Climate Progress

As hybrids go, this ain’t the Prius.

What do you get when you combine warming’s impact on the habitat of grizzly bears with the melting of the polar bears’ Arctic ice feeding ground?

“One of the real things that is happening is that grizzlies are moving north, at the same time the polar bears are forced to be on the beach and we have found a number of grizzly bear polar bear hybrids,” said biologist George Divoky, who has worked in the Arctic region for over three decades.

Such hybrids in zoos are not uncommon, where it “was considered a ‘cryptid’ (a hypothesized animal for which there is no scientific proof of existence in the wild),” as Wikepedia explains (here).

The first confirmed Grolar Bear found in the wild was in April 2006:

A DNA test conducted by Wildlife Genetics International in British Columbia confirmed that it was a hybrid, with the mother a polar bear and the father a grizzly

And just so animal rights activists don’t start shouting that humans have driven polar bears into desperate one-night stands with the fearsome grizzlies, National Geographic explains (here), it’s not like that at all:

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The top climate scientists at the UK’s Hadley Center for Climate Prediction get no respect. No matter how many times they try to explain that their data clearly shows the world is warming (see “Hadley Center to delayers: We’re warming, not cooling“), people, including those commenting on this very blog, keep insisting their data shows otherwise (see here).

As I wrote before, the 8 warmest years in the 150 global temperature record are, according to the Hadley Center, in order, 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2007. After the Hadley folk wrote a bunch of essays debunking standard denier myths (see here and below), they actually felt compelled to publish another piece on April 29 (here), pointing out again:

The global climate is currently being influenced by the cold phase of this oscillation, known as La Niña (see Expert speaks on La Niña). The current La Niña began to develop in early 2007, having a significant cooling effect on the global average temperature. Despite this, 2007 was one of the ten warmest years since global records began in 1850 with a temperature some 0.4 °C above average. Indeed, the years 2001-2007 recorded an average of 0.44 °C above the 1961-90 average, which is 0.21 °C warmer than corresponding values for the years 1991-2000.

Another way of looking at the warming trend is that 1999 was a similar year to 2007 as far as the cooling effects of La Niña are concerned. The global temperature in 1999 was 0.26 °C above the 1961-90 average, whereas 2007 was 0.37 °C above this average - 0.11 °C warmer than 1999.

[Hadley doesn’t even mention we are at a temporary solar irradiance minimum, which subtracts “no more than about 0.1°C,” according to NASA (see “Hansen throws cold water on cooling climate claim.”)]

And the Hadley folk predicted last year in Science (see here) that short-term warming is about to accelerate (just as the recent Nature article did, see here), and they reiterated that prediction in their April 29 post:

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The Nature article that has caused so much angst about the possibility we are entering a decade of cooling — “Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector” (subs req’d) — has, in fact, been widely misreported. I base this in part on direct communication with the lead author.

In fact, with the general caveat from the authors that the study as a whole should be viewed in a very preliminary fashion, and should not be used for year-by-year predictions, it is more accurate to say the Nature study is consistent with the following statements:

• The “coming decade” (2010 to 2020) is poised to be the warmest on record, globally.
• The coming decade is poised to see faster temperature rise than any decade since the authors’ calculations began in 1960.
• The fast warming would likely begin early in the next decade — similar to the 2007 prediction by the Hadley Center in Science (see “Climate Forecast: Hot — and then Very Hot“).
• The mean North American temperature for the decade from 2005 to 2015 is projected to be slightly warmer than the actual average temperature of the decade from 1993 to 2003.

Before explaining where the confusion came from — mostly a misunderstanding of how the Nature authors use the phrase “next decade” — let’s see how the media covered it:

MEDIA CONFUSION

The UK Telegraph says “Global warming may ’stop’, scientists predict” — “… Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a ‘lull’ for up to a decade.”

National Geographic News blares, “Cooler Climate May Hit N. America, Europe Next Decade.”

Revkin at the NYT wonders, “Can Climate Campaigns Withstand a Cooling Test?” and says the Nature study forecast “some Northern Hemisphere cooling in the coming decade.”

No surprise, global warming denier Sen. James Inhofe leaped on this with his own press release: ” ‘Global Warming Will Stop,’ New Peer-Reviewed Study Says: Global Warming Takes a Break for Nearly 20 Years?”

But none of these headlines accurately portray what the data presented in the paper actually says. Let’s look at the paper’s key figure, the one that looks at past and (forecast) future global temperatures, “Hindcast/forecast decadal variations in global mean temperature, as compared with observations and standard climate model projections” (click to enlarge)

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The nation’s top climate scientists, James Hansen, has just published a general-audience article, “Tipping Point,” in “2008-2009 State of the Wild,” from Island Press. It is well worth sending to folks who don’t like all the math. His key points:

We are at the tipping point because the climate state includes large, ready positive feedbacks provided by the Arctic sea ice, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and much of Greenland’s ice….

Prior major warmings in Earth’s history, the most recent occurring 55 million years ago . . . resulted in the extinction of half or more of the species then on the planet….

In my view, special interests have undue sway with our governments and have effectively promoted minimalist actions and growth in fossil fuels, rather than making the scale of investments necessary.

You might also like this figure on “cumulative fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions by different countries as a percent of global total”:

China has a long way to go to catch up to this country — let alone the entire industrialized world — on cumulative emissions (though they are obviously trying as hard as they can).

The good news: The earth’s carbon cycle has natural negative feedbacks that reverse natural surges in carbon dioxide.

The bad news: We are spewing CO2 into the atmosphere 14,000 times faster than nature has over the past 600,000 years, far too quickly for those feedbacks to respond.

This comes from “Close mass balance of long-term carbon fluxes from ice-core CO2 and ocean chemistry records,” in Nature Geosciences (subs. reqd, news article here) by Zeebe and Caldeira. Put another way:

“These feedbacks operate so slowly that they will not help us in terms of climate change … that we’re going to see in the next several hundred years,” Zeebe said by telephone from the University of Hawaii. “Right now we have put the system entirely out of equilibrium.“

Zeebe notes that, “the average change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 600,000 years has been just 22 parts per million by volume.” Humans have run up CO2 levels 100 ppm over the last two centuries!

In the ancient past, excess carbon dioxide came mostly from volcanoes, which spewed very little of the chemical compared to what humans activities do now, but it still had to be addressed.

This antique excess carbon dioxide — a powerful greenhouse gas — was removed from the atmosphere through the weathering of mountains, which take in the chemical….

The natural mechanism will eventually absorb the excess carbon dioxide, Zeebe said, but not for hundreds of thousands of years.

See, the skeptics were right: The planet is self-healing. You go, deniers [no, seriously, please, just go]! So my great-great-great-great — [insert 10,000 “greats” here] — great-great-great grand-kid will be doing just fine, thank you very much!

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[I am retroactively inserting this entry in the series for the sake of completeness. Much of the content has been previously posted.]

What happens if we fail to take the following actions to reverse emissions trends starting in 2009?

1. Start a cap-and-trade system that sets a serious price for CO2.
2. Launch most of the 14 to 16 major mitigation strategies (wedges) described here.
3. Begin a global effort to ban new coal plants that do not capture and store their carbon, an effort that quickly brings in China and other developing countries.

Failing to do that, we are headed to 800 to 1000 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The idea of stabilizing at, say, 550 or 650 ppm, widely held a decade ago, is becoming increasingly implausible given the likelihood that major carbon cycle feedbacks would go into overdrive, swiftly taking the planet to 800 ppm or more. In particular, the top 11 feet of the tundra would probably not survive 550 ppm (a point I will be blogging about soon) and two other key carbon sinks — land-based vegetation and the oceans — already appear to be saturating. That said, even if stabilizing at 550 ppm were possible, it would probably bring catastrophic impacts and in any case requires implementing some 10 wedges starting now.

At 800 to 1000 ppm, the world faces multiple miseries, including:

1. Sea level rise of 80 feet to 250 feet at a rate of 6 inches a decade (or more).
2. Desertification of one third the planet and drought over half the planet, plus the loss of all inland glaciers.
3. More than 70% of all species going extinct, plus extreme ocean acidification.

LIVING/SUFFERING IN A 1000 PPM WORLD

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“He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.” A Biblical proverb for our times, it turns out….

The bark beetle is devastating North American trees (see “Climate-Driven Pest Devours N. American Forests“).

Global warming has created a perfect climate for these beetles — Milder winters since 1994 have reduced the winter death rate of beetle larvae in Wyoming from 80% per year to under 10%, and hotter, drier summers have made trees weaker, less able to fight off beetles. [Picture shows forests turned red by beetle.]

New reseach published in the journal Nature, “Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change,” (subs. req’d, abstract reprinted below), quantifies the current and future impact just from the beetle’s warming-driven devastation in British Columbia:

… the cumulative impact of the beetle outbreak in the affected region during 2000–2020 will be 270 megatonnes (Mt) carbon (or 36 g carbon m^-2 yr^-1 on average over 374,000 km² of forest). This impact converted the forest from a small net carbon sink to a large net carbon source.

No wonder the carbon sinks are saturating faster than we thought (see here) — unmodeled impacts of climate change are destroying them:

Insect outbreaks such as this represent an important mechanism by which climate change may undermine the ability of northern forests to take up and store atmospheric carbon, and such impacts should be accounted for in large-scale modelling analyses.

Any “good news” here? Only if you like very dark irony. The accompanying news story (here, subs. req’d) notes:

Even if climate change brings further warm winters to the region, however, experts think this infestation has probably peaked. Mountain pine beetles can only reproduce in the largest trees, which were abundant thanks to a growth spurt after wildfires raged across western North America 80 to 140 years ago. Soon 80 to 90% of those large trees will be gone, Kurz says. “The beetle will eat itself out of house and home, and the population will eventually collapse.”

Hmm. “Eat itself out of house and home.“ Does the bark beetle sound like any other species we know? Finally, the species formerly known as homo sapiens sapiens is no longer alone in its self-destructive quest to destroy its habitat. Inhert the wind, indeed.

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The news from NOAA (here) is that all our dawdling on climate action this decade is having real impact on the atmosphere:

• Concentrations of CO2 jumped 2.4 ppm in 2007, taking us to 385 ppm (preindustrial levels hovered around 280 through 1850).
• That is an increase of 0.6% (or 19 billion tons). If we stay at that growth rate, we’ll be at 465 ppm by 2050 — and that assumes (improbably) that the various carbon sinks don’t keep saturating (see here and here).
• Levels of methane (a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) rose last year for the first time since 1998, perhaps an early indication of thawing permafrost.

Why this recent jump in methane? NOAA says:

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Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.

I have a new piece in Salon, “Let’s dump ‘Earth’ Day.” It is supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious. Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day has been on my mind for a while, or at least since this post last Friday:

I don’t worry about the earth. I’m pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I’m very certain the earth doesn’t worry about us. I’m not alone. People got more riled up when scientists removed Pluto from the list of planets than they do when scientists warn that our greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the earth into a barely habitable planet.

The earth is certainly not important enough to qualify for an ABC debate question. Who wears an Earth lapel pin? Arguably, concern over the earth is elitist, something people can afford to spend their time on when every other need is met. But elitism is out these days. Only bitter environmentalists cling to Earth Day. We need a new way to make people care about the nasty things we’re doing with our cars and power plants. At the very least, we need a new name.
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Why do I keep criticizing Roger Pielke when he keeps saying we agree? Because we don’t agree. This is not a semantic difference or a small difference among people who share core beliefs. It is a fundamental disagreement that goes to the heart of our exceedingly different views of how serious the threat is and about how best to address it.

First, in March 13, 2002 testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works committee (see here), Pielke talked about his work on adaptation:

An implication of this work is that policy related to societal impacts of climate has important and under-appreciated dimensions that are independent of energy policy. It would be a misinterpretation of this work to imply that it supports either business-as-usual energy policies, or is contrary to climate mitigation. It does suggest that if a policy goal is to reduce the future impacts of climate on society, then energy policies are insufficient, and perhaps largely irrelevant, to achieving that goal. Of course, this does not preclude other sensible reasons for energy policy action related to climate (such as ecological impacts) and energy policy action independent of climate change (such as national security, air pollution reduction and energy efficiency). It does suggest that reduction of human impacts related to weather and climate are not among those reasons, and arguments and advocacy to the contrary are not in concert with research in this area.

His research says that reducing future human impacts related to weather and climate are not among the reasons for energy policy action, and that such policies are perhaps largely irrelevant to reducing those impacts — though, in fairness, he isn’t opposed to a different energy policy, just not one whose primary justification is reducing climate impacts on human.

I simply could not disagree more, as I have explained at length here where I discuss “LIVING/SUFFERING IN A 1000 PPM WORLD.” I believe the reverse is true — if we don’t have an aggressive energy policy then adaptation policies will be grossly insufficient to prevent billions of people from suffering untold — but preventable — misery. Yes, Pielke is now on record saying he would like to see 450 ppm. I believe such a sentiment is utterly odds with his testimony above. Achieving 450 ppm would take an enormous amount of effort — indeed, avoiding 800 ppm would takes a lot of effort, too — and it is certainly only possible if the public and policymakers realize that failing to do so will have catastrophic impacts that render the word adaptation meaningless.

Anyone who argues we shouldn’t embrace energy policy primarily to reduce or avoid climate impacts — anyone who argues that energy policy is perhaps largely irrelevant to reducing those impacts — is, in my mind, undercutting the primary reason for going to all the trouble of adopting the necessary policies.

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