Desalinization and the fragile society

California is looking towards desalinization to address its water shortage:

Now, for the first time, a major California metropolis is on the verge of turning the Pacific Ocean into an everyday source of drinking water. A $1 billion desalination plant to supply booming San Diego County is under construction here and due to open as early as November, providing a major test of whether California cities will be able to resort to the ocean to solve their water woes.

This is part of a larger trend:

Across the Sun Belt, a technology once dismissed as too expensive and harmful to the environment is getting a second look. Texas, facing persistent dry conditions and a population influx, may build several ocean desalination plants. Florida has one operating already and may be forced to build others as a rising sea invades the state’s freshwater supplies.

In California, small ocean desalination plants are up and running in a handful of towns. Plans are far along for a large plant in Huntington Beach that would supply water to populous Orange County. A mothballed plant in Santa Barbara may soon be reactivated. And more than a dozen communities along the California coast are studying the issue.

This trend shouldn't be viewed in isolation, but rather as part of a broad suite of high-tech, high-capital, energy intensive solutions -- or "solutions" -- to environmental problems created or (more often) intensified by population growth and climate change.

Other examples include the vertical farming movement (a more recent write-up is here) and the increasing reliance of sky resorts on snow machines. Global consumption of air conditioning is rising rapidly and the latent demand for it is already vast.

Source

The result of these trends is apt to be a global society that is more comfortable, and more insulated from temporary shifts in weather. These are, of course, good things in and of themselves. They illustrate that there are (as few doubted there were) technological fixes that allow us to adapt (to some extent) to a warmer world.

But while a society that is increasingly dependent on such devices is in the short term more robust, it is in the longer term more fragile. The more you rely on energy-intensive, technologically sophisticated "solutions" to maintain reliable supplies of things as basic to human survival as food and water, the more vulnerable said society is to disruptions that may compromise those work-arounds.

While a society with desalinized drinking water is more resistant to drought, it is only so as long as the power in on, and the engineers come to work, and the spare parts are in supply. Lose that, whether to extreme weather, or war, or terrorism, or some other disruptive force -- and in addition to your other problems you will be very thirsty, very quickly.

We already live in a technological society, of course. I'm under no illusions that we would be able to feed seven billion people without the factories that produce fertilizer or the trucks and ships which move those fertilizers to the farm or the food to the market. Technological dependence exists along a spectrum. Things like desalinization move us further along that spectrum [1]. So while we store up more climate stresses for the society of nine billion people who will be confronting them at mid-century, we are also bequeathing to them an infrastructure which will be more vulnerable to catastrophic collapse -- a tall tower built taller even as the winds begin to howl.

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1. This is especially concerning when we push ourselves down that spectrum for no good reason, and desalinization in California is a perfect example of this. In California, as in most other places, the lion's share of the water -- more than three-quarters of it -- is used by agriculture. But when Gov Jerry Brown announced his emergency plan to save water across the state, he asked virtually nothing from the agriculture sector:

Brown's seven-page executive order, issued Wednesday, outlined the first statewide mandatory water use restrictions in California's history.

Among them: He ordered a 25% reduction in urban use statewide compared to 2013 levels. The directive also bans the use of drinking water to irrigate median strips in public roads, initiates the removal of 1,150 football fields worth of grass to be replaced with drought-tolerant plants; and orders golf courses, campuses and cemeteries to significantly cut their water consumption.

Agricultural mandates were fewer and milder. Irrigation districts were directed to develop drought management plans that include supply and demand data. Agencies in basins where groundwater has been overpumped must immediately monitor groundwater levels.

Ignoring three-quarters of the consumption during a period of unprecedented drought is obviously a political decision, not a practical one. In this context, the valuable technological asset of desalinization is not being put to use to adapt to climate change so much as to adapt to political cowardice and a feckless electorate.

What snow machines can tell us about the 21st century

Studies conducted by University of Colorado snow scientist Mark Williams and his colleagues predict that, if we continue to pollute the way we do now, skiing will be confined to the top quarter of Aspen Mountain in average years by the end of the century. Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort will have no snowpack whatsoever. The Great Melt will hit maritime ski resorts in the Cascades and Sierra even sooner. A study in New England found that only four of the region’s 14 major ski resorts will still be profitable by 2100 — if they even survive that long.

 -- "As the climate warms, skiers can kiss their Aspen goodbye"

Madeleine Thomas over at Grist has an article up with the catchy title "In the ski business, there are no climate deniers." To the optimistic mind, this might seem a herald of good things to come, as climate change's effects impact people and businesses so directly and forcefully that it's no longer practicable not to take into account. And so it may come to pass. But lurking in the latter paragraphs of the piece is a stark warning that the actions taken in response to that reality may not be what climate activists hope:

Many resorts across California, normally a Mecca for powder hounds, are being left with no option but to invest in snow-making equipment in order to stay afloat during the winter months — as much as $8 million worth within the last three years at larger resorts like Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows. But making snow is not without its costs: At resorts like Big Bear Lake, snowmaking equipment can suck up to 7,000 gallons of water from the lake per minute, at a whopping $3,000 per hour.

Economic analyses of the costs of climate change typically assume rational adaptation -- sacrificing places and aspects of are way of life when sustaining them becomes expensive or impracticable. But the opposite reaction is all too plausible -- expending resources lavishly to sustain one's existing patterns of behavior.

We would like a ski resort owner to hasten to DC a purchase a piece of a Congressperson in the service of fighting climate change. But what they are doing in practice is buying snow machines. Just as the people feeling the heat in New Delhi are buying air conditioning. And not just there, of course, but all over the globe:

China is already sprinting forward and is expected to surpass the United States as the world’s biggest user of electricity for air conditioning by 2020. Consider this: The number of U.S. homes equipped with air conditioning rose from 64 to 100 million between 1993 and 2009, whereas 50 million air-conditioning units were sold in China in 2010 alone. And it is projected that the number of air-conditioned vehicles in China will reach 100 million in 2015, having more than doubled in just five years.

As urban China, Japan, and South Korea approach the air-conditioning saturation point, the greatest demand growth in the post-2020 world is expected to occur elsewhere, most prominently in South and Southeast Asia. India will predominate — already, about 40 percent of all electricity consumption in the city of Mumbai goes for air conditioning. The Middle East is already heavily climate-controlled, but growth is expected to continue there as well. Within 15 years, Saudi Arabia could actually be consuming more oil than it exports, due largely to air conditioning. And with summers warming, the United States and Mexico will continue increasing their heavy consumption of cool.

Beyond air conditioning or snow machines, desalinization of sea water, farmed fish, and vertical farming are all examples of energy-intensive "adaptation" that may make the long-term problem worse. This is something we are going to see a lot of in the come years, so we will need a name for it. You might call it local energy-intensive resistance (LEIR.)

I don't begrudge an Indian family a cool place to sleep or, indeed, a ski resort owner their snow, which is, after all, their livelihood. But from the perspective of the larger civilization, these energy- and carbon-intensive solutions are maladaptive, not adaptive. They exacerbate climate change by increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and in exchange temporarily mitigate the harm caused by those emissions. They solve the problem of over-exploitation of the natural world by exploiting it harder.

Since LEIRs are available only to the comparably well-off, they additionally have the pernicious effect of weakening solidarity in confronting a crisis that threatens both rich and poor. The ski resort owner with his snow machine is not likely to become a climate warrior, even though the cost of climate change is real and immediate to him. He has made a separate peace.

Preparations in the meantime

Population: 158 million

Reported without comment:

According to the Bangladeshi government’s climate change action plan, as many as 20 million Bangladeshis may need to be resettled as soon as 2050. “Preparations in the meantime will be made to convert this population into trained and useful citizens for any country,” the plan (pdf) says.

The Anna Karenina scenario

Every happy family is alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Apropos of the Anna Karenina Principle, how many things would have to go right for climate change to be merely an expensive annoyance (or one human problem among many), rather than a planetary disaster?

First, we need continued rapid economic growth. Even in the best case, dealing with the impacts of global warming -- drought, sea level rise, heat waves, extreme weather events -- between now and 2100 or 2200 will require resources we don't have today. Without continual economic growth, even most optimistic global scenarios offer certain disaster.

Stern Review

 Five percent of 2100's projected GDP is over 40% of our GDP today -- an impossible burden that would lead to global impoverishment.

The assumption of continued economic growth is a reasonable one, as the world's economy has been on an upward trend for many years:

Nevertheless, continued rapid economic growth is not inevitable, and should be ranked as one of the requirements in realizing the Anna Karenina scenario. Wars, a global depression, unrelated natural disasters, and climate change itself could all compromise this pillar of futurists everywhere.

It is necessary but not sufficient that climate sensitivity prove to be on the low end of estimates. With a climate sensitivity of 3C, and a BAU pathway of 1000ppm CO2 equivalent (1), we can expect +4-6C of warming, which would wipe out most forms of life on earth.

Extract from p. 42 of Technical Summary of IPCC WGIII Fourth assessment Report (2007)

Reasonable people trying to strike a middle course between "alarmism" and "skepticism" will often say that climate change may not be a big deal, but we should protect ourselves from the possibility that climate sensitivity is high. This is well-intended, but a wrongheaded oversimplification. The reality is that while five degrees and onward is a planetary catastrophe under almost any set of assumptions you chose does not mean that 2-3 degrees is an expensive but manageable problem. A high total temperature rise is game over; a low total temperature rise still requires many other things to go right (2).

Sea level rise is presently estimated at between 0.5m to 2.0m between now and 2100. It needs to be closer to 0.5m to avoid the loss of huge numbers of human settlements to the sea. We must hope that the Greenland ice sheet and the WAIS respond very slowly to warming and are largely incapable of responding on a decadal scale. Of course other ice sheets, such as the less-popular sibling of the West Antarctic ice sheet, the East Antarctic ice sheet, must not have any nasty surprises in store.

Agriculture will have to prove highly resistant to climate shocks. Varying the type of crops and making efficient irrigation broadly available while avoiding massive losses to pests, diseases, and extreme precipitation.

We cannot afford to lose the Amazon (as is expected) or the boreal forests: the Anna Karenina scenario requires they resist warming and there is no massive die-off that would turn the terrestrial biosphere into a net source of carbon. That would insure catastrophic long-term warming.

No Arctic warming tipping points.

Healthcare technology and delivery systems will have to advance faster than the spread of tropical diseases north and south. Efficient building designs and/or air conditioning will need to be available to rich and poor alike to avoid millions of deaths from the direct thermal effects alone.

Permafrost melting will need to release its stored carbon slowly, and overwhelmingly as carbon dioxide and only a small amount as methane. Methyl hydrates need to stay put, or leak out only very slowly.

Political systems will have to prove highly resilient and adaptive. They will have to respond to the escalating climate harms with aggressive long-term adaptation, and not make things worse with panic responses like hoarding, protectionism, or conflicts over migration, borders, or resources. As the Economist cogently put it:

I feel fairly comfortable arguing that a modern economy can handle the stresses of climate change reasonably well; economies are built to handle big change. I feel very nervous about the ability of various political systems to survive temperatures unprecedented in human history. Many political systems rely explicitly on stability to survive, and even those capable of handling climate impacts may struggle to handle the knock-on effects of climate impacts on their more vulnerable neighbours. And as political systems are disrupted, it will become more difficult to sustain growth.

This is a partial list. There are impacts I haven't covered; there are certain to be impacts no one has yet guessed at.

The nasty aftertaste of a clear-eyed look at the possibilities is this: even if everything goes right -- if humanity holds the winning climate lottery ticket and none of the terrible things come to pass, or happen only in a blunted and delayed form, and only (in large part) after we are all healthier and wealthier and wiser than we are today: even so, in the best of all possible worlds, global warming will be an expensive destructive mess than will drag on for thousands of years, making the impoverishment of the natural world and disruption of the benign Holocene climate our civilization's permanent legacy.

Most economic analyses assume all these good things happen and neglect, not out of malice but due to the limitations of their science, most of the horrible disasters climate scientists think are possible -- in some cases likely. Even so, the benefits of slowing climate change outstrip the costs in virtually every economic analysis out there.

One of my least favorite lukewarmer fallacies is the concept of "no regrets" policies -- that we should push ahead with policies that can be sold to the right wing as energy independence or job creation or whatever appeals to those in denial of the science. This is an asinine idea. Climate change is real. You don't get to smart policy by agreeing to disagree on critical scientific facts pertaining to the future of human civilization. Here's the truth; aggressive emissions cuts are the true no-regrets strategy. Uncertainty in climate change lies between bad and worse. The benefits range from saving trillions of dollars and millions of lives, on the low side, to averting planetary catastrophe.

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1) Meaning a forcing caused by human activities similar to change the level of CO2 to 1000ppm, comprised mostly of CO2 but also with contributions from methane, NO, CFCs, and land use changes.

2) The best analysis of the economic implications of a "fat tail" probability of climate catastrophe is "On modeling and interpreting the economics of catastrophic climate change" (2009) by Martin L. Weitzman, the undisputed expert in this area (400+ citations for that paper alone in less than three years). He wisely make the limitations of climate sensitivity highly explicit:

There are so many sources of uncertainty in climate change that a person almost does not know where or how to begin cataloging them. For specificity, I focus on the uncertainty of so-called "equilibrium climate sensitivity." This is a relatively well-defined and relatively well-studied example of known unknowns, even if the uncertainties themselves are uncertain. However, it should be clearly understood that under the rubric of "equilibrium climate sensitivity" am trying to aggregate together an entire suite of uncertainties, including some non-negligible unknown unknowns. So climate sensitivity is to be understood here as a prototype example or a metaphor, which is being used to illustrate much more generic issues in the economics of highly uncertain climate change.

Sea Level

New site, h/t WHT: http://www.sealevelreport.com/

As with many climate impacts, the problem of sea level rise is a little more complicated than it appears at first blush. There is, of course, the problem of putting valuable real estate under water. Five million square kilometers of land lies within 10m of sea level; but it is not just any land. For thousands of years, boats have been the most efficient way to move goods; before the advent of railroads, automobiles, and airplanes, they were also by far the fastest. Hence huge numbers of people live at the water's edge. Today, about 37% of the world's people live within a 100km of the coast; by 2030, half the world's people will. About 500 million people currently live within 5m of sea level; those are the people whose homes are likely to be under water sometime between 40 and 400 years from now. There are 800 million people within 10m of sea level; they will probably have to move eventually as well.

But in addition to human settlements from small towns to great metropolises that must either by lost to the sea or protected via a huge and expensive system of dikes, there are additional consequences to sea level rise. One is erosion; higher seas mean the ocean takes bigger and bigger chunks of land away with the waves. This has been estimated at about 10% of rate of inundation -- so if we lose 5 million square km to rising seas, we might expect to lose 500,000 km^2 to erosion.

A more subtle problem is the infiltration of salt water deep inland.

 As the sea level rises, salt water filters into the aquifers, a problem exacerbated by over-pumping. In California, some regions have already been forced to inject fresh water into the aquifer on a regular basis to create a barrier to slow the infiltration of salt water into the aquifer.

An excellent report on sea level rise, its dangers, and the costs of adaptation, is here. The cost of the realistically expected sea level rise in this century alone is in the trillions. These estimates do not take into the loss of historic cities, the destruction of wetlands, corals, and wildlife, or the cost of conflicts over limited water or the resettlement of refugees.

Air conditioners all the way down

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the
sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. 

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at
the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish.
The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant
tortoise." 

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is
the tortoise standing on?" 

"You're very clever, young man, very clever,"
said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."

I came across this interesting inaction rationale in the latest Economist analysis of Durban:

Recent work by, among others, Michael Greenstone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology backs that approach. It shows that hot spells kill few people in air-conditioned America; but in India, where 300m have no access to electricity, the death toll is huge. India’s priority is to provide its people with electricity, and one day air-conditioners. That this will increase its emissions is less a problem for India than for the world. It therefore views any suggestion that it should be bound to curb its emissions as a threat.

Assuming that is indeed a line of argument in India (and the Economist is usually quite reliable) I was interested in how practical this approach might be, so I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Readers should feel free to point out obvious errors. Here we go:

There are about 1.2 billion people in India. That number is expected to rise to 1.6 billion by 2050. Let's say we want to protect them from global warming by providing them with central air in their homes and businesses (we could preserve their lives by, say, cooling a single room in their homes and making them all rest and sleep there, but let's assume they don't want to lead that sort of miserable existence.) Let's estimate about 200 million households needed residential air; there will probably be more than that by 2050, but let's be conservative. Some of them may live in cool regions; some already have air conditioning, factoring in to India's current power costs and greenhouse gas emissions, which for the record are:

India (thousands of tons of CO2): 1,742,698

We will also give them 50m commercial systems; they can't spend all day in their houses. We don't need people dropping from heat stroke in the factories, offices, the call centers and the banks.

Using this helpful wikipedia article, I estimated the residential systems would need about 3 tons of refrigeration, while I estimated the commercial systems very conservatively at 10 tons. One ton of refrigeration consumes 3,517 Watts whilst in operation (assuming an seasonal energy efficiency ratio (SEER) of 10). So residential systems consume roughly 10,000W, and commercial systems 35,000W (there is no point in false precision when we are throwing around estimates like this.)

A standard estimate for the use of air conditioning is a thousand hours per year (eight hours a day times a hot season of 125 days). That seems reasonable. That puts us at (10Kw * 1000 hours * 200,000,000 systems) = 2.0 * 10^12 Kw-h for the residential, plus (35Kw * 1000 hours * 50,000,000 systems) = 1.75 * 10^12 Kw-h for the commercial, totaling 3.75 * 10^12 Kwh of electricity required.

So how much is that? Well, at eight cents a Kwh, that power will run you $300 billion dollars a year (20% of India's present-day GDP; even if the economy grew by 300% in short order, they would still be spending 5% of their GDP on air conditioners). But more importantly, at an average emissions density for fossil fuel electricity of 750g (I love wikipedia) that air conditioning generates greenhouse gas emissions of:

India air conditioning alone (thousands of tons of CO2): 2,812,500

That's two and a half times India's current emissions. It's roughly 10% of the total global emissions in 2010. In other words, relative to the 80% emissions cut needed by 2050 to (hopefully) stabilize the climate in the short term, the CO2 emissions of Indian air conditioning would consume half of humanity's global CO2 budget.

The alternative is to keep emitting and keep warming -- and keep building air conditioners, and burning fossil fuels to power them, accelerating the warming further. Eventually we will need to run the air conditions harder, and longer, to deal with warming of +4C, +5C, or even more -- driving the cost and the emissions even higher (while we are also paying to resettle climate refugees, relocate coastal towns, and fight the spread of tropical diseases). Of course, we can't air condition our crops, we can't air condition every home in Africa or South America or the rest of Asia. But other than that, smooth sailing. It's air conditioners all the way down.

Curt Stager's Eemian -- cold comfort for a +4C future

Curt Stager has some reassurance for us regarding Greenland's ice sheet:

Another way to estimate the durability of Greenland's ice is to look to the distant past. Ice cores and marine sediments show that dozens of cyclic natural warmings have punctuated the last 2 to 3 million years without totally deglaciating the poles. The one before the last ice age, the Eemian Interglacial, kept Arctic summers several degrees warmer than now between 130,000 and 117,000 years ago, but at least half of Greenland remained glaciated even after 13,000 years of Eemian heating.

Oh, good. As long as it doesn't get any warmer than it was in the Eemian, we shouldn't lose more than half of the Greenland ice sheet. But of course, if you lose ice from Greenland you will probably lose ice from elsewhere, too, so we should probably look at what sea levels did in the Eemian, rather than just one source of what. They were about 13 to 20 feet higher than today.

Now one might object that Stager says this took place over 13,000 years. But that's not exactly what he said. He said that after 13,000 years, about half the ice was gone. That's not quite the same thing. Glaciers persist because of a balance of accumulation of new ice and melt. A given amount of warming pushes the equilibrium of the glacier towards a reduced size, but unless the reduced size starts to compromise the accumulation zone, the new equilibrium can be stable. Meaning that Greenland could have lost all that ice in a couple of centuries following the warming, and then remained in a stable half-melted state for the next 12,800 years. We don't know. Our proxies are not detailed enough to tell us. We know half the ice was there after twelve thousand years, but we don't know if that represents a rapid melt and a new equilibrium, or a gradual 13,000-years melting.

But, still. Twenty feet. We can do twenty feet, surely? I see the Bangladeshi delegation have their hands up. Please hold your questions until the end. Thank you.

The trouble with the reassuring anecdote of the Eemian is that it was not really all that much warmer than the present. Some parts of Europe were 1-2C cooler than today. The Arctic may have been "several degrees" warmer -- due to Arctic amplification, which we already observe with regards to the present warming.

SRES A1B, warming per century, from Real Climate

As the map illustrates, we can expect warming in the Arctic to run about double the overall trend. That puts us in line for +8C, +10C or even more over the next century or two. Eight degrees -- eight degrees is beginning to leave the realm of "several" and put a toe over the line into "many." In other words, the end of the next century will be warmer than the Eemian was. 

So what were the sea levels like the last time the world was +4C warmer (+8C at the poles) (the warming expected over the next century or so)?

If you look at the +2C line (which is probably the best case scenario for 2100, with aggressive mitigation; we are +0.8C now) you'll see the world has not seen temperatures that warm in the last ten million years, including the Eemian. The last time we were at +4C was in the Eocene, some 40 million years ago. What were the sea levels then? That turns out to be a tricky question to answer precisely, because over tens of millions of years, the land as well as the seas are moving up and down. But there was little ice in Antarctica, or in Greenland. Which, if it happened today, would equate to a 80 meter sea level rise -- 260 feet.

This is what the United States looks like after an 80 meter rise:

The Eastern seaboard is gone.

The Gulf is gone.

The principle cities of the West Coast are gone.

Essentially the United States as we know it would be destroyed and the nation, if it survived as such, would have to resettle more than a hundred million people and abandon its most valuable, most heavily developed, and most historic lands -- Washington DC and New York, Philadelphia, Miami (and indeed all of Florida), Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle.

I don't know how long we would have to remain at +4C for this to happen. A very long time, I fervently hope. But if you are looking for analogies to the coming warming, mine seems closer to the coming centuries than his. Yet he's a note paleoclimatologist with a book out on this very subject:

So why what seems to be a falsely reassuring analogy? Perhaps I'm missing something basic. He's the climate scientist, not me. To my layman's understanding, he seems to be avoiding the uneasy truth of just how far out of the realm of anything we know we are pushing the world's climate. He's striving to sound reasonable, but the threat is objectively so much bigger than the discourse is prepared to accept, that to sound reasonable you have to downplay the logical implications of the paleoclimate record.

How to get serious about green jobs: 4 keys

1. We could upgrade the nation's rail infrastructure with electrified rail replacing diesel engines and with the addition of double-track lines to minimize traffic congestion that can slow trains to an average of 2mph on some routes.

2. We could weatherize every home in America. (Heating, ventilation, and cooling puts paid to about a third of all the electricity used by US homes.)

3. We could fully fund fuels management on all federal lands:

Another issue is funding for fuel reduction. Funding and acres treated rose (roughly doubling) between FY2000 and FY2003, and have stabilized since. Currently about 3 million acres are treated annually. However, 75 million acres of federal land are at high risk, and another 156 million acres are at moderate risk, of ecological damage from catastrophic wildfire. Since many ecosystems need to be treated on a 10-35 year cycle (depending on the ecosystem), current treatment rates are insufficient to address the problem.

UPDATE: A recent study found fuels management increases greenhouse emissions. So while it might or might not be worth it, it's off my list of green jobs.

4. We could construct a backbone of HVDC lines connecting the regional power authorities across the United States, an "interstate highway" system for the power grid. This would cut transmission losses, today approximately 6.5% of all electricity generated. (Cutting those losses in half would be the equivalent of bringing 45,000MW of clean energy onto the grid -- and reliably linking the US power grid from coast to coast would greatly reduce the indeterminacy problem of high levels of wind and solar -- while the wind does not blow nor the sun shine all the time, if a thousand wind and solar plants are contributing to the grid, the law of averages will inevitably push their contribution towards a steady state.)

 Incentives to develop wind, or solar, or geothermal energy are all very well and good, but it is difficult to pick an industry and make it successful, especially if an important part of your motivation is to create jobs. Even successful industries may not create very many jobs, and there is nothing to stop the successful, once established, from taking those jobs elsewhere.

What we can and should do is radically upgrade our national infrastructure and our management of public lands. Those tasks cannot be left to the private sector. The private sector cannot set a new standard for rail lines, cannot protect federal lands from wildfires, cannot improve disaster response capabilities. True, a hefty carbon tax would advance many of these goals, including weatherization. But not only are the politics of such a tax difficult right now, but it would fail to provide the short-term stimulus and job creation which our economy needs.

Judith Curry gets risk backwards

A haymaker of folly:

With regards to climate change, those who are warning of the dangers need to actually make a case that a warming of several degrees is actually a bad thing.  Tying this warming to extreme weather events seems to be the most straightforward way to do this, but the science of doing this is nowhere near robust at this point.

Minor error first: if you want to make the case that a multiple-degree rise is a bad thing, the most straightforward thing to point to is the multiple-meter sea level rise that commits us to. It's not the worst thing, but it's simple inarguable physics and unquestionable harmful. Our coasts and bays are the most densely populated parts of the earth, and heavily developed. To lose them to the sea will be dangerous and expensive.

Curry also edges by things like ocean acidification, crop failures, the spread of tropical diseases, and the burden of direct heat stress on human beings, along with the extinction of 20% to 50% of all the species currently alive on earth.

Major error: Implementing a radical change in the earth's climate is safe until proven otherwise. We looked at this fallacy at IT before:

Forget about the specifics, and imagine a spaceship.

This ship includes the entire population of humanity -- one billion people, say (never mind what happened to the old Earth -- Death Star got it, or something). And it is going to travel to one and only one planet. That planet will now be humanity's new home. And you know literally nothing about it (scenario one).

Suppose the ship's computer informs the crew that the climate on New Earth is changing, and unless you expend significant resources to prevent it (deploying solar mirrors in advance of your arrival, or what have you) the temperature will be 3C warmer when you arrive.

What is your response? Clearly, you don't care. The planet may be just three degrees to cold to support life now. Or it might be an uninhabitable volcanic hell, and 3C more will be nothing. Warming could make things better, or worse, or make no difference. With no way to know, you aren't going to spend resources to try and control the climate.

This is the circumstance some pseudoskeptics and "lukewarmers" feel we are in. We don't know what the effects of warming will be, they could be good or bad, so it would be folly to decarbonize our economy on that basis.

But scenario one is unrealistic; we don't know nothing about this warming planet. We know a large number of us are living on it and have been for some time. So change the scenario a little bit. Suppose we know exactly one thing about New Earth; we know that it will support one billion human lives. Now, same question. Three degrees warmer, or expend the resources to prevent it.

This is a totally different calculation. You know the planet's climate will support human civilization, that the people on the spaceship can live there; you do not know if a new, warmer climate would. If you have a climate that will support human civilization on the one and only planet on which humans can live, you would be uncommonly stupid to do anything to significantly alter that climate. And the less you knew or could predict about the response of that climate, the more stupid it would be.

The last 8,000 years, coinciding with the entirety of recorded history, have enjoyed a remarkably stable climate:

The last 800,000 years have seen a number of ice ages and warming periods (interglacials), some of which were slightly warmer than the present:

Several degrees of warming takes us right off this graph, too. Homo sapiens evolved in Africa 200,000 years ago. If you are middle-aged or younger and in fairly good health, you will likely live to see conditions warmer than any ever before seen by human beings. And the issue is not, "Could this possibly be safe?" but rather "Can we assume this to be safe until such time as we can accurately predict the response of the climate and human civilization to this unprecedented event?

We still haven't gone back far enough.

 We are less than +2C from the warmest temperatures seen on earth in five and a half million years. That's prior to the time, about three million years ago, when apes began to walk upright.

How much further back we can go depends on what range of temperature rise you consider "several degrees." If you consider +8C a possibility, and the AR4 would suggest that it is, you are looking at conditions warmer than any seen on earth in tens of millions of years:

With these changes you are not just changing human living conditions: you are transforming animal and plant ecosystems many times faster than evolution can transform them to cope. You place the earth on a path of mass extinction, from which it will recover, but human civilization as we know it may not. Remember: this unprecedented climate needs to be able to provide food and shelter for nine billion people.

Climate scientists, economists, physicians, biologists and ecologists are all actively researching what the warmer world will means, what effects this radical change will bring. That is their job, but it should not be confused with the need to prove that radically changing the earth's climate without fully understanding the consequences is unsafe. It is unsafe, and stupid, and at the risk of repeating myself, the less you we or can predict about the response of that climate, the more stupid it is.

Watching the rice

A new study finds global warming is already depressing rice yields:

Climate change, the monsoon, and rice yield in India – Auffhammer et al. (2011) “Recent research indicates that monsoon rainfall became less frequent but more intense in India during the latter half of the Twentieth Century, thus increasing the risk of drought and flood damage to the country’s wet-season (kharif) rice crop. Our statistical analysis of state-level Indian data confirms that drought and extreme rainfall negatively affected rice yield (harvest per hectare) in predominantly rainfed areas during 1966–2002, with drought having a much greater impact than extreme rainfall. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we find that yield would have been 1.7% higher on average if monsoon characteristics, especially drought frequency, had not changed since 1960. Yield would have received an additional boost of nearly 4% if two other meteorological changes (warmer nights and lower rainfall at the end of the growing season) had not occurred. In combination, these changes would have increased cumulative harvest during 1966–2002 by an amount equivalent to about a fifth of the increase caused by improvements in farming technology. Climate change has evidently already negatively affected India’s hundreds of millions of rice producers and consumers.” Maximilian Auffhammer, V. Ramanathan and Jeffrey R. Vincent, Climatic Change, DOI: 10.1007/s10584-011-0208-4.

H/t AGWObserver. Milo Hamilton, a "global corporate rice buyer for Uncle Ben's," consultant, and president of firstgrain.com, brings the knowledge:

If you have come to hear my short-term price outlook, well here it is: The loss since June of large portions of world wheat and coarse grain production has left us with much higher and more volatile prices for alternatives for farmers to plant in the next year. Even rice may be affected in some areas at the margin by the high prices of corn, wheat and soybeans in particular. Rice as well has suffered some losses in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, China, Cambodia and Thailand as well as in the Western Hemisphere, last year in South America, this year in the United States due to record setting night time temperatures. We may have lost upwards of half a million MT of US paddy rice versus the September estimate from the US Department of Agriculture.

 Increased nighttime warming relative to the average temperature is, of course, one of the telltale features of anthropogenic warming and will be an increasing problem in the years to come.

Hamilton also note the uniquely thirsty nature of rice as a crop:

Water is a particularly difficult issue for all countries with large populations and low levels of ground water per capita. In particular, because rice takes two or three times as much ground water as other rain fed crops, the cost of water can lead to radical changes in how and where rice is grown. A good example is Egypt that is trying to face in to a future where its major River the Nile is projected to stop flowing into the sea within a decade. Notice that Egyptian experts estimate that it takes about six billion cubic meters of water to grow one million acres of Egyptian rice. If folks start charging for water, the price of rice could go to very high levels.

The loss of reliable glacier runoff, worsening droughts, and the salinization of the water table that can be expected with rising seas will all exacerbate a problem of water scarcity created by overpopulation, subsidy and waste.

The long-term outlook for rice is grim:

South Asia is home to nearly 22% of the world’s population, including 40% of the world’s poor. Agriculture plays a critical role in terms of employment and livelihood security for a large majority of people in all countries of the region. The region is prone to climatic extremes, which regularly impact agricultural production and farmers’ livelihood. Himalayan glaciers, a major source of water for the rivers in the Indo-Gangetic plains, are projected to significantly recede in future that could affect food and livelihood security of millions of people in Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, India and Bangladesh. Climate change is further projected to cause a 10–40% loss in crop production in the region by the end of the century.

 Accompanied by a 50% increase in population. Remember the number -- 14.5 trillion calories a day. It's non-negotiable. And it's under threat.

Jared Diamond dismantles Lynas: How to politely devastate a "skeptic" loon

Passersby were astonished by the unusually large amount of blood. Diamond sets right to work:

 Among Hunt’s and Lipo’s main conclusions, they say that Easter Island was deforested by rats, not by Polynesian settlers; that settlement was not until AD 1200 rather than earlier as widely assumed; that the tall stone statues of up to 90 tons were not transported horizontally, but were “walked” upright; that the collapse of Easter society was due to European impact, rather than to impacts of the settlers themselves before European arrival; and that the view of Easter society’s collapse as a self-inflicted ecological catastrophe is flawed. Unfortunately, the web postings don’t recognize the compelling reasons why Hunt’s and Lipo’s conclusions are considered transparently wrong by essentially all other archaeologists with active programs on Easter Island.

A "skeptic" with no experience of a given area of scholarship uncritically embracing a single source that claims to overturn all that went before, despite being regarded as  "transparently wrong" by the vast majority of qualified experts? Come on, that would never happen.

The initial reason for positing a role of rats in Easter’s deforestation was that some preserved seeds of Easter’s extinct palm tree, found in caves, show marks of gnawing by rats; and that a study of Hawaii attributed deforestation there to rats. However, evidence that rats played no significant role in Easter’s deforestation includes the following.  Rats occur not only on Easter but also on every other one of the hundreds of other Polynesian islands, most of which nevertheless did not end up deforested.  Over 90% of preserved palm seeds outside caves were not gnawed by rats.  Easter’s forest consisted not only of the palm but also of at least two dozen other species of trees and other plants, all of which also became extinct on Easter although most of them are not known to suffer seed predation by rats and continue to exist in the presence of rats on other Polynesian islands.

So we have "skeptics" who spin an entire narrative out of a single fact: there are some seeds in some caves, some of which were gnawed by rats. They then ignore the larger body of evidence and neglect the basic obligation of any scientist presenting a hypothesis to account for all the facts. Have we seen something like this somewhere before?

How could tall 90-ton statues have been dragged over unpaved hilly terrain?  The only reasonable solution, to avoid their tipping and breaking during transport, is to transport them horizontally and then lever them into an upright position.  Jo Anne Van Tilburg, the leading scholar of Easter statues, who has spent decades cataloging the hundreds of statues, carried out an experiment in which Easter Islanders demonstrated for her their horizontal transport and levering-up of a model statue.  But Hunt and Lipo claim that statues were transported vertically.  This seems an implausible recipe for disaster.  Imagine it yourself: if you were told to transport a 90-ton statue 33 feet high over a dirt road, why would you risk tipping and breaking it by transporting it vertically with all its weight concentrated on its small base, rather than avoiding the risk of tipping by laying it flat and distributing its weight over its entire length?

 Hunt and Lipo think that these statues "waddled" -- in all their 33-foot-tall glory -- up and down unpaved hills. As Diamond says, imagine it. But the problem here is not Hunt and Lipo having dumb ideas -- it's people like Lynas and Curry who spread this stuff to their many devoted fans, without any effort to assess critically the claims of the "skeptics."

This underscores that lukewarmism is not and never has been about a particular stance in relation to the science of global warming. Unfortunately, just like its cousin, denialism, it's about a particular attitude and approach to a given field. It's not primarily a set of erroneous conclusions, but an erroneous method motivated by partisanship.

Postscript on Peiser, Lynas' other crappy source: In a statement against interest by Lynas, a statement I don't know whether to praise for its honesty or condemn for its bald admission of indifference to the use of scholarly garbage, Lynas in his own comments basically admits Benny Peiser is a hack:

Actually Peiser’s paper was published in a special edition of E&E which was specifically devoted to taking apart Diamond’s ‘Collapse’ book, so fitted well into that. (I haven’t read any of the rest of it because Oxford University doesn’t subscribe to E&E!) [Memo to Lynas: Oxford is a thousand-year-old world-famous university with tens of thousands of journal subscriptions -- if they don't even carry the journal you are using to form the tentpole of your argument, that is a red flag.] I think the edition was guest edited by Julian Morris and Kendra Okonski – both very much anti-environment activists, latterly with the ‘International Policy Network’ (now defunct I think) and very much in the ‘climate denial’ line. So not great credentials…[No, really?] but that still doesn’t make the paper wrong – it should be judged on its own merits. Plus, I wouldn’t have given it so much weight except for the Hunt and Lipo book – which does seem very solid in terms of the fieldwork, and has also seen material published in the ‘right’ (specialist) journals. [Well, we know how that turned out for you.]

 Not a great day for Mark and his Curry-endorsed "opening mind," but here's hoping he learned from the experience.

Mark Lynas gets Jared Diamond wrong.

Mark Lynas joins the cottage industry of hating on Jared Diamond as he spins a myth of "The myth of Easter Island's ecocide:"

 Few historical tales of ecological collapse have achieved the cultural resonance of that of Easter Island. In the conventional account, best popularised by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book ‘Collapse’, the islanders brought doom upon themselves by over-exploiting their limited environment, thereby providing a compelling analogy for modern times. Yet recent archaeological work suggests that the eco-collapse hypothesis is almost certainly wrong – and that the truth is far more shocking.

As we will see, the most "shocking" thing Lynas brings to bear is evidence of his own incompetence and/or malice in misrepresenting Diamond's argument in the measured, carefully argued Collapse.


Judith Curry spreads the meme, and extends the faulty argument:

[C]omplex coupled social-ecological-environmental systems, simple theories are almost certain to be too simple.  The complexity of such coupled systems precludes simple cause-effect analyses.   If we are arguing about such a system on the scale of Easter Island, what hope do we have of understanding and managing such interactions on  continental or even global scales?  Ecosystems eventually adapt to climate change and insults from humans. 

From arguing that Diamond got Easter Island's tragedy wrong, Curry somehow gets to the point that all of Diamond's thinking is wrong, because it is "too simple," and by the way, climate science is impossible, because it is too simple too. Also, ecological devastation is nothing to worry about because "Ecosystems eventually adapt to climate change and insults from humans." (That single sentence is wrong in so many dimensions -- the moral, the practical, and the scientific -- not just Pollyannish but horribly pantheist and anti-humanist -- that it deserves its own post.)

Judith Curry was once a respected climate scientist. Now she poses for photos like this.

But we should really start with patient zero, Lynas himself. The reality he is describing -- one historian has one idea about how something happened, supported by pieces of evidence, and other historians highlight new evidence that challenges that account -- is really not punchy enough for the kind of "gotcha" post Lynas is writing (those evil environmentalists are trying to scare you!). So he sexes up the allegations with a small army of straw men:

Diamond’s thesis is that the island’s original lush tree-cover was destroyed by the Polynesian colonists, whose cult of making massive statues (for which the island is now famous) required prodigious amounts of wood to transport these huge rock idols. He suggests that as the ecological crisis brought on by deforestation worsened, the islanders tried to appease their apparently angry gods by making and transporting yet more statues, creating a vicious circle of human stupidity.

Anybody who has spent five minutes paying attention to Jared Diamond would know that he would be highly unlikely refer to an entire culture's spiritual practices as a "cult."  The only use of the word "cult" in the entire book refers to a post-disaster religious practice which Diamond regards positively: "The survivors adapted as best they could, both in their subsistence and in religion . . . the new religion developed its own art styles . . ." (141).

 What about the vivid (and given Curry's reaction, unintentionally self-referential) phrase "a vicious circle of human stupidity"? Did Diamond say anything like that?

Actually, if you search Collapse for the word "stupid," you find the opposite -- Diamond stressing the intelligent and cultured native civilizations, whose behavior we unfairly judge, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been unintelligent:

Page 24: "The societies that ended up collapsing were (like the Maya) among the most creative and (for a time) advanced and successful of their times, rather than stupid and primitive."

Page 513: "With the gift of hindsight, we now view it as incredibly stupid that colonists would release into Australia two alien mammals . . . But it's still difficult for professional ecologists to predict which introductions . . . will prove disastrous. . . . Hence, we really shouldn't be surprised."

Page 518: "We unconsciously imagine . . . just a single tree left, which an islander proceeds to fell in an act of incredible self-damaging stupidity. Much more likely, though, the changes in the forest cover from year to year would have been almost undetectable . . ."

Whenever Diamond mentions stupidity (and there's one more reference, on page 624, but it's just the same) it is always to defend societies (and not just native societies; he sticks up for the Australian colonists too) from our harsh judgements, with the benefit of hindsight, that they behaved stupidly.

This is incredibly obvious to anyone that has read any of Diamond's books, including his most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (and if you haven't read it, do). The theme that runs through all of Diamond's writing is that people are people and in the long-term make a similar proportion of good and bad decisions, decisions which however are usually based in a fairly deep understanding of the conditions in which the people at the time lived, decisions that are often smarter and more flexible than we tend to attribute to societies other than our own.

That is Diamond's big idea, and Lynas gets him entirely backwards. So how does he sell this straw man Diamond to the reader? Check out this epic bait and switch:

Diamond was not the first to draw this specific analogy: over a decade earlier, in a 1992 book entitled ‘Easter Island, Earth Island’, Paul Bahn and John Flenley (both palaeoecologists) wrote:

“…the person who felled the last tree could see that it was the last tree. But he (or she) still felled it. This is what is so worrying. Humankind’s covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn. Selfishness leads to survival. Altruism leads to death. The selfish gene wins. But in a limited ecosystem, selfishness leads to increasing population imbalance, population crash, and ultimately extinction.”

Lynas suggest that Diamond's thesis builds on this one, but as we now know, Diamond's conclusion was precisely the opposite:

“…the person who felled the last tree could see that it was the last tree. But he (or she) still felled it."

Page 518: "We unconsciously imagine . . . just a single tree left, which an islander proceeds to fell in an act of incredible self-damaging stupidity. Much more likely, though, the changes in the forest cover from year to year would have been almost undetectable . . ."

Lynas depicts Diamond as extending the argument of Bahn and Flenley (doubtless the most extreme and unsupportable conclusion he could find) despite the fact that Diamond specifically addresses this theory and categorically refutes it. That's not just a poor argument: it's dishonest to attribute to Diamond a thesis he specifically entertained and vehemently rejected.

There's more here, much more, but after we've caught Lynas using Collapse to attribute beliefs to Diamond which are exactly the opposite of what he wrote in Collapse, that's sort of the end, isn't it? He's committed credibility suicide as that point. As so often with such as Lynas, we are left with the eternal question: is he a liar or just a sloppy incompetent?


UPDATE: Yes, I know I said that catching Lynas in a 180 degree misrepresentation of Diamond was enough to call it right there, but here's one more fun fact about his fallacy-laden screed.

Lynas casually introduces the following reference:

As Benny Peiser points out in this 2005 paper, fish supplies were abundant, and reports from early European explorers that the islanders were thin and miserable-looking are highly contradictory (others report that they lived in comparative luxury). Certainly Diamond’s reading of this seems highly partisan. As Peiser puts it:

“Together with abundant and virtually unlimited sources of seafood, the cultivation of the island’s fertile soil could easily sustain many thousands of inhabitants interminably. In view of the profusion of broadly unlimited food supplies (which also included abundant chickens, their eggs and the islands innumerable rats, a culinary ‘delicacy’ that were always available in abundance), Diamond’s notion that the natives resorted to cannibalism as a result of catastrophic mass starvation is palpably absurd. In fact, there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever for either starvation or cannibalism.”

Sounds bad for Diamond. I'll just do a quick check, as I always do, to make sure this paper is good science by a respected author in a reputable peer-reviewed journal . . .

B. Peiser (2005) From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui Energy & Environment volume 16 No. 3&4 2005

 Energy and Environment. Your source for all your archaeological and archaeometrical needs, without the stress and hassle of peer review. So, Mr. Peiser, how did you come to be publishing in such as illustrious pillar of the historical sciences?

Of course there's a Sourcewatch page:

Benny Peiser is a UK social anthropologist on the Heartland Institute "Global warming experts" list. He runs CCNet (network) and is frequently quoted in Local Transport Today, a transport journal that frequently features the views of climate change skeptics. He is director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.^[1] He is co-editor of the skeptic journal Energy and Environment^[2] and is on the editorial board of the Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development.

 An expert in climate change and historical instances of Polynesian cannibalism. Talk about your double threats.

His educational background is not given . . . I'm sure we can all come to a reasonable inference about that. But he is (or was) an academic, to be sure:

Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology & Sport Sociology, Liverpool John Moores University

 So far Mark Lynas has promoted this clown, and Judith Curry repeats the quote, whilst praising Lynas' "opening mind." Who will be next to join them in embarrassing themselves with lavish praise for psuedoscience? This threatens to become the Jonestown of credibility suicides.

What if we took +4C as inevitable?

The range of possible responses to climate change is typically broken down into two main strategies -- "adaptation" -- learning to live with it -- and "mitigation" -- slowing the rate at which we are warming the planet, primarily but not exclusively by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases.

Lukewarmers, as one would expect, don't like mitigation much. That's kind of the point of being a lukewarmer, accepting the main bullet points of the science whilst opposing limits on greenhouse gas emissions. (If you are a lukewarmer who accepts the basic theory of AGW and supports curbs on greenhouse gases -- well, I'm sorry to have to tell you that this is the point in the movie when the tough guy realizes he was bitten in that last skirmish and has began the inevitable transformation into one of them.)

The lukewarmer argument -- which I explored in some detail here and here -- has traditionally been that there's nothing much to worry about. It's a little warming, big whoop. It was a lot warmer a couple hundred million years ago, and the dinosaurs didn't have any problems with it at all.

But more recently it's become clear problems are coming -- big problems -- and they can't be ignored. And the discussion has turned to adaptation, as opposed to mitigation. This is Judith Curry's main line of argument: local adaptation to problems as they emerge.

I was confronting this argument, and I had a revelation: the lukewarmers are right (no, really). Adaptation is the name of the game. Why? Because, in all probability, a +4C world is coming. The only question is when.

The SRES temperature projections are well known:

We passed year 2000 concentrations a decade ago without slowing down, so that ship has pretty much sailed, but no problem; it looks like the B1 scenario limits us to just under +2C. That's great! The earth was warmer than that a mere 120,000 years ago! Should be fine. Onward mitigation!

Here's a little Easter egg of bad news, lurking in the fine print of the AR4 like an unpaid bill:

For the B1 constant composition commitment run, the additional warming after 100 years is also about 0.5°C, and roughly the same for the A1B constant composition commitment (Supplementary Material, Figure S10.3). These new results quantify what was postulated in the TAR in that the warming commitment after stabilising concentrations is about 0.5°C for the first century, and considerably smaller after that, with most of the warming commitment occurring in the first several decades of the 22nd century.

So it's going to continue warming for a hundred years past the right edge of the graph. But then it stops . . . right?

Yeah . . . no. It keeps warming. The deep ocean warming sees to that. The ice-albedo feedback sees to that, too, but it isn't modeled in the AR4. These also aren't the carbon-cycle models we have coming in the AR5, but the expectation is that permafrost melting and other carbon-cycle feedbacks will contribute to warming as well.

How long can this go on? Recent research ("The contribution of timescales to the temperature response of climate models," Jarvis & Li (2011)) is not reassuring:

Both the magnitude and timescale of climate change in response to anthropogenic forcing are important consideration in climate change decision making. . . . As a result of this emergent property of climate models, it is possible to offer credible partitioning of the full equilibrium gain of these models, and hence their equilibrium climate sensitivity, between two discrete timescales; one decadal associated with near surface ocean heat equilibration; and one centennial associated with deep ocean heat equilibration. Timescales of approximately 20 and 700 years with a 60:40 partitioning of the equilibrium gain are found for the models analysed here. A re-analysis of the emulation results of 19 AOGCMs presented by Meinshausen et al. (Atmos Chem Phys Discuss 8:6153–6272, 2008) indicates timescales of 20 and 580 years with an approximate 50:50 partition of the equilibrium gain between the two. This suggests near equal importance of both short and long timescales in determining equilibrium climate sensitivity.

So when does it stop?

After the year 3000, the global mean surface temperature is predicted to be almost constant due to the compensating effects of decreasing atmospheric CO₂ concentrations due to oceanic uptake and delayed response to increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentrations before. 

That's a comfort.

So here's the sharp end of the argument, and the point where I turn it back (you knew I would) on the adapt-niks. +4C is coming. Even if we follow a B1 (low population, intensive emissions cuts) pathway, and hold concentrations fixed from 2100, we still hit +4C eventually (with +2C in short term warming, Jarvis & Li tells us another +2C is in the pipeline.)

So we have to adapt to a +4C world -- sea levels tens of meters higher, 50% of animals extinct, agricultural production decimated, climate refugees in the hundreds of millions. To adapt we need money -- vast amounts of economic resources to resettle refugees, relocate coastal cities, cope with almost unimaginable heat waves, mega-droughts, and huge storms. We need scientific and technological progress -- a lot of progress, before we can have any confidence in feeding billions of people in a +4C world, before we can cope with the mass extinctions and radical rearrangement of floral and fauna in a +4C world.

Hey, we don't know what you're talking about; warming is great

There is only one thing that will give us vastly more money, scientific knowledge and technical know-how. Time. We need time to adapt. Buying time has got to be the cornerstone of any adaptation strategy. People like Bjorn Lomborg advocate deferring serious mitigation to the far future, when we have more money and know-how. Adaptation is then presented as the default alternative. But accepting the reality of a +4C world shows that logic to be backwards. If we are going to be richer and smarter in the future, we should defer adaptation to our future selves by pursuing mitigation now.

We know a +4C world in coming. What we don't know is when. If we do nothing by way of mitigation, smart money says it will be before the end of this century. Fifty years -- 2060 -- if we're really unlucky. And without mitigation, we will rapidly pass +4C on the road to something worse.

Fifty years is not a very long time. Fifty years ago people already flew across the country on jets, watched television, got antibiotics when they were sick. They had cars and rockets and fusion bombs. They were like us. 

With intensive mitigation -- holding the short-term warming to under +2C -- +4C is still waiting for us, but in six hundred years. Six hundred years is a very long time. Six hundred years ago the scientific revolution had not been conceived, democracy had not been seen since Athens; there was no internal combustion -- steam engines belonged to the distant future at that point. Medicine was little better than the shaman who drilled holes in heads thousands of years before. Shakespeare was as far in their future as the 23rd century is from us.

In six hundred years, if we don't destroy ourselves, our technical and scientific abilities will be unrecognizably superior to those we have today. As well they should be, before we rely on them to cope with temperatures warmer than the earth has seen in millions of years.

+4C is coming. We're not ready yet. So if you truly believe in human progress, in continual growth and the expansion of human knowledge, the conclusion is clear: mitigation is the best adaptation.

Climate change: The Economist gets it

I don't know what it is with The Economist's climate coverage recently, but it's dead on. From a July 31st editorial:

Droughts, floods, deadly storms: the news is full of them. While it's not easy to attribute any individual event to climate change, it is clear that a hotter planet translates into a higher frequency of extreme weather events.

So there you have "the problem of attribution" -- solved. Like cigarettes and cancer, extreme weather is not always cause by global warming. But more warming get you more extreme weather, just as smoking three packs a day gives you a higher risk of cancer. Simple enough?

When we emit carbon into the atmosphere, we impose a tiny cost on society as a whole in the form of more rapid global warming and a greater intensity of the accompanying social ills. Views of the magnitude of this cost differ. Many studies peg it at somewhere between $5 and $150 per tonne of carbon. Other studies indicate that it could be far higher—perhaps more than $1,000 per tonne. But the cost is positive, and a crucial first step to dealing with climate change, therefore, is to charge people for the carbon they emit. If you put a positive price on carbon, this price will be reflected in the cost of transactions, people will internalise the effect of their behaviour on the climate, and emissions will fall.

Why is this so hard for Andy Revkin, Judith Curry et al? The cost is positive. So you internalize the externality. The Economist is a freakn' libertarian journal and has been for a hundred and fifty years. They get it. Where are you?

There's no shortage of crises in the world today, and these troubles collectively reveal the many shortcomings in the institutional arrangements of our modern world. But in some ways, the continuing failure to address climate change in an appropriate fashion is the bigger indictment of government today. The fall-out from an American default would be hugely costly, but it almost certainly wouldn't represent an existential threat to humanity.

Whoa, you're starting to depress me, guys. Can't you give me something hopeful to go away with?

Anyway, it's just about the least surprising political outcome ever, but it's nonetheless noteworthy that in the whole of this major American fiscal debate no one has proposed taxing carbon. Forget the nitpicks; it would be easy to design a tax so that it didn't kick in right away, and so that its impact would be progressive. But people in Washington would literally laugh in your face if you presented a carbon tax as a good policy choice to include in a deficit-reduction package.

Well, that image is going to be stuck in my head for a while. We're in a bad place on the politics, no question. But on the bright side:

1. Politics change -- often quickly, often dramatically. See marriage, gay.
2. Global warming can be relied upon to get worse. And while we should be starting now, or, more accurately, should have started some time ago, as things get later, more people should come around. And late is better than never.