Roger Pielke Jr, Joe Romm, Ron Oxburgh and Rajendra Pachauri — Together at Last!
The excellent Anna Barnett of Nature Reports Climate Change (follow her on twitter; read her on Climate Feedback) has coerced various people into recommending books to read in preparation for Copenhagen. Here’s the whole sherbang; below extracts (with mine in full, because it’s my blog and my copyright…)
Joe Romm recommends the forthcoming Al Gore book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (Amazon US|UK)
Based on 30 of Gore’s ‘Solutions Summits’ as well as one-on-one discussions with leading experts across multiple disciplines, the book aims, in Gore’s words, “to gather in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now”.
Tony Juniper goes for something that’s been around a little longer — Mark Lynas’s Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Amazon US|UK)
At 4 °C, a very different world would emerge, and it would not be conducive to the maintenance of secure economic and social conditions. Unfortunately, this is the expected outcome from modest emissions cuts, presuming they are actually delivered.
Ron Oxburgh, formerly of Shell, the UK government, and Cambridge Earth Sciences (where he lectured me in first year geology) goes for a geologist’s book which I wasn’t aware of, Bryan Lovell’s Challenged by Carbon: The Oil Industry and Climate Change (Amazon US|UK)
An eyewitness account of oil producers’ shifting views on global warming. Unlike many writers on climate, he presents today’s changes in their long-term geological context and shows how this impeded understanding of human influences. After all, the argument went, the climate has changed many times in the past, so what is different today? Lacing the story with personal anecdotes, Lovell describes a slow evolution in the industry from scepticism and hostility to a widespread if not universal recognition that although coal is the main culprit, burning oil is a major and growing contributor to climate change.
Roger Pielke Jr reaches back more than a decade for Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by Yale anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott (Amazon US|UK)
Scott recites a litany of failed attempts at centralized planning that should serve as warnings to Copenhagen … [and] warns that the “mechanical application of generic rules” — such as emissions targets in climate policy — “is an invitation to practical failure, social disillusionment, or most likely both”. He proposes that, instead of convoluted centralized plans to remake society, we recognize the need for practical wisdom embodied in conceptions of ‘muddling through’.
Oliver Tickell’s Kyoto2: How to Manage the Global Greenhouse (Amazon US|UK), recommended by Mark Lynas, argues that the whole basis of the Copenhagen negotiations has things the wrong way round
Are we really going to try to police the carbon burned by close to 7 billion individuals? A better option, Tickell suggests, is to regulate production by setting a global cap on the amount of carbon being drilled, dug and piped out of the ground. Don’t work with individuals or even governments: auction carbon production rights to companies instead. There are then only a few hundred agents, not a few billion, to worry about. And instead of fighting over who has to make emissions cuts, fight over which countries get the auction cash.
Andy Revkin quite rightly suggests we should all read Mike Hulme’s book, mentioned here before, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (Amazon US|UK)
The deep divisions among the variegated parties coming together in Copenhagen — deeply poor countries, fast-growing giants, established powers — are unlikely to be easily bridged in a single accord. Each faction has, in essence, a unique definition of the climate challenge: for the poorest, it’s about adaptation and equity; for the richest, it’s about energy technology and markets; for the forested, it’s about credit for carbon stores. Hulme’s argument bolsters predictions by long-time observers of climate diplomacy that a grand agreement is less achievable than a set of specific deals on particular issues.
The aforementioned Mike Hulme, for his part, urges us towards The Sustainability Mirage: Illusion and Reality in the Coming War on Climate Change by John Foster (Amazon US|UK)
This is a challenging book that explores some crucial social and psychological realities of climate change. Foster engages with the deepening tension that humans face, living in the overconsuming present while being aware of the unrepresented future. He honestly reveals some of the structural limitations of the sustainable-development paradigm and struggles with interpreting the value–action gap that all of us, to varying degrees, encounter in our behaviour. But you won’t hear too much about this during the Copenhagen conference. So read it.
Rajendra Pachauri, reasonably enough, I suppose, recommends the IPCC’s Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report (IPCC download) by, well, Rajendra K. Pachauri and & Andy Reisinger
A unique document that should top the reading list of anyone trying to understand the scale of the climate challenge.
And I, a little off piste, sing the praises of Stewart Brand’s new Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (Amazon US|UK)
This book is not going to help anyone get to grips with the intricacies of the UN climate negotiations, but if you want to lift your head from the trenches for an overview of the twenty-first century, it’s a great place to start. Brand has been championing clear long-term visions since he campaigned for NASA to photograph the Earth from space in the 1960s, later setting up such farsighted institutions as the Whole Earth Catalog, the Global Business Network and the Long Now Foundation.
His new book, though presented in small chunks that are enticing to skip in and out of, nevertheless builds up into a lucid big picture put together with experience, wisdom and optimism. Brand tackles touchy issues such as the importance of urbanization, the potential of genetic engineering and the practical case for nuclear power, fully aware that many of the environmentalist readers he hopes to reach will start out disagreeing with him. He refuses either to pander to their prejudices or to take delight in shocking them, preferring engagement, reason and a leavening of wit. He simply argues persuasively, on the basis of wide reading, for the positions he thinks will best allow humans to shore up nature so that nature in turn can help preserve humanity.
Interesting that no one recommended David McKay’s Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air (Amazon UK|US, discussed here before); I guess most of the panel went bigger picture than that, but it is still a vital read for people thinking about how what the politicians say might actually pay out in terms of nuclear on the ground , wind at sea, biomass in the hearth and so on.Feel free to nominate your own additions, either here or over at the Climate Feedback blog.
If I had a kindle, it would have all of them loaded up well before December 6th. If I have to take the damn things on the train, I’ll probably cull the list. But it does seem to me an excellent list from which to cull.
Update: I’m not paying any attention to the FTC mullarkey, other than hearing about it at third hand, but it probably behooves me in general to note that links to Amazon on this site generate a kickback to me if there’s a sale, and if I’ve remembered to muck around with the URL in the right way.
Filed under: Geoengineering, Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis, Published stuff
It is time again for the annual feast of fun that is Time’s Heroes of the Environment list. As always it is a thought provoking reminder of how narrow my environmental issues are. Climate and energy issues dominate what I think of under that rubric but here there is lots of room for good old fashioned pollution: mines, dirty rivers, rubbish and the like. Not to mention bloody organic farmers, and various people who would not really make my list (Pen Hadow? Really?)
But climate and energy do top the bill: Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives leads off the whole package, and there’s a nice spread about Joe Romm, who gives his take on the honour here. (Nice note of irony: the piece on Joe Romm is written by Bryan Walsh, eviscerated by Joe earlier this year for a piece that took the Breakthrough Institute’s line on energy R&D; in last year’s Heroes Bryan profiled the Breakthrough Institute’s founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger.)
My contribution this year (following Jim Lovelock in 2007 and Kim Stanley Robinson in 2008) is on David Keith, who I imagine is probably suitably embarrassed by the whole thing; but to my mind deserves the recognition. His heroism consists of thinking hard and clearly about things other people are hardly thinking about at all. That has let him do a great deal to help frame and further the debate on geoengineering, which needed to be done, and now he’s pursuing ideas about direct air carbon captur, which again can but benefit from the serious attention. It also makes him one of the best people to talk to about climate and energy issues, bar none. Excerpt:
The brains have arrived, Master (©2008 Ewan Nicholson)
Early success in pure physics (his graduate project, supervised by a professor noted for his mentoring of future Nobelists, was a long-awaited experimental breakthrough in atomic optics) did not satisfy him. Climate work promised a greater opportunity to do good while at the same time throwing up what ambitious physicists always want most: questions no one yet knows the answers to.
Soon he was working on nitty-gritty climate-modeling problems while learning economic and policy analysis. That breadth has helped him communicate climate concerns to the often skeptical energy industry; it’s also part of why he is listened to by people like Bill Gates, who relies on meetings organized by Keith to stay up-to-date on climate science. “While he’s got informed and strong opinions,” Gates says, “he’s also incredibly open-minded, pointing out the unknowns in his opinions and just as readily pointing out the merits of others’ opinions.”
It’s been a good press weekend for David. He has a Perspectives piece on air capture that’s part of a package on CCS in last Friday’s Science; that got picked up on John Tierney’s NYT blog.
Image of David Keith by Ewan Nicholson, used with permission, all rights reserved
Filed under: Geoengineering, Global change, Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis, Published stuff
The last of my filling-in-for-Olivia columns at the NYT is now up, a quick run through some points from the later parts of Eating the Sun and subsequent stuff. It’s a carbon-climate crisis, energy is about flows not stocks, many wedges needed, yadda yadda yadda:
Given that humans are changing the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate, what responses should we expect from the biosphere? And is there anything that we can do to make those responses work to human benefit? For those in a hurry, the answers in brief: a) complicated ones; b) yes, at least a bit.
Belatedly, I should point out that I am doing a few columns/posts over at the Times so that Olivia Judson can enjoy some time off. Turns out that they are about life and atmospheres, last week’s (Found in Transit) on detecting life by way of the atmospheres of other planets, this week’s (Heavy Weather) on a speculative mechanism by which life might influence the climate. One more to come next week…
An avian emplacement approach to cetacean albedo ehancement
As mentioned, I twittered the geoengineering session I just posted on: http://preview.tinyurl.com/CopehagenGeoengTweets. I am sure there would have been better ways to do so — I am an egg in these matters. Glad to hear feedback and advice, but in the meantime here’s my self-assessment, FWIW.
a) some of the tweets are, to be kind to myself, hard to parse:
Battisti: if field testing need to look at monitoring capacity in order to differentiate results from background
b) as a form of note taking, not too bad; looking back on them, the tweets cover a lot of the key points I would have wanted people to take away. And a few dashes of levity too.
c) They were helpful to me as a focusing mechanism. Often I will drift off in some talks, or even leave a session. The self imposed twitter discipline meant that i had to be on top of each presentation enough to get 140 characters out of it.
d) also time efficient: there’s an (admittedly perhaps challenging) 800 words of reasonably useful commentary there. If it had been done afterwards, would have taken time away from caffeination and schmoozing. And wouldn’t have mentioned as many aspects of what was said.
e) that said, if done afterwards, would have been shaped, balanced and more clearly analytic. Looking at this stream, you might think Zeng’s presentation on burying trees marked an exciting new idea. Don’t think it did; but tweeting its main points I forgot to tweet scepticism.
f) and if done afterwards — as a post here, say – the set would have had its own URL, findable by google, and been categorised for users of the blog. By using the advanced search function it’s possible to get them all on a page that stands some chance of staying stable, but whether that really lasts, who knows? And they will not show up in searches for geoengineering because I didn’t have the characters to spare for such a long word.
g) Even if people could find them, not sure they would gain much thereby. People who have a real interest in geoengineering might find them of some interest or use: probably not terribly helpful, if at all, for a broader audience.
h) it would have had more value, perhaps, if other people had also been tweeting. But that seems more likely to happen at the sort of meetings where @doctorow and @timoreilly are to be found than around here.
Some questions: Too many tweets, or too few? Would TinyUrls for the abstracts of each talk have helped enough to make up for the loss of characters entailed? Was value added?
Will I do this again? Dunno.
Filed under: Farming, Geoengineering, Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis, Plant physiology, Published stuff
Let's brighten this up...
I wrote a little piece for Nature today today about a paper by Andy Ridgwell at Bristol and some of his colleagues on changing the albedo of crops. The gist as published:
Manipulating the waxiness of crops through traditional breeding techniques or genetic modification should raise their albedo by about 20%, from 0.2 to 0.24. On the basis of climate modelling they calculate that the planet would cool by a modest 0.11 ºC. “It’s very small on the global average,” says Ridgwell. But “what is more important is the summertime effect in specific regions”. The mid-latitudes of North America and Eurasia could cool by as much as 1 °C in June, July and August, according to the models. Ridgwell and his colleagues report their results in Current Biology.
The models also show pronounced cooling in the North Atlantic Ocean and the Barents Sea in the wintertime — which might have a positive effect on sea ice — but a drying out of the soil in some parts of the subtropics. Ridgwell points out that climate models do not predict future precipitation well on a regional basis and treats the latter results more as evidence that there might be effects far from the fields being changed than as a clear indication that there would be damaging consequences.
There are some interesting details and implications to this “bio-geoengineering” scheme. Though you might think that reflecting more light off the surfaces of leaves means less photosynthesis, according to the paper the evidence in the literature suggests not. This may be because more reflective leaves stay cooler and more efficient; another possibility is that the light is reflected mostly from leaves in direct sunlight (which are not constrained by a lack of light) and some of what is reflected ends up with leaves that are in shadow (which are constrained by lack of light). More detailed studies, of course, may show that in fact photosynthesis does go down.
Making the plants more reflective, if it proved a good idea at all, might well necessitate genetic engineering, which in some places is distrusted. That engineering might be more acceptable in energy crops than it is in food crops. It might make sense, if people are going to engineer energy crops for other purposes, to make them a little lighter too, all other things being equal.
Another point is that this is very small beer as geoengineering goes. A similar but more dramatic proposal along similar lines by Robert Hamwey (pdf) has a radiative forcing of about 0.6 Wm-2, which is smallish by the standards of the CO2 forcing; I would guess if they expressed it in the same way the forcing in the Ridgwell et al scheme would be a good bit less than that. But it might still have some marginal utility. This is a trend I suspect we will be seeing more and more of in geoengineering studies over the next few years, a shift away from totalising projects such as sunshades for the whole earth and layers of aersosol all through the stratosphere towards smaller regional and semi regional ideas.
Talking about this trend Tim Lenton has suggested that we may be moving towards a discussion of geoengineering that has some similarities to Socolow’s “wedge” approach to decarbonization: breaking the big problem down into smaller lumps that feasible technologies could bite off and chew; as I report in the Nature piece, Tim and some colleagues are looking at setting up a unit to compare geoengineering schemes and their potential payoffs on this basis. I’m not sure this is necessarily a good development. Every geoengineering scheme has strange knock-ons and side effects around the edges, and it seems reasonable to suspect that the more such schemes you have, the more chance there is for one of the side effects to be unexpectedly serious — or for two of them to interact with each other catastrophically. But that said, the fact that it is probably a lot easier to find little forcings than big ones suggests that the portfolio approach may be in the ascendant for a while.
Image from flickr user ecstacist under a creative commons licence
Filed under: Geoengineering, Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis, Published stuff
At Edge.org John Brockman has put up the answers to his annual question. This year it was “What changes everything?” I’m not sure it’s the best question he has ever posed, because it does somewhat play up to a transcendentalist tendency which needs little encouragement in many of those Brockman questions. But it brings forth some interesting answers. There’s a number of different conceptions of telepathy and similar things, there’s various energy stuff, of course, there’s first contact with aliens, there’s Bad Things (nuclear weapons, tech collapse) and much more. Worth checking out; it’s possible that when I have had a chance to work through a fair part of its book-like length I may post a few favourites and discussion, but don’t hold your breath. My favourite to date is Brian Eno’s.
My offering is on geoengineering. Here’s the core of it, but feel free to go over and read the whole thing.
Why do I think those attempts will change the world? Geoengineering is not, after all, a panacea. It cannot precisely cancel out the effects of greenhouse gases, and it is likely to have knock on effects on the hydrological cycle which may well not be welcome. Even if the benefits outweigh the costs, the best-case outcome is unlikely to be more than a period of grace in which the most excessive temperature changes are held at bay. Reducing carbon-dioxide emissions will continue to be necessary. In part that is because of the problem of ocean acidification, and in part because a lower carbon-dioxide climate is vastly preferable to one that stays teetering on the brink of disaster for centuries, requiring constant tinkering to avoid teetering over into greenhouse hellishness.
So geoengineering would not “solve” climate change. Nor would it be an unprecedented human intervention in the earth system. It would be a massive thing to undertake, but hardly more momentous in absolute terms than our replacement of natural ecosystems with farmed ones; our commandeering of the nitrogen cycle; the wholesale havoc we have wrought on marine food webs; or the amplification of the greenhouse effect itself.
But what I see as world changing about this technology is not the extent to which it changes the world. It is that it does so on purpose. To live in a world subject to purposeful, planetwide change will not, I think, be quite the same as living in one being messed up by accident. Unless geoengineering fails catastrophically (which would be a pretty dramatic change in itself) the relationship between people and their environment will have changed profoundly. The line separating the natural from the artificial is itself an artifice, and one that changes with time. But this change, different in scale and not necessarily reversible, might finish off the idea of the natural as a place or time or condition that could ever be returned to. This would not be the “end of nature” — but it would be the end of a view of nature that has great power, and without which some would feel bereft. The clouds and the colours of the noon-time sky and of the setting sun will feel different if they have become, to some extent, a matter of choice.
Image from edge.org
Filed under: Earth history, Global change, Nature writing, Published stuff
It takes nothing from the beauty and power of the image, though, to point out that it was the photographer, far more than its subject, who was isolated, and that the fragility is an illusion. The planet Earth is a remarkably robust thing, and this strength flows from its ancient and intimate connection to the cosmos beyond. To see the photo this way does not undermine its environmental relevance — but it does recast it.
…
To substitute these flows for the fossil fuels poised to despoil our planet and also run out on us — worst of both worlds — is an epic task. But the message that frames all the other messages of “Earthrise” is that we can rise to epic tasks. Look where the photo was taken. “If we can put a man on the Moon …” quickly became shorthand for society’s failure to achieve goals that seemed far simpler. But still: we put a man on the Moon, and that does say something. Efforts on a similar scale aimed at harvesting the energy flowing about us are entirely appropriate, and could make things a great deal better. We cannot solve all problems; some climate change is inevitable. But catastrophe is not.
“Earthrise” showed us where we are, what we can do and what we share. It showed us who we are, together; the people of a tough, long-lasting world, shot through with the light of a continuous creation.
Happy Holidays
Filed under: Earth history, Global change, Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis, Published stuff
Just to say that I am and a few other people at Nature are blogging the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco over at Nature’s In the Field blog.
As I think I mentioned, I’m giving a talk in Boston on Wednesday at the 4th Clean Energy conference, and so it’s gratifying to have some early interest in the book in Boston nedia. In the Globe, Anthony Doerr pairs Eating the Sun up with The Superorganism, the new ant book by Bert Holldobler and E. O. Wilson (Amazon UK|US) under the headline “Overlooked Agents of Change” and says excitingly complimentary things.
On the surface, Morton’s new book is about photosynthesis. But to say this doesn’t do “Eating the Sun” justice. Over the course of the last century, with something like quiet heroism, scientists have dissected photosynthesis, illuminating an exquisite symphony of biochemistry. Morton devotes the first third of “Eating the Sun” to charting the thrills of elucidating that symphony. The intricacies of the chemistry in this section get occasionally confusing, but hang in there.
In the latter two sections of the book, Morton starts hitting simpler, more accessible notes, and he hits them beautifully. For all of us who’ve shivered outside on a bitterly cold morning and muttered, “So much for global warming,” “Eating the Sun” helps us understand the immense complexity of what’s really going on.
This book is fundamentally about relationships. To even begin fashioning a model of Earth’s carbon cycle, for example, one has to consider the time of year, the planet’s reflectiveness, oceanic conditions, industrial emissions, and rates of chemical weathering, and a jumble of other factors. Indeed, the air we breathe is a rat’s nest of intersecting loops, where one strand might be wobbles in Earth’s axis, another the water cycle, another the nitrogen cycle, another the sulfur cycle, and so on. “Every change bumps up against another,” explains Morton; “no cause is sufficient in itself.”
…The infinitesimal chemical reactions occurring inside the leaves in your backyard are ultimately connected to the gasoline in your lawnmower and the air over Kathmandu. And “Eating the Sun” elegantly traces the multiple, increasingly skewed reverberations inside that system.
Meanwhile Jim Sullivan at the Phoenix interviewed me about what the conference keynote I’m giving would say.
“I’m by nature not that optimistic,” admits Morton, “but at the same time, I am optimistic about this. Intellectually, the case is pretty good. You have a duty to be optimistic. It’s not in my temperament, but nor it is fake. If you don’t think you can change the future, it’s like you’re not showing up.”
More on my difficulties with optimism here…
Incidentally, the Phoenix piece also quotes me completely accurately on how easy life has been with fossil fuels, because they are such dense and accessible stores of energy. At the broad historical level this is true — but seeing it on screen suggests to me that it could be read as minimising the hard and frequently deadly work of those who actually mine and have mined the coal, and who drill for oil. Not my intention at all.
