BBO Discussion Forums: Climate change - BBO Discussion Forums

The lawmaker on Friday was widely ridiculed for the way he responded to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) call for action on the climate crisis. Schumer had tweeted about July 2019 being “the hottest month ever, of any month, on record” and described climate change as “the greatest threat facing our planet.”

Cornyn replied: “It’s summer, Chuck.”

As Greenland's glaciers melt, Siberia's permafrost turns to slush, the Amazon burns and the Arctic sizzles, this summer of record heat should serve as a reminder of the imminence of climate change. A warming world isn’t decades away -- it’s here now, as the carbon emissions that accelerate warming keep rising.

It’s critical for the U.S. to reduce its own carbon emissions to help combat this threat. A number of Democratic politicians have released sweeping plans to do this. But decarbonizing the U.S. economy won't be enough to prevent catastrophic warming, for two reasons. First of all, U.S. emissions are already dwarfed by the rest of the globe, and the disparity is increasing as developing nations catch up with rich-world living standards:

But even more importantly, much of the world is moving in the wrong direction. As part of its Belt and Road global development initiative, China is building coal plants in developing countries around the world. That threatens not just to increase emissions, but to create infrastructure around coal power in those countries that could lock them into reliance on fossil fuels as they industrialize. Meanwhile, fires are raging through the Amazon rainforest at a record pace, thanks in part to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s weakened environmental protections and arson by ranchers eager for more land. The Amazon's trees are vital for pulling carbon out of the air, so clearing of the ancient forest will accelerate climate change even more.

If the U.S. merely stays in its corner of the world and attends to its own emissions problem, it will have at most a marginal impact on the progress of climate change. This is a global crisis, and it needs global solutions. One approach is to use international accords like the Paris Agreement, which the U.S. unwisely withdrew from in 2017. We need more agreements like this, and there are plenty being proposed. But the failure of most nations to meet their Paris emissions targets, combined with lax requirements for developing nations, shows that this approach by itself is insufficient.

But there are several steps the U.S. can take to encourage other nations to reduce their emissions, even as it cuts its own.

The most obvious step is to directly transfer green energy technology to less advanced nations. This can be done through international institutions like the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, and with bilateral agreements with countries like India. The most important technology is improved energy storage, for use when wind and solar can't generate power.

A second approach is to subsidize U.S. exports of green technology and low-carbon products, including green energy, storage, smart grids, building conversion kits and low-carbon cement and steel. This would include helping finance foreign purchases of these products. If the rules of the World Trade Organization forbid such subsidies, then the rules should be rewritten. This idea sometimes is referred to as a Green Marshall Plan, and has been touted by some of the current crop of presidential candidates.

A more dramatic version of this strategy is to pay developing countries to build green-energy infrastructure like flexible power grids, electric-vehicle charging stations and energy storage facilities -- even if these products aren’t made in the U.S. This could be done through the same channels by which rich countries now offer official development assistance, or through the Green Climate Fund. Green infrastructure would help lock newly industrializing nations into using carbon-free energy sources.

Another idea, proposed by economist Bard Harstad, is for the U.S. and other rich countries to buy up coal deposits around the world and leave it in the ground. This will raise the price of coal relative to greener alternatives, and help prevent developing countries from building their infrastructure around coal. It also would assure that much of the fossil fuel in the world never gets burned.

Finally, there are more punitive measures. Carbon tariffs would tax the emissions embedded in imports, discouraging other countries from using carbon-intensive energy and production processes. The U.S. could go further, threatening to cut trade with nations like Bolsonaro’s Brazil unless they implement more stringent conservation policies. European countries are already taking some steps in this direction.

This last step would be a harsh and extreme policy. In most cases, it doesn’t make sense for rich countries to hold poor ones to their own environmental standards. But climate is an exception, because Brazilian deforestation and Chinese coal construction affect the entire globe. And the U.S. certainly shouldn’t seek to punish other countries for reckless environmental policies until it implements its own serious program of rapid emissions reductions. Yet in the end, steps like this may be necessary, since there’s only one Amazon rainforest in the world.

None of these policies is likely to be politically possible as long as Donald Trump is president, but after his departure a window for action may open. Any ambitious, comprehensive climate plan must address the international aspect of the problem.

One part of the new standards would have required the adding of four kinds of incandescent and halogen light bulbs to the energy-efficient group: three-way, the candle-shaped bulbs used in chandeliers; the globe-shaped bulbs found in bathroom lighting; reflector bulbs used in recessed fixtures; and track lighting. A rule that will be published Thursday in the Federal Register will eliminate the requirement for those four categories of bulbs.

The Department of Energy was also supposed to begin a broader upgrade concerning energy efficiency in pear-shaped bulbs, scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2020. The department is proposing a new rule that would eliminate that requirement, subject to a 60-day comment period.

His group estimates that putting efficient bulbs in all six billion light sockets in the United States could mean $14 billion in savings in 2025, “equivalent to the electricity generated by 25 large power plants,” he said.

The Northern Hemisphere just sweltered through its hottest summer on record, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Monday.

A whopping 90% of the population of the Earth lives in the Northern Hemisphere, where all five of its warmest summers have occurred in the past five years.

For the planet as a whole, the three months were the second-hottest on record. (June-August is winter in the Southern Hemisphere). Only 2016 was warmer, NOAA said. The overall trend is one of heat: Nine of the 10 highest June-August global surface temperatures have occurred since 2009.

Records go back to 1880.

Trump Administration Is Rolling Back Rules Requiring More Energy-Efficient Bulbs

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The dying incandescent/halogen light bulb manufacturers refuse to see the writing on the wall, and the Gasbag in Chief is more than happy to do what he can to increase global warming.

"What's with the lightbulb?" Trump asked introducing one of several environmentally related rants in his more than hour-long remarks. He described energy efficient light bulbs as "many times more expensive than that old, incandescent bulb that worked very well" and "the lights no good."

"The bulb that we're being forced to use, number one, to me, most importantly, I always look orange," he said, to laughs from the audience.

The world may become hotter than previously expected by the end of the century, according to a major study by some 100 of the top researchers in the field in France.

In the worst-case scenario, average global temperatures may rise 6 degrees to 7 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees to 12.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, according to the work released by France’s National Center for Scientific Research CNRS, the atomic energy commission CEA and weather office Meteo-France.

That reading is about 1 degree Celsius hotter than previous projections. It’s also well above the 2-degree threshold endorsed by the United Nations. Beyond that level, storms are likely to become much more powerful and sea levels more than 1 meter higher.

The two updated models by the French researchers take a closer look at the regional effects of higher temperatures. They integrate the latest understanding of atmospheric physics and have higher resolution, CEA climate scientist Pascale Braconnot said in a press conference on Tuesday. All of the scenarios generated by the models predict “pronounced” and more severe global warming than the previous research completed in 2012, CNRS said in a statement.

“There’s a jump in quality in the result of the models for numerous indicators,” Braconnot said. “We have more confidence in the new version compared to the previous one.”

Updating the climate models required 500 million hours of calculations by supercomputers at Genci and Meteo-France, the weather office said in a statement. The research will contribute to part one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report, expected in 2021.

Only one of the updated climate models used by the researchers allowed for the global temperature increase to remain below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

The assumptions in that best-case scenario, called SSP1 1.9, include carbon neutrality by 2060 followed by a boost for carbon capture technology. That would also require lower population growth, a priority on sustainability and strong global cooperation to reduce pollution.

The worst-case scenario, called SSP5 8.5, assumes rapid economic growth driven by fossil fuels.

In the more pessimistic scenario, all summers in France by the end of the century will be hotter than the 2003 heatwave year, CNRS climate researcher Olivier Boucher said at the press conference.

Across Europe, heat waves will become longer and more intense, while the Arctic will be entirely ice-free during summer in the last two decades of this century.

“In 10,000 years, we haven’t explored anything as major as what we’re doing over a period of 100 years,” Braconnot said. The global temperature difference between the last ice age and the end of glaciation was 3 to 4 degrees Celsius, she said.

The Great Climate Retreat is beginning with tiny steps, like taxpayer buyouts for homeowners in flood-prone areas from Staten Island, New York, to Houston and New Orleans — and now Rittel’s Marathon Key. Florida, the state with the most people and real estate at risk, is just starting to buy homes, wrecked or not, and bulldoze them to clear a path for swelling seas before whole neighborhoods get wiped off the map.

By the end of the century, 13 million Americans will need to move just because of rising sea levels, at a cost of $1 million each, according to Florida State University demographer Mathew Haeur, who studies climate migration. Even in a “managed retreat,” coordinated and funded at the federal level, the economic disruption could resemble the housing crash of 2008.

In one of the largest youth-led demonstrations in history, millions of people from Manhattan to Mumbai took to the streets around the globe on Friday, their chants, speeches and homemade signs delivering the same stern message to world leaders: do more to combat climate change — and do it faster.

From small island nations such as Kiribati to war-torn countries such as Afghanistan and across the United States, young people left their classrooms to demand that governments act with more urgency to wean the world off fossil fuels and cut carbon dioxide emissions.

“Oceans are rising and so are we,” read the sign that 13-year-old Martha Lickman carried through London.

“Whose future? Our future!” shouted students from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md., as they made their way to the U.S. Capitol.

“Policymakers don’t get it,” said Yujin Kim, a 17-year-old South Korean student who had traveled to New York for a U.N. youth summit. “They’re not going to be here in 30 years. And we are. We’re going to keep speaking out until they listen.”

Organizers said more than 1,100 strikes took place across all 50 states on Friday. New York and Boston public schools granted students permission to skip school for the strikes. Numerous companies closed their doors in solidarity with the youths and encouraged employees to attend the strike.

After hours of marching and chants and speeches in New York, the sea of protesters roared as Thunberg finally took the stage.

“The eyes of the world will be upon them,” she said of the national leaders gathering next week at the U.N. summit. “They have a chance to take leadership. To prove they actually hear us.”

She paused.

“Do you think they hear us?”

The crowd screamed back: “No.”

She smiled.

“We will make them hear us,” Thunberg said, adding, “Change is coming. Whether they like it or not.”

Kathryn Murdoch is sitting with a reporter in her offices in the West Village, talking about climate change and democracy.

This, in itself, is unheard-of. She is a Murdoch, a member of the billionaire family that controls influential news organizations on three continents, and Murdochs rarely talk to the outside press. Ms. Murdoch is married to James Murdoch, the younger son of Rupert Murdoch.

Ms. Murdoch and her husband, however, are stepping out of their family’s shadow. He had once risen to dominance in the companies, only to lose a closely watched power struggle to his brother, Lachlan. As he neared the height of his influence — in the empire, and with his father — James was running the British satellite television service Sky while nudging the company into green initiatives. In 2006, he even invited Al Gore to speak at a Fox corporate retreat in Pebble Beach, Calif.

But Lachlan, whose politics are more in line with those of his father, saw his star rise as James’ fell. This year, after Fox sold assets to Disney, including 21st Century Fox, for $71.3 billion, James left the company, with his portion of the proceeds coming to a reported $2 billion.

Now James and Kathryn Murdoch are claiming their independence from the more conservative arm of the family.

James Murdoch recently spoke with The New Yorker for a brief article in which he acknowledged that “There are views I really disagree with on Fox,” referring to Fox News, the channel that was his father’s brainchild and which is known for its lineup of popular conservative hosts. And, in a series of interviews with The New York Times beginning in May, Ms. Murdoch has stepped out further, in order to bring attention to the fight against climate change. That means countering the efforts of those who block progress by stoking partisan rancor or by attempting to muddy the scientific consensus that climate change is happening now, and it is driven by human activity.

The Murdoch empire and Fox News have long had a substantial role in that muddying and stoking.

So this could be awkward. But to Ms. Murdoch, it is all part of her moment to go public on some 13 years of behind-the-scenes climate activism. “I’m very comfortable staying in the background and continuing to work quietly,” she said, but “I’ve decided doing that means I’m not working hard enough, I’m not doing everything in my power to do.”

Ms. Murdoch said that she actually got the inspiration to take on climate change from that Al Gore talk at the Fox retreat in 2006. The former vice president presented a version of the slide show that had just been turned into the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

In particular, the urgency of the climate crisis jolted her. “I decided to switch everything I was doing,” she said. “I wanted to be able to look my children in the eye and say ‘I did everything I could.’”

Now, working with the nonpartisan group Unite America, she is connecting like-minded organizations that are trying to overhaul the democratic process of voting to make it less likely to reward partisanship. She is also raising funds to ensure that the network will be effective.

She and her husband have already invested millions in their work toward these ends, and are “anchor funders” in the larger plan, she said, with an ultimate goal that she characterized as being in the “nine figures.” (While she declined to be more specific, the lowest nine-figure number is $100 million.)

“I’m not saying I have all the answers — I don’t,” she said, “But what I know and what I feel very strongly is that sitting around not doing anything is the wrong answer.”

Ms. Murdoch’s public comments confirm what many who closely watch the intricacies and intrigues of the Murdoch empire have long believed: that she is more progressive than many other members of the family. (She calls herself a “radical centrist.”)

Her approach is bipartisan, but it is also clear that one party has been more resistant to action. “There hasn’t been a Republican answer on climate change,” Ms. Murdoch said. “There’s just been denial and walking away from the problem. There needs to be one.”

To those who defend climate science and warn of the risks that global warming poses, her emergence and use of her fortune and network of powerful friends and her famous name — which she describes as a “double-edged sword” — is welcome. “Murdoch media are notorious amongst climate scientists for their constant stream of misinformation on climate change,” said Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “I can see how a thinking person who marries into that family might feel an urge to counter at least a little bit of the damage they do.”

Fox News did not respond to requests for comment.

Her early climate work included taking a position in 2008 with the newly formed Clinton Climate Initiative, part of the Clinton Foundation established by the former president. As for her family connections, “I was certainly aware that the other Murdochs are conservative,” the founder of the climate initiative, Ira Magaziner, said, but “it didn’t matter.” At the time, he noted, many Republicans, including Mitt Romney, had spoken about the need to deal with climate change.

Over the years, she has worked with organizations whose approaches to environmental action align with her own. She joined the board of the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that often collaborates with industry on climate issues. In 2014 she and her husband created the Quadrivium Foundation (the word means “crossroads”) to fund their programs. One of those is SciLine, an independent nonprofit service that connects reporters with scientists and provides fact sheets on topics in the news like a primer in August on hurricanes and climate change.

She decided, however, that spreading scientific knowledge might not be enough. People already understand that the planet is warming and that humans are the cause. The deeper problem, she said, is that the government of the United States isn’t doing anything about it.

She took a deep dive into possible solutions to partisan deadlock and reviewed the players in the diffuse field known as democracy reform: Small groups that push for changes in the electoral system.

Some of the avenues her groups are pursuing include ranked-choice voting, in which voters rank candidates in order of their preference. Proponents of this method argue that it reduces the tendency of primaries to reward candidates who work mainly to energize their base, and favors candidates who have the broadest appeal. She is also interested in initiatives to restrict gerrymandering and increase access to voting through proposals like automatic registration, as well as open primaries, in which voters do not need to declare their party affiliation.

Charles Wheelan, founder of Unite America, said that because of Ms. Murdoch’s surname, “it’s fair to say that in some quarters our relationship raises a few eyebrows.” But he also calls her “an important ambassador” to the wealthy and powerful, someone who can tell them, as a peer: “Look, if you really want to make the world better for your grandchildren, fix politics.”

President Vladimir Putin needs to go green quickly to stop the permafrost from melting, so that Russian oil and gas companies can keep pumping the hydrocarbons that are warming the planet and making the permafrost melt.

Even I’m struggling with the warped logic of that one, but it’s the conclusion I’ve reached from Russia’s sudden ratification of the Paris climate accord and from reading the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Until now, climate change has been seen as a “good thing” for Russia — at least in part. Warming waters have opened up the Northern Sea Route across the top of the country and made it practical, if not necessarily economic, to search for and exploit oil and gas resources beneath the Arctic seas. Who remembers the Shtokman gas project?

Yet the warming that is opening up the Arctic seas may be starting to have a less beneficial effect on the frozen landmass of northern Russia, the heartland of the country’s oil and gas development and production.

Read the whole thing.

When California's historic five-year drought finally relented a few years ago the tally of dead trees in the Sierra Nevada was higher than almost anyone expected: 129 million. Most are still standing, the dry patches dotting the mountainsides.

But some trees did survive the test of heat and drought. Now, scientists are racing to collect them, and other species around the globe, in the hope that these "climate survivors" have a natural advantage that will allow them to better cope with a warming world.

On the north shore of Lake Tahoe, Patricia Maloney, a UC Davis forest and conservation biologist, hunts for these survivors. Most people focus on the dead trees, their brown pine needles obvious against the glittering blue of the lake. But Maloney tends not to notice them.

"I look for the good," she says. "Like in people, you look for the good, not the bad. I do the same in forest systems."

Maloney studies sugar pines, a tree John Muir once called the "king" of conifers. "They have these huge, beautiful cones," she says. "They're stunning trees."

The sugar pines on these slopes endured some of the worst water stress in the region. Winter snowpack melts fastest on south-facing slopes, leaving the trees with little soil moisture over the summer. That opens the door for the trees' tiny nemesis, which would deal the fatal blow.

"Here you have some really good mountain pine beetle galleries," Maloney says, as she peels the bark off a dead sugar pine to show winding channels eaten into the wood. "Like little beetle highways."

Pine beetle outbreaks are a normal occurrence in the Sierra. As the beetles try to bore into the bark, pine trees can usually fight them off by spewing a sticky, gummy resin, entrapping the insects. But trees need water to make resin.

During the drought, "the tank ran dry, and they weren't able to mobilize any sort of resin," Maloney says.

But next to this dead tree, Maloney points to one towering above, the same exact species, that has healthy green pine needles. Somehow, it was able to fight the beetles off and survive the drought. As she's found more and more of these survivors, Maloney has studied them, trying to figure out their secret.

"What we found is that the ones that were green, like this one, were more water-use efficient than their dead counterparts," she says.

In other words, the survivors had an innate ability to do more with less.

Individual members of any species can vary dramatically, something tied to genetic differences. That diversity comes in handy when environmental conditions change.

The drought, heat and beetle outbreaks in recent years put extreme pressure on sugar pines, creating a natural experiment that weeded out all but the toughest.

"I think what we're seeing is contemporary natural selection," Maloney says.

Now, she's trying to ensure their descendants survive.

Inside a greenhouse at her Tahoe City field station, Maloney shows off a sea of young green trees in their own containers. These 10,000 sugar pine seedlings grew from seeds Maloney and her team collected from 100 of the surviving sugar pines.

Over the next year, these young trees will be replanted around Lake Tahoe, both on national forest and private land. The hope is the trees, due to their genetics, will be better able to handle a warming climate, more extreme droughts and more frequent beetle outbreaks.

"These survivors matter," Maloney says. She plans to study the genetics of these trees as they grow, research that could help in other climate-threatened forests.

And Maloney's not alone in searching for species that can handle the warming climate.

"Evolution is a tool that we can bring to bear in helping us get through this future," says Steve Palumbi, a biology professor at Stanford University, who has been looking for coral that can handle heat.

Coral reefs are bleaching and dying as oceans warm, so Palumbi is growing surviving corals in the hope they can build new reefs full of "super corals." Reefs aren't just tourist attractions, he says. They're also biodiversity hotspots that protect coastlines from flooding by absorbing wave energy.

"If it gives us another decade, if it gives us another two generations, that'll be good, we'll take it," he says. "I see these next 80 years as the time where we have to save as much as possible."

But beyond that, it gets trickier, given the rate the climate is changing.

"The question in the future is: When the environment changes and it changes really fast, can these populations keep up?" he asks. "How fast can they adapt? How much help will they give us in keeping those ecosystems going?"

Ultimately, Palumbi says, the best solution for these species is for humans to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases. In the meantime, scientists are trying to buy them a little more time.

Economists greatly underestimate the price tag on harsher weather and higher seas. Why is that?

For some time now it has been clear that the effects of climate change are appearing faster than scientists anticipated. Now it turns out that there is another form of underestimation as bad or worse than the scientific one: the underestimating by economists of the costs.

The result of this failure by economists is that world leaders understand neither the magnitude of the risks to lives and livelihoods, nor the urgency of action. How and why this has occurred is explained in a recent report by scientists and economists at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

One reason is obvious: Since climate scientists have been underestimating the rate of climate change and the severity of its effects, then economists will necessarily underestimate their costs.

But it’s worse than that. A set of assumptions and practices in economics has led economists both to underestimate the economic impact of many climate risks and to miss some of them entirely. That is a problem because, as the report notes, these “missing risks” could have “drastic and potentially catastrophic impacts on citizens, communities and companies.”

One problem involves the nature of risk in a climate-altered world. Right now, carbon dioxide is at its highest concentration in the atmosphere in three million years (and still climbing). The last time levels were this high, the world was about five degrees Fahrenheit warmer and sea level 32 to 65 feet higher. Humans have no experience weathering sustained conditions of this type.

Typically, our estimates of the value or cost of something, whether it is a pair of shoes, a loaf of bread or the impact of a hurricane, are based on experience. Statisticians call this “stationarity.” But when conditions change so much that experience is no longer a reliable guide to the future — when stationarity no longer applies — then estimates become more and more uncertain.

Hydrologists have recognized for some time that climate change has undermined stationarity in water management — indeed, they have declared that stationarity is dead. But economists have by and large not recognized that this applies to climate effects across the board. They approach climate damages as minor perturbations around an underlying path of economic growth, and take little account of the fundamental destruction that we might be facing because it is so outside humanity’s experience.

A second difficulty involves parameters that scientists do not feel they can adequately quantify, like the value of biodiversity or the costs of ocean acidification. Research shows that when scientists lack good data for a variable, even if they know it to be salient, they are loath to assign a value out of a fear that they would be “making it up.”

Therefore, in many cases, they simply omit it from the model, assessment or discussion. In economic assessments of climate change, some of the largest factors, like thresholds in the climate system, when a tiny change could tip the system catastrophically, and possible limits to the human capacity to adapt, are omitted for this reason. In effect, economists have assigned them a value of zero, when the risks are decidedly not. One example from the report: The melting of Himalayan glaciers and snow will both flood and profoundly affect the water supply of communities in which hundreds of millions of people live, yet this is absent from most economic assessments.

A third and terrifying problem involves cascading effects. One reason the harms of climate change are hard to fathom is that they will not occur in isolation, but will reinforce one another in damaging ways. In some cases, they may produce a sequence of serious, and perhaps irreversible, damage.

For example, a sudden rapid loss of Greenland or West Antarctic land ice could lead to much higher sea levels and storm surges, which would contaminate water supplies, destroy coastal cities, force out their residents, and cause turmoil and conflict.

Another example: increased heat decreases food production, which leads to widespread malnutrition, which diminishes the capacity of people to withstand heat and disease and makes it effectively impossible for them to adapt to climate change. Sustained extreme heat may also decrease industrial productivity, bringing about economic depressions.

In a worst-case scenario, climate impacts could set off a feedback loop in which climate change leads to economic losses, which lead to social and political disruption, which undermines both democracy and our capacity to prevent further climate damage. These sorts of cascading effects are rarely captured in economic models of climate impacts. And this set of known omissions does not, of course, include additional risks that we may have failed to have identified.

The urgency and potential irreversibility of climate effects mean we cannot wait for the results of research to deepen our understanding and reduce the uncertainty about these risks. This is particularly so because the study suggests that if we are missing something in our assessments, it is likely something that makes the problem worse.

This is yet another reason it’s urgent to pursue a new, greener economic path for growth and development. If we do that, a happy ending is still possible. But if we wait to be more certain, the only certainty is that we will regret it.

It's hard to bury your head in the sand when the beach is under water.