Climate Progress

The report hasn’t even been released yet, but one of the big stories around this Friday’s release by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the conservative edge to the final product, which does not fully account for the melting of the Greenland nor Antarctic ice sheets.

The report is consensus-based and as such, carefully written and meticulously reviewed. The process is heavily bureacratic, a maze of international political and scientific red tape, which is both its strength and weakness.

While its level of international cooperation attests to its conclusions, scientists have struggled with how to model variables like melting ice sheets. Taking into consideration the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet is likely to move measurements of the sea level rise from inches to feet or meters within this century.

Uncertainties in the science need to be addressed with more research, certainly not the proposed cutback in funding for climate studies. And for as cautious as the IPCC report is in its creation, it needs to consider and calculate the potential consequences of climate change even more cautiously.

That means at least two things need to accompany the report’s release: a public awareness campaign of the missing pieces and future IPCC reports that include models of disintegrating ice sheets.

The scientific debate is closing (against us) but not yet closed.
–Frank Luntz, conservative strategist, 2002

Global warming is real (conservatives secretly know this).
–David Brooks, New York Times columnist, 2005

The global- warming problem is no longer primarily a scientific matter. Science has told us what we need to know about how life on this planet will be ruined if we stay on our current greenhouse gas emissions path. Global warming is also not a technological problem. We have the technologies to avoid the disasters that await us if we keep doing nothing.

Today, global warming is a problem of politics and political will. We lack the will to take the necessary actions–and many of the actions we are poised to take are either inadequate or ill conceived. The great political tragedy of our time is that conservative leaders in America have chosen to use their superior messaging and political skills to thwart serious action on global warming, thereby increasing the chances that catastrophic climate change will become a reality.

Global warming should not be a partisan issue–not when the health, well- being, and security of the next fifty generations of Americans are at stake. But it has become partisan, at least in this country. In order to determine how to create the politics of action in the next decade, we must understand what the politics of inaction has caused in the past decade. That’s what this chapter is about.

A new “semi-empirical” method of estimating sea level rise shows that earlier techniques underestimated the likely rise, according to research published in Science online.

Ocean expert Stefan Rahmstorf noticed a correlation between the warming in the atmosphere and the rise of sea levels over the 20th century. Having also watched the actual rate of sea level rise pass earlier computer estimates, Rahmstorf integrated his real-world observations with the models.

Rahmstorf estimates a possible sea level rise of anywhere from 50 to 140 centimeters, up from 9 to 88 cm. The new numbers would put North Atlantic shore cities, like New York and London, at higher risk for storm surges, which helped flood New Orleans.

Rahmstorf’s research has higher accuracy than previous models, explaining why he insists that:

We should not take this risk. We should start with very effective emission reduction measures. The global temperature increase should be kept to under 2°C.

Already, we have experienced a .8°C increase, meaning we are almost halfway to where scientists have warned us not to go, and we need to stop pushing the envelope.

We could get a meter [of sea-level rise] easy in 50 years.

– Bob Corell, chair, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, 2006

The peak rate of deglaciation following the last Ice Age was . . . about one meter [39 inches] of sea- level rise every 20 years, which was maintained for several centuries.

– James Hansen, director, Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA), 2004

Sea-level rise of 20 to 80 feet will be all but unstoppable by midcentury if current emissions trends continue. The first few feet of sea-level rise alone will displace more than 100 million people worldwide and turn all of our major Gulf and Atlantic coast cities into pre-Katrina New Orleans–below sea level and facing superhurricanes.

How fast can seas rise? For the past decade, sea levels have been rising about 1 inch a decade, double the rate of a few decades ago. The Third Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released back in 2001, projected that sea levels would rise 12 to 36 inches by 2100, with little of that rise coming from either Greenland or Antarctica. Seas rise mainly because ocean water expands as it gets warmer, and inland glaciers melt, releasing their water to the oceans.

Sea-level rise is a lagging indicator of climate change, in part because global warming also increases atmospheric moisture. More atmospheric moisture probably means more snowfall over both the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets, which would cause them to gain mass in their centers even as they lose mass at the edges. Until recently, most scientists thought that the primary mechanism by which these enormous ice sheets would lose mass was through simple melting. The planet warms and ice melts–a straightforward physics calculation and a very slow process, with Greenland taking perhaps a thousand years or more to melt this way, according to some models.

Since 2001, however, a great many studies using direct observation and satellite monitoring have revealed that both of the two great ice sheets are losing mass at the edges much faster than the models had predicted. We now know a number of physical processes can cause the major ice sheets to disintegrate faster than by simple melting alone. The whole idea of “glacial change” as a metaphor for change too slow to see will vanish in a world where glaciers are shrinking so fast that you can actually watch them retreat.

The disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is a multistage process that starts with the accelerated warming of the Arctic….

In his State of the Union address, President Bush threw away the last opportunity he had to save his historical legacy. He continued his business-as-usual do-nothing approach on global warming, which is the gravest threat facing the American way of life. As I wrote earlier in a column posted on the Center for American Progress web site:

President George W. Bush believes history will end up judging him favorably. He compares himself to Harry Truman who left office unpopular in large part because of a difficult war on the Korean peninsula but who is now admired by historians. President Bush suffers from an unpopular war, too, yet absent a dramatic reversal in President Bush’s climate policies–never mind Iraq–it’s a good bet that neither historians nor future generations of Americans will ever warm to President Bush.

Predicting the long-term consequences of the president’s misguided and mismanaged invasion of Iraq is impossible. But it is not at all difficult to detail the suffering that humanity faces because of global warming. If the United States “stays the course” with President Bush’s non-interventionist climate policies over the next decade, then by the third decade of this century all of American life–politics, international relations, our homes, our jobs, our industries, the kind of cars we drive–will be forever transformed.

The full column is here.

Bush’s much hyped U-Turn on climate wasn’t even a Double U-Turn. All he said was:

America is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that will enable us to live our lives less dependent on oil. And these technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change.

Technology, Technology, yada, yada, yada. Straight from the Frank Luntz playbook on how to do nothing but sound like you really care. Fool me once….

For more response, here is Climate Progress on CNBC.

The buzz is growing that President Bush will call for change in fuel economy regulations in his State of the Union address.

Bush must understand that calling for the authority to act is no longer acceptable–He has the power to toughen the standards himself right now. Bush needs to take a bold step to show he is serious. After all, he has been President for 6 years and we have heard the rhetoric in six SOTU’s.
The CAFE standard sits at 27.5 miles per gallon and has not been raised since 1990. Last year when Bush called for the authority to improve CAFE, Democrats in Congress shot back that the power to do so was already at his fingertips.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) framed the status of CAFE well:

Our problem in dealing with the Bush administration is that when they want to send troops to fight for oil, they do that whether they have the authority or not. When you ask them to reduce the need for oil, suddenly they’re concerned about authority.

Check out this podcast interview on E&ETV and this interview on Pacifica Radio.

Also, check out this story on “Getting hydrogen cars to live up to their hype” — an article whose title seems a response to my last book, The Hype about Hydrogen:

During the Clinton and Bush administrations, the federal government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year on advanced automotive technology. Joseph Romm, an Energy Department official in the late 1990s, estimates the total expense at $3 billion since the early 1990s.

President Clinton launched an initiative called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. The goal of the program was to deliver an advanced hybrid family sedan that could get 80 miles per gallon….

“As soon as George Bush got elected, the U.S. car companies walked away from the partnership and didn’t continue developing hybrids,” Romm said. “And the Japanese did. As a result, they ended up the leaders.”

And catch Climate Progress on CNBC Wednesday Morning at 10:20….

[Note: This excerpt is being posted out of sequence because Chapter Six of Hell and High Water lays bare the rhetorical strategy that the President will no doubt use in his State of the Union address.]

There is no doubt that the time to act is now. It is now that timely action can avert disaster. It is now that with foresight and will such action can be taken without disturbing the essence of our way of life, by adjusting behaviour, but not altering it entirely.
–Tony Blair, 2005

It’s important not to get distracted by chasing short-term reductions in greenhouse emissions. The real payoff is in long- term technological breakthroughs.
– John H. Marburger III, president’s science adviser, 2006

The mantra of the Delayers is “technology” and “technology breakthroughs.” Their technological fix to the greenhouse gas problem is, unsurprisingly, not imminent. It is “long-term.” But as we have seen earlier, failing to act in the near term–now–will bring about such drastic conditions that soon our only choice will be to react with extremely onerous government policies.

In 2005, British prime minister Tony Blair described the crucial two- prong strategy we must adopt: “We need to invest on a large scale in existing technologies and to stimulate innovation into new low- carbon technologies for deployment in the longer term.” Future technology will be able to help preserve our way of life in the long term if and only if we have already moved “on a large scale” to technologies that already exist. Over the next few decades, we must rapidly deploy available technologies that stop global carbon dioxide emissions from rising. Then, in the second half of this century, we must sharply reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by deploying all the new technologies we have developed.

The time to act is now…..

Conservative message makers, like Frank Luntz, realized that it could be politically dangerous to oppose any action on global warming, even if their efforts to obfuscate the climate science were successful. Luntz lays out a clever solution to this conundrum in his 2002 “Straight Talk” memo on climate change messaging [a must-read for all progressives]:

Technology and innovation are the key in arguments on both sides. Global warming alarmists use American superiority in technology and innovation quite effectively in responding to accusations that international agreements such as the Kyoto accord could cost the United States billions. Rather than condemning corporate America the way most environmentalists have done in the past, they attack us for lacking faith in our collective ability to meet any economic challenges presented by environmental changes we make. This should be our argument. We need to emphasize how voluntary innovation and experimentation are preferable to bureaucratic or international intervention and regulation.

This is the technology trap, where clean energy technology is used to delay action, rather than to foster action, on climate change.