Happy Birthday to the Keeling Curve

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Charles Keeling’s Mauna Loa carbon dioxide record is a tour de force, one of the great works of science of the 20th century. It shows the inexorably rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. But its iconic status today derives from hypotheses confirmed and ideas well understood, things that were anything but certain when Keeling launched the effort. His son does a nice job with a 50th anniversary story in this week’s Science (sub. req.):

At the outset, the decision to place the instrument at Mauna Loa was a gamble. Existing measurements suggested that atmospheric CO2 concentrations varied widely depending on the place and time. Given this variability, could a meaningful record be recovered from an instrument parked in one location?

Roger Revelle had an alternative idea: campaigns involving ships and airplanes, repeated every decade or so, to look for trends. But Keeling won out, and it is worth thinking about how our understanding today might be different if Revelle’s approach had been used:

[A] CO2 record degraded to include only one point every decade or two loses its convincing message. Variations from survey to survey may be instrumental artifacts, or the apparent trend may be a random fluctuation.

Adaptation v. Mitigation, Episode XVI

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David Roberts and Roger Pielke Jr. took another turn around the adaptation/mitigation block today. Roger argued, as he has for some time, that adaptation to the problems caused by climate change needs to be given the same due in policy discussions as attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigation,” in the parlance of the field.)

David said that of course everyone agrees, and what’s all the fuss about anyway?

In short, the solutions he (Pielke) advocates are the same ones pushed by just about everyone in the climate debate: a mix of adaptation and mitigation.

Down in the comments, David allows as how most of what he calls the “green commentators” focus mostly on the greenhouse gas reduction part, but they really do believe in adaptation too, they’re just not talking so much about it. But they really do believe it, so what’s all the fuss about, anyway?

The fuss, David, is the problem posed by things like this report, which came across my desk today at work. It’s from NRDC, and looks at the problems posed by climate change in the western United States.

The report offers up a compelling litany of reasons why we’re fucked here in the west because of climate change: dwindling snowpack, seasonal runoff shifts, heat waves, more frequent droughts, etc. I turned with interest to Chapter 7, “Policy Conclusions and Recommendations.”

We must immediately adopt comprehensive policies that will reduce emissions of global warming pollutants.

Energy efficiency initiatives. Low-carbon transportation fuels. Carbon capture. Lieberman-Warner. All mitigation. But not one word about the societal changes we in the west will have to undertake to cope with the climate change already in the pipeline, no matter how successful we might be in curbing future greenhouse emissions.

This would be an unfair response to David’s argument if the NRDC report was an exception, but this is the rule. Over and over, I see climate change in the west used as an argument in favor of greenhouse gas reductions, and over and over I have seen the necessary political and policy discussions of what might be needed for adaptation either implicitly or explicitly off the table, most often because of a fear that such discussions will somehow sap the political will needed to change our energy habits.

I’m out here in arid New Mexico, boots on the ground trying to help my fellow citizens understand what we must do in response to climate change, and we’re sure as hell not getting any help thinking about the issue from David’s green commentators. If these people really believe, as David says, that “a mix of adaptation and mitigation” is needed, they sure have a funny way of showing it.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Cycling Edition

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It is about the bike:

I can still remember that exquisite feeling of freedom when I was 10 years old and my friends and I would pack lunches, jump on our bikes and head off. It was the late 1960s, and the place was the distant edge of suburban Los Angeles.

We’d head off down 23rd Street into the orange groves, sneaking into an old barn and climbing up into the attic to eat our sandwiches.

From my grownup vantage point, it is clear we had not gone very far. But that is not the point. The bikes extended our range, and made us self-contained little units of freedom. We had our lunches in our backpacks and we were beholden to no one but our whims and the practical limitations of where our wheels would take us (as long as we got home by 5).

Cost of Diesel

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Silver Fox asked a great question in the comments a couple of weeks ago:

I’m wondering why the price of diesel is higher than gasoline right now, when it was the other way around for so long?

TWIP to the rescue!

At winter’s end, we normally expect gasoline and diesel fuel prices to be converging, with gasoline prices then rising above diesel for the remainder of the summer. However, diesel fuel prices have continued to rise at a quicker pace than gasoline through the late winter/early spring period, and the diesel fuel premium over gasoline is now in the 70 cent per gallon range….

Factors in both gasoline and distillate are contributing to the current and projected pricing pattern. Weakness in the U.S. economy has led to softening gasoline demand. While gasoline prices have increased this winter due to surging crude oil prices, they have not risen as high as they would have if year-on-year gasoline demand growth was unfolding at normal rates.

On the other hand, demand for distillates in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East has continued to grow at a fast pace. In Europe, financial incentives continue to promote the transition from gasoline-powered to diesel-powered cars and light trucks, while a growing economy has lifted transportation sector consumption overall. Additionally, emissions standards for diesel fuel continue to tighten across Europe, adding to supply tightness as European refineries catch up to new specifications.

Phase Three: Profit!

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I’m a little bit suspicious that we’ve got one of those “underpants gnomes” business models here, but whatever.  Keith Johnson reports on some moves by big-time financial players into the carbon market:

Merrill Lynch launched a new carbon-market index aimed at giving all sorts of investors access to the carbon markets. Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan said it would acquire ClimateCare, a British company that builds clean-energy projects in the developing world as a way to “offset” carbon emissions elsewhere.

I’m inclined to view this as a good thing.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the question of what a “journalist” actually is, and how what I do in print differs from what I do on line, and also how it differs from what others do on line who one might not traditionally think of as journalists, but who are doing things that have some similarities to what I do. (Yeah, Coco and Johnny, that means you.)

So here’s a case in point. First, in print, I’m all formal and serious about an Important Issue of the Day.  “Yeah, John, but what do you Really Think?” That’s where the elbows fly out and spit runs down my chin. Not a pretty sight.

Another Example of “The Nature Effect”

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Andy Revkin, on his blog and in the newspaper, has another case study of the distorting effect of Nature and suchlike A-list scientific publications.

Let’s say our study suggests climate change is driving some rare and charismatic toad to extinction. We’re in Nature! Journalists will write about us in the New York Times etc. The story has legs.

Let’s say we think it’s something else, not climate, that’s responsible. Our paper is not in Nature, because it’s too pedestrian.

To the extent that Nature and Science go for the sexy story line in their choice of papers, and in addition to the extent that journalists (myself included) allow Nature and Science to set our agenda, the public is fundamentally misled.

Yet Another Thing the IPCC Gets Wrong

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A new paper by Maximilian Auffhammera and Richard T. Carson suggests that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising much more quickly than presumed in the IPCC’s emissions scenarios. A reminder that

  • The IPCC’s “mistakes” don’t all break in one direction. The common rhetorical conception has the IPCC’s errors uniformly overstating the effects of greenhouse emissions and climate change, but this one has rather the opposite effect.
  • Economists are good for something, despite what some might say.

(h/t Tim Haab)

Water in the Desert: Fish Edition

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Water in the Desert

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

Took the family (Mom, Dad and Lissa) to the Rio Grande Nature Center to see the new fish channel they dug for the Rio Grande silvery minnow. I went out Monday for the newspaper as they let the first water in, and wanted to go back to see it with water now flowing the full length.

It’s lovely, but I say so with reservations. It’s funded by money intended to help protect the minnow, which is an endangered species. The problem with this approach is that the minnow’s endangerment is an indicator of broader problems, but rather than address those broader problems (or simply accept them as unsolvable, another option available to the political and policy process), we’re devoting enormous resources in a very fish-specific way. That said, the folks involved in the fish rescue effort are terrific, motivated, interesting people, and their projects are exciting.

In this case, it involves bringing water back into the riverside woods, something that hasn’t happened for decades. Back in the day, flood stage would bring water through the trees all the time. Now, we have to dig a ditch for it.

But that’s all highbrow intellect and complex environmental ethics. Bottom line – water in the bosque, a cool thing, if you’re in Albuquerque you’ve got to go see it.

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Concrete and Water

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Devil's Gate before the damConcrete is increasingly sounding old school. The idea makes sense: build a concrete channel through your city, to get the water as quickly as possible from the mountains to the sea, minimizing the mischief it can do in the interim. But such engineering efficiency comes with a cost, as the folks in Pasadena, Calif., (where I first wrote about water a couple of decades ago) are finding out (story from the Pasadena Weekly):

Restoring water courses to a more natural state, said Kwan, will allow more water to percolate into the ground rather than flow into the Los Angeles River and spill into the Pacific Ocean.

(h/t aquafornia, Wikipedia picture of the old Devil’s Gate area in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco prior to all the concrete)