U.S. Greenhouse Emissions Drop

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A shift from coal to natural gas for generating electricity contributed to a 1.5 percent drop in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2006 as compared to 2005, according to an EIA report out today. We’re 15 percent above 1990.

update: from the comments, Andy Dessler, thoughtful academic that he is, actually reads the report:

The report says the drop was “due to favorable weather conditions; higher energy prices; a decline in the carbon intensity of electric power generation that resulted from increased use of natural gas, the least carbon intensive fossil fuel; and greater reliance on non-fossil fuels.”

Natural gas was part of this, but my reading of the report was that other factors were more important. In particular, it was a really, really hot winter and a slightly cool summer.

Wiring the Desert

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Nature has a story on a massive Sahara-based solar energy proposal to be presented to the European Parliament in Brussels tomorrow (Thursday Nov. 28). The price tag mentioned in the story sounds enormous: US$595 billion. The political complications sound vexing. But hey, couldn’t be any harder than retrofitting coal plants for carbon capture, could it?

Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan was scheduled to present this green-energy idea, dubbed DESERTEC, to members of the European Parliament in Brussels on 28 November.

The vision is ambitious: it would require roughly 1,000 100-megawatt power plants, using mirrors to concentrate energy from the Sun’s rays, throughout the Middle East and North Africa to meet the region’s projected energy needs. A high-efficiency electricity grid, yet to be built, would then ferry the power around and across the Mediterranean Sea and northern Europe.

Climate Change As Seen From Nairobi

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Per capita income in Kenya is $1,200. Climate change does not currently rank high on the list of pressing concerns of the residents of Nairobi, according to a new study by Meleckidzedeck Khayesi and Chris Shisanya in the journal Climatic Change.

The global concern about climate change appeared like a mere drop in the oceanic context pervaded by problems of poverty, unemployment, crime and corruption, etc. which Nairobi faces, as does Kenya as a whole. Our conclusion is partially reflected in the priorities of the Kenyan government, which focus on poverty alleviation, the fight against crime and graft, improved access to education, and on addressing health problems; it also poses a challenge to the climate change community to find ways to making interventions relevant to local socioeconomic reality facing a developing country city like Nairobi. There may be a need to reconsider ‘whose reality counts’ (borrowing from Robert Chambers, Whose reality counts? Putting the first last, Intermediate Technology Publications, London, p 122, 1997) in addressing climate change: should protracted Kyoto protocol negotiations be given priority or should a long lasting solution be sought to socioeconomic problems facing developing world cities such as Nairobi? We recommend that the ongoing efforts at integrating climate risk management, as components of climate-sensitive sustainable development, be studied in many settings, with a focus on the developing world which is the most vulnerable, in order to inform decision-making and development of intervention measures.

Wasting Time

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Roger Pielke Jr. points to a nice example of why all the energy so enthusiastically devoted to arguing about the hurricane record or fighting those pesky Climate Audit guys and the other “science wars” activities is such a colossal waste of time. On Prometheus, Roger points to comments by both James Hansen and David Victor on the issue of coal. Both care deeply about climate change. For Hansen, coal is likened to the holocaust. For Victor, it offers a potential route to solution. Roger notes:

That David Victor sees coal plants as part of the solution to limiting greenhouse gas emissions and James Hansen does not illustrates how widely experts who agree on the need to limit emissions disagree on energy policy.

There may be fun fights to be won over the hurricane record or the latest  thermometer in a parking lot, but actually dealing with climate change is a genuinely hard problem.

On Buying Locally In a Desert

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Kelsey has some nice thoughts on what it would mean to actually try to buy locally:

Globalization seems to favor our desert city sticking to high technology at discount rates, with low land costs and lots of intellectual capital. Farming is mostly done elsewhere already, and the city is supported by the Labs, the Base, and Intel. Agriculture’s place in a truly global economy is uncertain, but I can almost guarantee that it isn’t in Albuquerque. Not when Albuquerque water has a much higher value sustaining the city as is.

Did Climate Change Make Us What We Are Today?

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human genomeCleaning off my desk this evening, I found an interesting paper I’d printed and set aside to read weeks ago by Alison Smith in Holocene about the relationship between climate change and human evolution. Smith uses data from the human genome project on the timing of major bits of human evolution to argue that pressures from abrupt climate change during the last 10,000 years can be linked in time to major steps in human evolution:

For example, 5000 to 6000 years ago, changes occurred in the human genome, including among others
the development in some populations of lactose tolerance, the development of malarial resistance and an increase in brain size. These changes occurred in regionally distributed populations responding to some strong positive selection pressure. I suggest that the source of the selection pressure may have been the abrupt climate change documented as occurring at the close of the mid-Holocene hypsithermal climatic optimum), 5000–6000 years ago.

The Colorado River: Dwindling Under Climate Change

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One of the disconnects between science as it’s practiced and science as it’s understood by the public is “the results of the latest study”. When we report on “the results of the latest study,” the public is likely to be left shouting: “But last week I though they told me coffee was good for me!”

The trick, dear reader, is to look for consistency. If one study says coffee is good for you and the next one says it’s bad for you, chances are good this is an area where the science is hard and/or immature, and it’s wise to wait. On the other hand, if all the studies seem to be pointing in the same direction, using different methodologies and approaches the question, then chances are you can begin to think about hanging your hat on the results. It’s not that any one of them is the answer, so much as their collective wisdom is likely to be pointing you in a fruitful direction.

Such should, I think, be the response to a new paper in GRL next week by Greg McCabe and David Wolock on the Colorado River and climate change. The Colorado is the primary water source for much of the Southwestern United States. It’s already stretched to the limit. And McCabe and Wolock say that climate change is likely to mean a lot less water in the river.

There’s significant uncertainty in the models about whether precipitation in the Upper Colorado River Basin goes up or down as a result of anthropogenic climate change. But increasing temperature means more evaporation, which means less of whatever water falls from the sky actually ends up in the river. The average flow under a 2 degrees C warming is 17 percent less, according to the analysis by McCabe and Wolock. That’s consistent with previous studies, which have shown decreases of anywhere between 8 percent and 45 percent. (See “is coffee good for me or not” above. This coffee is consistently “not”.)

The really interesting bit of the new study is the way the authors used the tree ring record and a river management model to estimate the percentage of the time the flow in the Colorado would be insufficient to meet the requirements of the Colorado River Compact.

During the 20th century, the river failed to deliver enough water to meet compact requirements 7 percent of the time. If you take the 20th century record, slap a 2 degree C warming on top, that rises to 37 percent of the time. But if you take the driest period in the tree ring record and slap global warming on top of it, that rises to a whopping 77 percent of the time!

More reading:

  • Warming may create substantial water supply shortages in the Colorado River basin, McCabe and Wolock, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L22708, doi:10.1029/2007GL031764. full paper for GRL subscribers, abstract (maybe, I was getting an error on the abstract link Saturday)
  • nice summary by Brad Udall of the various Colorado River climate change studies
  • Past peak water, Hoerling and Eischeid
  • Christensen and Lettenmaier, A multimodel ensemble approach to assessment of climate change impacts on the hydrology and water resources of the Colorado River

Another Water Blogger

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Funny is hard, especially when it’s about the fact that we’re all screwed because we’re running out of water. So I’m happy to discover a water blog that is both informative and funny:

As we glumly consider our half-empty glass of tap water, which may or may not be contaminated, we decide that we have all been beaten down into numb submission by a domineering corporate culture that values nothing but profit and leaves us in constant terror of being unemployed and poor.

(via Aquafornia)

Adaptation and Mitigation

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There’s an exchange over at Prometheus that nicely illustrates the fundamentally linear face of the public climate debate, as so eloquently characterized by Andrew Revkin’s “pushmi-pullyu” metaphor.

The example at hand is the Prins and Rayner paper in Nature last month laying out, in part, the argument for a fuller integration of adapation to climate change into the debate. At the risk of putting words into his mouth, Prins and Rayner are, I think, what David Roberts might characterize as part of the “extraordinarily complex” and multi-faceted face of the actual climate debate, in which people come down in different places on different questions. Here you have people who clearly think climate change is a serious problem, that greenhouse gas reductions are necessary, but that the present approach to achieving them is a failure and that, in the process, an ossified political debate has arisen that excludes the importance of adaptation to that portion of climate change which is inevitable.

Some people, at one end of the traditional linear structure of the debate, use adaptation as an argument against greenhouse gas reductions. People should adapt to climate change, the argument goes, rather than undertaking the economic expense of curbing greenhouse gas emissions. That is most explicitly not what Prins and Rayner are doing here.

Here’s what happens, then, when people like Prins and Rayner attempt to jump off the line, expressing a view that does not fit along the linear dichotomy. People try to push them back on the line!

In the comments to the Prometheus blog post above, John Quiggin immediately assumes that, by arguing for adaptation, they must be arguing against greenhouse gas reductions (“mitigation,” in the increasingly tortured argot of the debate): The adaptation argument is a problem, Quiggin argues, “when used to oppose action by rich countries to reduce their own emissions, and thereby the risk of even worse disasters like this in the future.” In fact, Prins and Rayner are making no such argument: “Mitigation and adaptation must go hand in hand,” they wrote.

But so ingrained is the linear nature of this debate that people like Quiggin seem bound and determined to push anyone who diverges back onto the path.

It’s worth noting that David Roberts has a nice counter-example to this dynamic in his discussion of Prins and Rayner. His piece recognizes the multi-dimensional nature of the issues being raised by Prins and Rayner rather than trying to shove them back into the linear model. Credit where credit is due, even if the guy does annoy the hell out of me sometimes.