From the Voice of America:

A new study finds that technologies already exist to solve the problem of global warming. It says strategies employing these technologies over the next fifty years could put the brakes on rising levels of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the earth’s atmosphere – a chief cause of global warming.

Whew. That’s a relief. Problem solved just in time for football season! Honey, could you get me a beer? The game’s about to start.

OK, that’s a totally cheap quote. The lead paragraph I excerpted above goes on to cite critics pointing out that it’s not quite that easy, on account of the “economic, social and political costs” of the plan.

The story’s about a paper in Science last month by Steve Pacala at Princeton:

Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century. A portfolio of technologies now exists to meet the world’s energy needs over the next 50 years and limit atmospheric CO2 to a trajectory that avoids a doubling of the preindustrial concentration. Every element in this portfolio has passed beyond the laboratory bench and demonstration project; many are already implemented somewhere at full industrial scale. Although no element is a credible candidate for doing the entire job (or even half the job) by itself, the portfolio as a whole is large enough that not every element has to be used.

This is one of those “it’s not that simple” problems, involving the hubris of the technician. Roger Pielke Jr. had a great take on this last month when the Pacala paper came out:

What the technocrats fail to appreciate is that even as “solutions” such as increasing fuel economy, adding nuclear power, and eliminating tropical deforestation may be technologically feasible, seeing their actual implementation represents social and political challenges. Solving poverty, disease, and wars are also similarly “simple.” Overcoming these sorts of challenges are in reality not so simple, irrespective of the state of technology.

When I first started paying attention to the climate wars in the 1990s, the political component of the science debate seemed fixed on the question – “Is it warming.” That debate – the deniers at CO2Science notwithstanding – seems over. Among working scientists in the climate field, the interesting action now on the detection side involves how much it is warming – or, to be more precise, how much climate is changing – and what effect it is having.

In today’s issue of the journal Science, a fascinating new analysis of a longstanding data set on plankton offers new evidence that the change is real, ongoing, and measurable. Anthony Richardson of the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science the U.K. and David Schoeman of the University of Port Elizabeth in South Africa used a powerful data set that has been collected by instruments hitched on the backs of North Atlantic freighters since the 1930s, collecting plankton. (Their abstract is free, subscription required for the full paper.) What they found was that as cool regionsof the ocean warm, the plankton population increases. But as warmer regions warm further, the population tends to decline.

“This impact propagates up the food web (bottom-up control) through copepod herbivores to zooplankton carnivores because of tight trophic coupling. Future warming is therefore likely to alter the spatial distribution of primary and secondary pelagic production, affecting ecosystem services and placing additional stress on already-depleted fish and mammal populations.”

I’ve written at length in the past about the relationship between decadal-scale climate variability and our rapidly changing human societies. The basic argument is that the sort of climate change that matters happens when a human society becomes accustomed to one climate regime, and then it changes. This is the reason I think greenhouse climate change is worth paying attention to. But it’s also the reason I think the climate’s natural variability is important – whatever the cause, if you’re not alert as a society on decadal scales, you’re screwed.

Here in the desert southwest, for example, population exploded during the relatively wet period that lasted from the 1970s in the 1990s. Some sort of a fundamental modal shift in climate seems to have set in the late 1990s, and now all those people, who built all those houses etc. during wet times, are having to learn how to manage with a lot less precipitation.

Some of the more thoughtful analysis I’ve been reading suggests a similar thing may have happened in Florida. A bunch of folks built a bunch of stuff during a period of relatively few hurricanes, and now there’s been a modal shift. Here’s Timothy Appleby in the Globe and Mail:

Thus, from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes were relatively commonplace. Then came a period of relative tranquillity, (which was when much of Florida’s coastal population took up residence).

The climate’s clearly a slow-moving, unruly beast. We’re clearly tampering with it, in ways we do not yet fully understand. But even without our “help,” it can be a bugger if we don’t pay attention on time scales rather longer than seems to have been our habit these last few decades.

Something of mine that ran yesterday in the Albuquerque Journal:

Global warming could dramatically increase the extent of wildfires in New Mexico and across much of the West over the next century, new research suggests.
While unusually dry weather can play a role in big fire years, high temperatures seem more important, especially in New Mexico, according to Philip Mote, a climate researcher at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the new study.
Climate simulations done by Mote suggest significant warming in New Mexico over the next 70 to 100 years, with a resulting four-fold increase in the number of acres burned per year in forest and grass fires.
The study’s authors cautioned against reading too much into the specific numbers generated by their analysis. They said the analysis should be viewed as a framework to help think about fire risks as climate changes rather than a specific prediction of what will happen.
“We’re suggesting that this is just one way of looking at things,” Donald McKenzie, another of the study’s authors, said in a telephone interview.
The research by Mote and his colleagues, published in the current issue of the scientific journal Conservation Biology, is the latest work documenting the link between warm weather and fire and raising the possibility that global warming could make things worse.
“It’s pretty much what we’ve been expecting,” said Thomas Swetnam, a University of Arizona scientist who has been independently studying the fire-climate link. “The results seem to confirm what we are worried about with the warming, that is, more fire.”

(Please let me know if the link above doesn’t work. There have been issues.)

From Kenneth Chang in Sunday’s New York Times:

Global warming is not a significant factor in this year’s storminess, experts said. While some climate models predict that warming might eventually mean somewhat stronger hurricanes, that effect is expected to be very small compared to the natural hurricane cycle.

Or how ’bout this, from our friends in the UK:

Hurricane Frances – a vast storm the size of Texas – yesterday began to hit the Florida coastline, bringing 100mph winds and torrential tropical rain.

But a US government body admits – despite President George Bush’s refusal to join international action to combat global warming – that it is likely to be only a foretaste of things to come as the climate changes.

Now, I hate to harp, but it looks to me like Mr. Chang is being a bit more rigorous here. The Independent doesn’t say, but when it refers to “a US government body” admitting that Frances “is likely to be only a foretaste of things to come as the climate changes,” it could only be referring to the recently released USGCRP report. Here’s what that report actually has to say about hurricanes:

Simulations with a new hurricane model suggest that tropical cyclone intensities may increase under conditions of warming of tropical sea surface temperatures. The model projects that this warming, representative of the average projected change during the 21st century as a result of human-induced changes in atmospheric composition, results in an increase of approximately 5-10 percent in peak hurricane winds. However, considerable controversy still exists with respect to the correctness of such simulations in light of our inability to assess the veracity of these models due to the lack of consideration of the full complement of climate system changes under a warming scenario and inadequate observational data on hurricanes ? areas where continuing research is warranted.

That’s a bit weaker than “likely,” don’t you think? Though I love the bit about a storm the size of Texas. That’s epic. Texas is real big.