Greenhouse Gas Flows

A Problem with Many Strands

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 ~ Reductions will require sustained effort and focus across a wide swath of global economic sectors.

The problem will soon become even harder.

Choosing Profits Over Planets

From the Mouths of Boobs

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 ~ "What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?"

So said CEO Rex Tillerson at Exxon's annual meeting yesterday. What really concerns him, of course, is less the suffering of humanity than the suffering of diminished profits. The right choice between the planet and profits? Yes! More money! Never mind that there is no business to be done on a dead planet. Or that you can't take it with you. Or that dispensing with the Earth, our only home, is somehow a reasonable option in service of unbounded cupidity. But then T. Rexx has some puzzling beliefs.

Carbon Intoxication

Scientists are Not Immune

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 ~ I've been formally trained as a computer scientist, and at one time made a very good living from it at a top institution. However, just because I am a "scientist" it does not mean that I am qualified to discourse on scientific subjects at large.

This does not, however, much deter some scientists from fulminating well outside their areas of expertise or qualification. Or spouting their personal beliefs from ideologically aligned platforms. Today we have been treated to another tired retread of an article in the Wall Street Journal by climate change simpleton William Happer. Along with astronaut Harrison Schmidt, he claims, again, that more atmospheric carbon is good for us because we need plants, and plants need carbon dioxide.

Much of the article can be dismissed on factual grounds with reference to what actual climate science and climate scientists can tell us. (I'm no expert—being a computer scientist does not make me a general scientific expert—and I happily defer to those who are.) Happer and Schmidt focus on the tired and discredited trope that carbon concentrations have been higher in geological time (true) but ignore the recent, and utterly unprecedented rate of change in those concentrations. Sure, life flourished, but not human life, and species that cannot adapt to a changing environment not infrequently suffer or become extinct. Evolution does not work well in short time periods of rapid environmental shift.

400 ppm

Too Much Carbon

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 ~ Atmospheric carbon is now higher than it has been in 3 million years.

The last time CO2 reached the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million in the atmosphere - in the Pliocene era - temperatures rose by between 3 and 4 degrees and sea levels were between five and 40 metres higher than today.

Climate change is a slow-motion calamity, but also an economic opportunity for those who seek profit. Might be a good time to start businesses building seawalls, boats, or snorkels.

Imagine

A Less Fracked World

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Divestiture

Money Talks

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 ~ Protest and divestment work.

Seattle is the first US city to announce formal divestiture of investments in the fossil fuel industry. Mayor Mike McGinn made the announcement yesterday, making good on a promise made November 7 during 350.org's Do The Math tour. Said McGinn:

Climate change is one of the most important challenges we currently face as a city and as a society. I believe that Seattle ought to discourage these companies from extracting that fossil fuel, and divesting the pension fund from these companies is one way we can do that.

With Friends Like These...

A Messy Relationship

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 ~ At the Alberta Tar Sands, how committed are they really?

A spokesman for government department Natural Resources Canada said: "The oil sands are an important strategic resource that we are committed to developing in a socially and environmentally friendly manner." [Emphasis added]

Are Norwegians Nuts?

Norway To Double Their Carbon Tax

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 ~ Big Oil and its apologists inveigh endlessly against a carbon tax and its twinned alternate, a cap-and-trade (or cap-and-dividend) system. Why? Because it will destroy the economy of course!

Burdening oil and other forms of carbon energy with fully pricing their currently externalized costs would dramatically boost the cost of energy, impoverishing consumers and stunting business investment! Economic growth with slow, stop, or even reverse! So we are told.

However, in our northern provincial neighbor, BC, the economy seems to be doing just fine despite several years of an innovative application of just such a measure.

None of the dire predictions of economic catastrophe have come to pass, and there is no longer political opposition to having such a tax. There is a simple and straightforward object lesson here about the hysterical voices in the US Congress shrilling shrieking shibboleths of doom and devastation: they're wrong.

Now Norway is set to do something even more ambitious—more than doubling their existing carbon tax on their (thriving) oil industry. Can they really do that?

Dinosaur Fossils

Are Investors Paleontologists?

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 ~ Hey! Turn around and check out the view...

Why Clean Energy Matters

It's The Emissions, Stupid

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 ~ It's a significant part of the greenhouse gas emissions problem:

Graphic by Emmanuelle Bournay, UNEP/GRID-Arendal

What part of this surprises you the most?

Learn more about the UN Environmental Programme here.

Download high-resolution versions of this graphic here.

Buried Treasure?

Keep Fossil Fuels Buried

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 ~ We should leave our fossil fuels in the ground.

And not just because it would keep that carbon and its climate change impacts out of the atmosphere, but also because it would add to our energy security as a country.

Keeping more of our fossil fuel wealth in the ground would increase our energy security in two ways:

Climate Change Conversion

Skepticism Pursued

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 ~ Richard Muller, climate change skeptic, writes:

It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed.

Muller is a scientist, and thus, a skeptic. He's still a climate change skeptic, but has turned his deeply skeptical faculties to the question, and come to a definite conclusion:

Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

Four observations:

Climate Change Math

Is Our Number Up?

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 ~ Bill McKibben has written the definitive piece on the three key numbers that summarize our impending, self-made, and slow-motion global catastrophe. Simply:

1. 2°C--The maximum rise in average global temperature we can sustain without cataclysmic consequences. We're already 0.8°C there, and may have another 0.8°C yet to be reflected but already baked into the global warming cake.
2. 565 Gigatons--The limit on the amount of atmospheric CO2 we can yet emit and stay under 2°C.
3. 2,795 Gigatons--The amount of carbon in the proven gas, oil and coal reserves of companies and countries. These reserves are what those entities intend to extract for humanity's collective burning.

The economics of the fossil fuel industry, their capitalization, and their shareholders' wealth depend on extracting and burning almost 5 times more CO2 than the absorbing ability of the Earth can sustain.

McKibben argues, convincingly, that we need to start thinking of the Fossil Industry in a different way:

Ready for a Grand Bargain

If Only There Were True Leadership

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 ~ Amazingly, perhaps the first glimmers of an awareness of a real way forward:

A majority of Americans from both political parties are ready for the "grand bargain"--an increase in taxes on old energy sources (oil, coal, and natural gas) in return for a reduction in income tax rates across the board. In short, they're ready for a new national climate and energy policy to emerge.

They're also ready to support new, cutting edge energy technologies. And they recognize that climate change is starting to affect extreme weather events--in fact, 82 percent said they were personally affected by a climate-related extreme weather event of one kind or another last year--and are ready to do something about it.

It's bipartisan too. Details and other surprising results.

People know this is what needs to be done, and something much like this is already working in British Columbia. All we need is real leadership, and less corruption from unlimited corporate money.

Climate Change Impacts Day

Connect the Dots

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 ~ Great job by Bill McKibben and the rest of 350.org.

There were better things to do today than drink tequila, and tens of thousands did just that—connecting the dots on how climate change is the result of human choices and actions.

Pictures.

Paper or Plastic?

More Choices

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 ~ For decades we've been asked at the grocery checkout which bag we want—"paper or plastic?" It's a Morton's Fork.

The problems with plastic bags are well-known, including petroleum and energy inputs, production emissions and how unsustainable they are, especially their waste stream impacts. Plastic is angst-ridden.

Paper bags are little better. They are made of a renewable resource, sure, but use much more energy and water in their manufacture have a higher carbon footprint, and produce more pollution. That they are nominally biodegradable is mostly irrelevant; most end up taking space in landfills where decomposition is inhibited to prevent methane production.

The dilemma is really a false one, or should be.

Acid Redux

Oceans in Trouble

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 ~ The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is increasing and the ocean is becoming more acidic. It may be an "experiment" that the Earth has run before, but it's not the same this time.

The world’s oceans may be turning acidic faster today from human carbon emissions than they did during four major extinctions in the last 300 million years, when natural pulses of carbon sent global temperatures soaring, says a new study in Science. The study is the first of its kind to survey the geologic record for evidence of ocean acidification over this vast time period.

Who Cares About Carbon?

Merely the Living, Really

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 ~ Climate change deniers cannot dispute the evidence that carbon concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing.

Instead, they argue that it doesn't matter because it's happened before. Indeed it has, and that history should give us all pause.

Geologist Bryan Lovell explains:

Selective Regulation

Constituent Service?

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 ~ Who fills their campaign chests?

For all the talk about protecting life, they do rather objectify women as things to regulate.

If they were serious about protecting life, there would be a lot more regulation of quite a few other things, like atmospheric carbon, coal ash tsunamis, guns, fracking fuels in drinking water, and any number of things that blow up far too too often: oil refineries, drilling rigs, and financial markets especially.

Climate Change Case Closed

A Preponderance of the Evidence

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 ~ Who killed the climate?

For all the misdirection over what is the compelling cause of climate change and the niggling over minor mistakes in the IPCC report, the preponderance of the evidence points to greenhouse gases:

So, we have a precedent for how climate change policy should be determined, not by the bogus logic that any hint of uncertainty in any of the climate science should be grounds for doing nothing, but rather that the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence demonstrating the human link to climate change should frame our actions.

The prosecution rests.

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Reposted from my earlier blog of 3/23/10