant concern, not immediate to them, and not as pressing as other issues like the economic crisis. This is a problem, because the history of social movements and social change show that people often do not get active and involved in an issue until they can connect it to their daily lives, until it touches them personally. The economic crisis is touching people personally. Climate change, in the public mind - not so much.
This is where climate scientists could have a very important role to play: to begin shattering the taboo between weather and climate.
Right now, the conventional wisdom is that no specific weather event can be attributed to climate change. This is of course “true.” But it is the wrong question, and its persistence is having disastrous effects. First, it reinforces the public view that climate change is a remote, long-term concern not immediately affecting them. Second, it falls into the “uncertainty” argument - since you can't say that climate change “caused” a weather event, it ends up being an argument of doubt (and inaction) that plays into climate deniers' hands.
Again, the problem is it’s the wrong question, and we need to reframe the issue. Luckily, some are already doing this. In his paper “How Warm Was This Summer?” NASA scientist James Hansen suggests climate scientists reframe the question to: “Would these events have occurred if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 ppm?” To which he says: “An appropriate answer in that case is ‘almost certainly not.’”
Other scientists, for example, Ben Santer are using climate models as a “control experiment” for pre-industrial greenhouse gas levels, to determine how many times an extreme event of a given magnitude should have been observed in the absence of human interference, and compare that to present conditions, called “fractional attributable risk.
These are much needed advances, for both scientific and public understanding. The more people connect daily occurrences to increasing greenhouse gases, the more they’ll want to do something about it. Now.
The next step, of course, is getting the media and meteorologists to pay attention. But the more scientists discuss daily events, the more social scientists, activists, and other concerned people will demand attention be paid to it. And that will help raise the broader attention and concern we need around climate change. Because the best option, of course, is mitigation. And sadly it is an option we have yet to try.
Christine Shearer
Christine Shearer is a researcher for CoalSwarm, part of SourceWatch, and a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at UC Santa Barbara. She is managing editor of Conducive, and author of the forthcoming book, "Kivalina: A Climate Change Story" (Haymarket Books, 2011).
Figure 1: Conceptual framework showing (in the shaded area) the steps involved in planned adaptation to climate variability and change from Application of environmentally sound technologies for adaptation to climate change; United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, Bonn, Germany, Technical Paper FCCC/TP/2006/2, 107 p
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Updated: Saat: 02:18 AM GMT Tarih: 31 Aralık 2010
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Old Letter // Changing the Game
Old Letter // Changing the Game:
This entry will take a ritualistic view at the end on 2010 and the beginning of 2011. First though I want to start with a letter that my brother Bob stumbled onto. (My readers might like this: The Nature of Technological Civilizations). The letter is from a distant relative of our family, Tabitha Morgan, who was describing the winter of 1782-1783. It is available online at Christmas in Virginia, specifically here.
Winter in 1782-1783:
“The wind was still biting cold on the 5th day of March outside the church in Amelia County where we made our vows to each other. If not the coldest, then surely it had been the longest winter that anyone could remember.
The Elizabeth River froze at Norfolk and all of Virginia was covered in a blanket of snow well into what should have been spring. The Chesapeake Bay froze clear out to the mouth and the ice frozen hard on the Potomac didn’t even crack til ten days after the wedding.
When the thaw finally came, the massive sheet of ice that jammed the James River broke loose at Richmond. Ice and water came crashing down the river’s course like a mighty Atlantic wave. All the boats tied below the falls were lost. No living thing survived in the path of that flood.
In May, as it always does, new life burst forth out of the long frozen ground. This year though, the grasses seamed greener . . . the blossoms more fragrant after all those long, dark months of winter. When the hot, wet Virginia summer finally arrived, I realized that I also carried new life within me.
Nothing was as important to me as the child I carried. He dominated my thoughts and absorbed all my energy. I have never known such joy. ….”
From the past year: I have been in Colorado for the past couple of weeks. The week before Christmas there was more than six feet of wet, heavy snow in Gothic, Colorado. This occurred during a month of warm temperatures, with at least one record high in Grand Junction. Meanwhile, I know people who have been stranded in Europe and missed Christmas because of snow. (some old relevant blogs: Cold Warm Cold Warm, Warm Snow, Weather and Climate)
This year also saw the heat wave in Russia, and the floods in Pakistan. All of these events bring together weather and climate, extreme events, geography and people. (see Brian Fagan’s, for example The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization -- review) More and more we hear of this combination of weather and geography and people leading to disruption and destruction and the collapse of fragile, stressed systems.
Is this climate change, increasing stress on societal capacities, exposure of a growing population, or information shared more broadly, more quickly, and with more focus? Is the flood in Pakistan the biggest – or not. Are the (Lady) Huskies better than the (Gentlemen) Bruins of a previous generation? We reduce our focus to events like the focus on the last game, this game, and the next game. We let this gamesmanship rule the day.
This winter I teach my Climate Change Problem Solving class for the sixth time. Usually I try to lead students through an unfolding of the scientific evidence and the complexity of how to approach climate change as a societal problem. I march through ideas like avoiding dangerous climate change. I lead the discussion to conclusions like - we need to understand far more carefully geo-engineering, because we are, in fact, engineering the planet - if we are going to control carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, then we are going to have to develop the technological means to remove carbon dioxide. We discuss the political and scientific and practical problems of carbon markets - the intersection of climate change and national security. The list goes on.
This year I plan to change my approach, into one of thinking about how to prepare for an atmosphere with more than 400 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide and with temperatures that are beyond our notional two degree average that represents our arbitrary and comfortable threshold of dangerous. It has become evident that we must think about this world that is likely to be. We need to prepare and by making this world more real, perhaps, we raise the tangible information that will motivate us to make this world less notional, less likely.
Climate has always impacted us; it brings us success, and it causes us grief. This will continue to be true, but the Earth will be warmer, sea level will be higher, and the weather will be different. Water will come and go in different cycles. There will be more people. Ecosystems will be different. Weather and geography and people will continue to mix it up. No longer will we be able to plan over generational spans with the idea that the environment is constant, or that we have experienced environmental extremes. The very fabric of the way we build will have to change, buildings and houses and infrastructure will have to adapt. Our crops will have to change. It’s a new way of thinking, a big problem that I have difficulty explaining, much less taking on, but it is time to move beyond identifying the problems and take them on in a new game.
r
Figure 1: The 1953 floods lead to a rethink of London's flood strategy. from The Thames Barrier, from 21st Century Challenges
Pakistani Flood Relief Links
Doctors Without Borders
The International Red Cross
MERLIN medical relief charity
U.S. State Department Recommended Charities
The mobile giving service mGive allows one to text the word "SWAT" to 50555. The text will result in a $10 donation to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Pakistan Flood Relief Effort.
Portlight Disaster Relief at Wunderground.com
An impressive list of organizations
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Updated: Saat: 05:00 PM GMT Tarih: 01 Ocak 2011
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A Trillion Tons: Stabilization of Carbon Dioxide (5)
A Trillion Tons: Stabilization of Carbon Dioxide (5)
I have gotten off of my planned series on open communities because of meetings and the end of the semester. I am at the American Geophysical Union Meeting in San Francisco. This is one of the biggest regular collections of geophysicists – perhaps even a meeting of ritual. I have been told that there are more than 19,000 registered this year. I’ve had a couple of talks (uncertainty, heat waves), and I have had students making presentations. In terms of presentations of ongoing research about the Earth, about climate, this meeting is overwhelming. You could take a bunch of reporters and send them to a 1000 talks and poster presentations and not cover it all. And, of course, it is hard to pick out what will prove to be important. The sessions I attended have focused on improving the evaluation of climate models, better use of climate data by practitioners, and linking global and local information.
There was a talk by Ray Pierrehumbert that has changed the way I think about carbon dioxide and managing the future heating of the planet’s surface. This is one of those interesting results that come from putting together basic information that has, honestly, been around a while. It’s a result that demonstrates the importance of synthesis in scientific investigation.
Some background (here is a longish list from this blog): Stabilization is the idea of controlling, stabilizing, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at some concentration. Some commonly used numbers are that prior to the industrial revolution in parts per million (ppm) there were about 280 ppm. We are currently at about 390 ppm. Jim Hansen has argued we need to get back to 350 ppm. A number, more or less accepted as the lowest, reasonable target, is 450 ppm. And a number that has been used in many evaluations of the impact of global warming is doubled CO2, say, 560 ppm. Currently CO2 emissions are increasing at about 3% a year.
Pierrehumbert was giving his interpretation of a pre-publication report from the National Academy of Sciences, Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts over Decades to Millennia. These reports are written by expert panels, and Pierrehumbert was on the panel, which was chaired by Susan Solomon. (with an innocuous registration you can download a .pdf for free.) A take away message from the report is that stabilization of the climate requires us to consider the total accumulated amount of carbon dioxide that we have released. That is, CO2 does not really go away, and that to think about simply controlling emissions is not enough. It just keeps building up, and in the end, carbon dioxide wins.
In January of 2009 Susan Solomon and colleagues published a paper called Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. The article appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This paper focused specifically on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and made the argument that the effects of man-made carbon dioxide on the climate would last more than 1000 years – their definition of irreversibility.
The lifetime of carbon dioxide in the climate system, specifically in the atmosphere is more difficult to calculate than for many greenhouse gases. This is because of the role of the oceans and the terrestrial ecosystems. A balance develops between the terrestrial carbon dioxide, the carbon dioxide in the ocean and in the atmosphere. While one can find citations that the lifetime of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is on the order of 100 years, Solomon and her co-authors point out that when one considers how long today’s “excess” carbon dioxide from industry influences the climate, it is in excess of 1000 years. It for this reason that if we stopped burning fossil fuels immediately, that the Earth’s surface would continue to warm and remain warm.
Thinking about this, at least for any amount of time relevant to humans, this suggests that the carbon dioxide that we put in the atmosphere will just build up over time. Pierrehumbert’s exposition of this issue comes to the conclusion that given our stated desire to limit surface warming to only 2 degrees on average, we are allowed to put one trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere (I have revised this to take care of the difference between unit of carbon dioxide or carbon equivalent. A ton of carbon equivalent is 3.667 tons of carbon dioxide, see EPA definitions). On time scales of 1000 to 10,000 years, it does not matter a whole lot if we put that trillion tons in over 20 years or over 100 years. From the point of view of an inhabitant for the next few years, I would take issue with it not mattering how fast it comes in – it would affect the peak amount and the amount of warming in the short term. But, as Pierrehumbert presented the argument, it makes sense, and the time scales are all close enough to be relevant and have important implications. Again, long-term effects are determined by carbon dioxide, and it matters what we do in the short term to limit these effects.
Pierrehumbert takes issue with Ramanathan’s proposal that we can manage the composition of black carbon and methane to buy time. The point being that it does not really buy time if we don’t actually control the amount of CO2 emission – because in the end what matters is the total amount of accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. Yes, the management of black carbon and methane makes a difference to temperature, but it is a relatively short blip even on a time scale of 100 years. It temporarily reduces the warming but does not exactly buy time, as CO2 continues to accumulate. Such a warming management tactic could be implemented at any time. (see Pierrehumbert on RealClimate, see also Hot the Brakes Hard).
This rethinking of the role of carbon dioxide challenges the standard stabilization curves that I and many others have used to discuss carbon dioxide balance. Here is that curve:
Figure 1: Stabilization of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide as a Function of Emissions (from IPCC).
This curve suggests that if we start to reduce emissions at a certain rate in, for example, about 2040 and then follow a reduced emissions curve that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will decrease to some value. If you study the curve you will see the carbon dioxide decreasing significantly over 100 years. Pierrehumbert is essentially stating that this curve is not appropriate to reality, because CO2 is not leaving the atmosphere; it does NOT decrease significantly over 100 years. It, therefore, accumulates.
So I am going to try to read some graphs. According to this graph from Pierrehumbert’s blog on Realclimate, a total emission of one trillion tons of carbon would keep warming just below the two degree global average.
Figure 2: Warming based on accumulated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (from RealClimate.org)
Then, according to Table 1 in Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts over Decades to Millennia this trillion tons corresponds to about 430 ppm of carbon dioxide. This suggests that emissions reductions alone, no matter how drastic, will not get us back to 350 ppm. If this is the needed target, then we will have to learn how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
So a question arises – over the past 150 years what is the accumulated carbon dioxide due to burning fossil fuels and how much do we have left? As I understand the emissions, we have used about half of our trillion tons, and we will get to our 1 trillion tons in 2040 with our current rate of emissions. Current reality suggests that we are increasing, not decreasing our emissions. It would be, therefore, an ambitious goal to limit our emissions to one trillion tons, and shift to non-carbon energy sources. We might buy some time by managing and reducing our carbon emissions, meaning to reduce the rate of emissions increase.
In a statement of what has been becoming more and more evident, the National Academy report "concludes that the world is entering a new geologic epoch, sometimes called the Anthropocene, in which human activities will largely control the evolution of Earth’s environment.” It will be ours to manage and engineer, either with knowledge and responsibility or without.
r
Pakistani Flood Relief Links
Doctors Without Borders
The International Red Cross
MERLIN medical relief charity
U.S. State Department Recommended Charities
The mobile giving service mGive allows one to text the word "SWAT" to 50555. The text will result in a $10 donation to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Pakistan Flood Relief Effort.
Portlight Disaster Relief at Wunderground.com
An impressive list of organizations
Figure 3: A ton of carbon dioxide in Copenhagen.
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Updated: Saat: 10:32 PM GMT Tarih: 27 Ekim 2012
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Cancun and News - Again:
Cancun and News - Again:
Cancun, Conference of the Parties - 16: The Conference of the Parties (COP) are the annual meetings that are part of the governing body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. We went into the Cancun meeting with far lower expectations than the 2009 meeting in Copenhagen . Much of the talk preceding the meeting was focused on small good things (A Small Good Thing, this is just a good short story.) This is, perhaps, an implicit statement that a comprehensive global agreement on climate change and reduction of emissions are just beyond our ability of collective action. Some would argue that this has been evident for some time, and it is finally emerging that we need to piece together, more effectively, bottoms-up solutions.
Like last year, there is a group of University Michigan and Alma College students at the conference. They are going and coming, and they are writing their own blogs, which appear on ClimateBlue. There are a few students and members of the Michigan Delegation who were also at last year’s meeting, providing a perspective of the two meetings. (We thank Wunderground.com for helping to sponsor the students.)
Figure 1. Cancun Climate Conference. (Photo from Kevin Reed)
In my entries from the 2009 COP meeting, I recall talking about the quiet work of the people sitting at coffee-shop tables talking about their community-based approaches to adaptation (Rood). That is, in the big storm of international politics, people dismiss their political leader’s relevance to the real world and take on the opportunities to anticipate and to prepare based on information provided by climate simulations. In short, adaptation to the consequences of climate change rises to the forefront.
The January 13, 2011 issue of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society explores the world of four degrees warming. This issue implicitly and explicitly recognizes that we are not likely to limit warming to a global average of two degrees, and that it is critical to describe this new warmer world and to plan for this new world. Here are links to the preface and the editorial accompanying this issue. At the start of the Cancun meeting there was a flurry of press coverage of reports coming from the International Livestock Research Institute. These reports fed off of looking at a world that is closer to a four degree warming, as opposed to the increasingly unrealistic world where “dangerous” climate change has been avoided. What struck me about the people looking at these adaptation problems was the thorough, serious approach, and their ability to cut a rational path through all of the political, economic, and scientific uncertainty to develop convincing strategies for problems such as – can we still grow corn in Africa? Here are a set of reports and press coverage over the past few weeks and years:
Climate variability and climate change: Impacts on Kenyan agriculture
A wonderful collection of stories on agriculture and climate change in Africa
Climate change as opportunity in Africa
Voice of America Coverage of African Climate Adaptation
Africa’s Growing Water Crisis
I respond to efforts such as the one outlined above on many levels. It is gratifying to see the use of the climate projection information in systematic and rational ways. Further, to me, this response and knowledge is being developed in Africa, and these efforts serve as examples of the increasingly deep and distributed intellectual base vested in addressing climate change. These efforts proceed while the international political clamor imagines moving towards a problem more tractable than reducing emissions – namely, who will pay, setting up international funds and ways to hand off technology (as a poor writer, I note a tone of the incredulous).
It also makes me wonder about us, here, in the United States. At last year’s meeting, in the exhibits it was not the U.S. exhibitors who had the leading technology. As I look around the world the self-organization that is taking place is not in the U.S. Here, on the national scale we argue about prosecuting climate scientists, and shoot, literally, cap and trade in political ads. I see European firms building U.S. wind technology. I sit in meetings where U.S. scientists argue about the same data provision issues they argued about in 1995, probably 1985, while Canada already has a facility to provide climate data for applications. In short, the political argument and the cultural inertia places the U.S. further and further behind in both science and technology – an issue of basic economic and societal success. (Does this only seem relevant to me? Molybdenum and test scores)
Going back to the students and the University of Michigan Delegation in Cancun – it is these students and their peers who are starting to address these problems. It is this generation who will live with the warming planet, and who will take advantage – or not – of the opportunity that is provided by climate projections. I point out some of their entries from Cancun: Climate Action Network Canada Press Conference, Moving Beyond Coors Light Solutions, Top Three Warmest Year.
Figure 2. Cancun Climate Conference – UoM Students, Sarah Katherine Pethan (SNRE) and Marisol Ramos (Ford School), point at a white square that says “United States.” (Photo from Kevin Reed)
Book of the Year: A Vast Machine I have mentioned Paul Edwards’ book A Vast Machine many times. The Economist has selected it as a Book of the Year. A quote. “Not enough intelligent, scholarly and critically minded history of contemporary science gets published, but this work, by a professor at the University of Michigan, is a nice exception on an important area.”
A Couple of Updates: Johannes Feddema sent me a note on focusing of targeted studies of land use changes in response to some of my recent blogs. (White Roofs in the Cities).
And my blog got a great write up in the Cody Enterprise.
Pakistani Flood Relief Links
Doctors Without Borders
The International Red Cross
MERLIN medical relief charity
U.S. State Department Recommended Charities
The mobile giving service mGive allows one to text the word "SWAT" to 50555. The text will result in a $10 donation to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Pakistan Flood Relief Effort.
Portlight Disaster Relief at Wunderground.com
An impressive list of organizations
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Updated: Saat: 05:07 AM GMT Tarih: 10 Aralık 2010
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