Climate Articles


Three Models of Social Change
Can we change fast enough? When thinking about the enormous need for social change as we attempt to move the world economy onto a sustainable path, I find it useful to look at various models of change. Three stand out. One is the catastrophic event model, which I call the Pearl Harbor model, where a dramatic event fundamentally changes how we think and behave. The second model is one where a society reaches a tipping point on a particular issue often after an extended period of gradual change in thinking and attitudes. This I call the Berlin Wall model. The third is the sandwich model of social change, where there is a strong grassroots movement pushing for change on a particular issue that is fully supported by strong political leadership at the top.
The surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was a dramatic wakeup call. It totally changed how Americans thought about the war. If the American people had been asked on December 6th whether the country should enter World War II, probably 95 percent would have said no. By Monday morning, December 8th, perhaps 95 percent would have said yes.
The weakness of the Pearl Harbor model is that if we have to wait for a catastrophic event to change our behavior, it might be too late. It could lead to stresses that would themselves lead to social collapse. When scientists are asked to identify a possible "Pearl Harbor" scenario on the climate front, they frequently point to the possible breakup of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Relatively small blocks of it have been breaking off for more than a decade now, but huge parts of the sheet could break off, sliding into the ocean.
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Livestock Emissions: Still Grossly Underestimated?
The environmental impact of animals raised for food has been vastly underestimated and in fact accounts for at least half of all human-caused greenhouse gases (GHGs), according to contributors to this month's World Watch magazine. Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, co-authors of "Livestock and Climate Change," found that livestock and their byproducts account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions.
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We Can't Ignore Climate Change
At a Clean Energy Economy Forum at the White House on October 7, 2009, J. Wayne Leonard, the chairman and CEO of Entergy Corporation, a Fortune 500 energy company based in New Orleans, spoke about the urgency of addressing climate change. -Editor
We are a broad base of business across America. We represent some 37 states. We touch all aspects of the economy. And we have come together here this morning unified in one particular request. And that is that we pass comprehensive climate change and energy policy legislation this year. We are prepared as business to invest, to innovate, to transform the energy sector of this country and of the world - the way we source energy, the way we deliver energy, the way we use energy.
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Ailing planet seen as bad for human health
Advocates' report links climate change to worsening of diseases
Climate change will make Americans more vulnerable to diseases, disasters and heat waves, but governments have done little to plan for the added burden on the health system, according to a new study by a nonprofit group.
The study, released Monday by the Trust for America's Health, an advocacy group focused on disease prevention, examines the public-health implications of climate change. In addition to pushing up sea levels and shrinking Arctic ice, the report says, a warming planet is likely to leave more people sick, short of breath or underfed.
Experts involved with the study said that these threats might be reduced if the federal government adopts a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions. But no legislation could stop them altogether, they said. Emissions already in the atmosphere are expected to increase warming -- and the problems that come with it -- for years to come.
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Climate Change Begins at Home: Small Steps to Cut Greenhouse Emissions Can Lead to Big Results
A new study shows how household improvements, such as better insulation, could cut U.S. carbon emissions by more than 7 percent
American homes and their energy consumption account for nearly 40 percent of U.S. emissions, 626 million metric tons of carbon in 2005 alone. But 33 simple actions-ranging from improving the insulation to carpooling-could cut those annual carbon emissions by 123 million metric tons. That savings would more than entirely offset emissions from petroleum refineries, iron and steel works, and aluminum smelters combined.
"We did a careful analysis of the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from changes in energy use by households. We did this by considering not only the hypothetical reduction that would occur if everyone undertook each action but by looking at what is behaviorally realistic," explains ecologist and sociologist Thomas Dietz of Michigan State University, one of the authors of the study laying out the possibilities in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "A substantial amount of energy use in U.S. households is wasted, and there have been successful programs to eliminate that waste."
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How to keep track of climate change
It's a vexing problem - how to keep the public and policymakers informed and engaged on what many scientists say is the primary long-term challenge to humanity's well-being: global warming.
You could invite folks to burrow into the most recent 998-page climate-change opus by 620 leading scientists and editors. Or, for lighter reading, peruse the 34-page "frequently asked questions" primer on that same 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
But to capture public attention while avoiding the need for a PhD on sea-ice thickness, glacier melt rates, and carbon dioxide concentrations, you could just put that data into a single index that tracks the pulse of climate change as it happens.
So says Daniel Abbasi, who has proposed a Global Climate Change Index, not unlike the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which tracks stock prices. The index would try to distill the latest ecological figures into something simple enough for the average reader to understand and concrete enough to hold policymakers accountable for lowering greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere.
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Telling the Whole Story on Global Warming
Global warming is one of the greatest challenges of our generation. Addressing this challenge also represents enormous opportunities for economic recovery and long term prosperity.
But sometimes the big picture is lost when just a part of the story is told.
That's just what happened when Douglas Elmendorf, the head of the Congressional Budget Office, testified recently before the Senate Energy Committee about the economic impact of clean energy legislation recently passed by the House of Representatives.
Afterward, a few headlines gave a misleading impression about the implications of addressing the challenge of global warming.
But those reports largely missed what CBO left out of its analysis.
The CBO Director said it himself: "These measures of potential costs do not include any benefits from averting climate change."
Global warming is happening now. Ignoring the long-term costs of doing nothing to avert the most dangerous impacts of a changing climate results in a profoundly incomplete and distorted economic picture.
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Fossil Fuels' Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says
WASHINGTON - Burning fossil fuels costs the United States about $120 billion a year in health costs, mostly because of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution, the National Academy of Sciences reported in a study issued Monday.
The damages are caused almost equally by coal and oil, according to the study, which was ordered by Congress. The study set out to measure the costs not incorporated into the price of a kilowatt-hour or a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel.
The estimates by the academy do not include damages from global warming, which has been linked to the gases produced by burning fossil fuels. The authors said the extent of such damage, and the timing, were too uncertain to estimate.
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September Global Surface Temperature Second Warmest Since 1880 The northeast is getting snow already, and low temperatures. Does this mean global warming is a myth? Not necessarily. A new analysis of global temperatures show that the combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the second warmest September on record, according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Based on records going back to 1880, the monthly National Climatic Data Center analysis is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides. * The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was 1.12 degrees F above the 20th century average of 59.0 degrees F. Separately the global land surface temperature was 1.75 degrees F above the 20th century average of 53.6 degrees F. * Warmer-than-average temperatures engulfed most of the world's land areas during the month. The greatest warmth occurred across Canada and the northern and western contiguous United States. Warmer-than-normal conditions also prevailed across Europe, most of Asia and Australia.
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Report: Tackling climate change nets 4.5 million jobs
A new report suggests that tackling climate change will be a major net job creator for the U.S. economy. According to the report, aggressive deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency can net up to 4.5 million new U.S. jobs by 2030 and provide the greenhouse gas emission reductions necessary to tackle climate change.
The report entitled, Estimating the Jobs Impact of Tackling Climate Change, was released today during a news conference in Washington, D.C. The study was released by the nonprofit American Solar Energy Society (ASES) based in Boulder and Management Information Services, Inc. (MISI) based in Washington, D.C.
According to the analysis, renewable energy and energy efficiency deployment costs would be revenue neutral (or better), as costs to implement the technologies are offset by savings from lower energy bills, making total net costs near zero.
"The twin challenges of climate change and economic stagnation can be solved by the same action-broad, aggressive, sustained deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency," said Brad Collins, ASES' Executive Director, "the solution for one is the solution for the other."
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Climate change in our own backyards.
How global warming is already affecting us and the tough choices we have to make Americans are seeing radical changes to their surroundings as temperatures rise and nature changes from global warming. It will force some tough choices in the very near future. First of four parts
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Killer foam: Was it a freak event or a warning?
A simple organism that killed thousands of seabirds in Oregon and Washington has stunned scientists who are combing through clues in hopes of unraveling its mystery. They can name it. They can measure it. They can peer at it under a microscope.
But they do not know exactly why it suddenly burst into deadly profusion for the first time off the Northwest coast and whether this was a freak event or a harbinger of the future.
"This is an amazing story," said Julia Parrish, a marine biologist and professor at the University of Washington. The organism, which has ignited a flurry of emails and phone calls among oceanographers from Seattle to Santa Cruz, Calif., is a single-cell phytoplankton, or algae, called Akashiwo sanguinea.
It has painted red tides off Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Hong Kong. It has even hit Chesapeake Bay on the East Coast and Monterey Bay in California, where it killed about 200 birds in 2007.
But it was never a player on the scientific stage in the Northwest -- until mid-September.
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With eyes open to cost of climate change, it's time for us to decide
All we had were questions. Now we have answers. The answers aren't pretty.
A major bank has paid two environmental organizations to produce a groundbreaking report that, for the first time, calculates the costs of both the Harper government's modest plans to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and the much more ambitious targets set by the environmental community, nationally and regionally.
The conclusion: Canada can still meet a 2020 target to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions below 1990 levels while preserving some economic growth through the next decade. But to meet that target, the federal government must act immediately. The impact of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions will be deeply disruptive to the economy. It will be very expensive. And Alberta, especially, will suffer.
"It will be the biggest fiscal shock in Canadian history," observes TD chief economist Don Drummond. "But the study shows it can be done."
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Methane's role in global warming underestimated
Greenhouse gas calculations blame carbon dioxide too much for global warming, and methane too little, suggest researchers Thursday.
In the journal Science, a team led by Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York finds that chemical interactions between greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide cause more global warming than previously estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other efforts. "The total amount of warming doesn't change, just the balance of gasses behind it," Shindell says.
The world's climate warmed an average about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 1906 to 2005, very likely due to industrial greenhouse gases, the IPCC concluded in 2007, adding that carbon dioxide is "most important" greenhouse gas. Methane is a greenhouse gas produced by landfills, agriculture and some industries.
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Greenland is warming up
Disko Bay lay glinting with ice on the bright afternoon we sailed in. Bergs as big as buses floated among others the size of houses. But houses from another world - these were castles and fairy grottoes, crazy monumental statues sculpted into fantastical shapes by the sea, the wind and the pressure of centuries of falling snow. Pools of unearthly blue water shimmered on their surfaces. One iceberg with five straight sides - on the surface, an exact cube - drifted slowly, slowly by, its geometry bewitching.
These were just the beginning. Further on were floating mountains, ice cliffs hundreds of metres tall, marching forth from the mouth of the glacier that reaches the sea at Disko Bay. Most of these break up or are worn down before they get here, but some last for years, as huge and menacing as when they were calved from the Jakobshavn Isbrae, the most productive glacier in the northern hemisphere. Every year, 35 billion tonnes of ice break free of the Greenland ice sheet here. Only the mammoth glaciers of Antarctica can compare. The Isbrae - also known as Sermeq Kujalleq - moves at 40m a day. For glaciers, this is pretty quick.
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Climate change threat to shellfish
Creatures may face dramatic decline in survival rates
STONY BROOK -- A Native American name for Long Island, Sewanhacky, meant "Island of Shells." It referred to the vast numbers of clam, oyster and other shells deposited on its shores. Ancient mounds of empty shells, called middens, show researchers today how important shellfish were in the early diet.
But shellfish, which now feed one of the state's most historic industries, now face an invisible yet mounting attack from global climate change, according to a study from researchers at Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.
Increasing fossil fuel emissions of carbon dioxide, in addition to raising average global temperatures, also are causing changes in ocean chemistry that threaten any creature making a shell, like shellfish, as well as coral reefs and plankton, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Known as ocean acidification, the process occurs when some CO2 in the atmosphere is absorbed into the ocean, where it converts into carbonic acid. As CO2 levels have started to climb since the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, the oceans have gradually grown more acidic. That is expected to continue if CO2 emissions are not reduced.
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The Nitrogen Fix: Breaking a Costly Addiction
Over the last century, the intensive use of chemical fertilizers has saturated the Earth's soils, waters, and atmosphere with nitrogen. Now scientists are warning that we must move quickly to revolutionize agricultural systems and greatly reduce the amount of nitrogen we put into the planet's ecosystems.
A single patent a century ago changed the world, and now, in the 21st century, Homo sapiens and the world we dominate have an addiction. Call it the nitrogen fix. It is like a drug mainlined into the planet's ecosystems, suffusing every cell, every pore - including our own bodies.
In 1908, the German chemist Fritz Haber discovered how to make ammonia by capturing nitrogen gas from the air. In the process he invented a cheap new source of nitrogen fertilizer, ending our dependence on natural sources, whether biological or geological. Nitrogen fertilizer fixed from the air confounded the mid-century predictions of Paul Ehrlich and others that global famine loomed. Chemical fertilizer today feeds about three billion people.
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Coping With Climate Change: Which Societies Will Do Best?
As the world warms, how different societies fare in dealing with rising seas and changing weather patterns will have as much to do with political, social, and economic factors as with a changing climate.
Following the disastrous tsunami of December 2004, the government of Bangladesh embraced upgraded storm-alert systems that warn communities in a coordinated way and improved social support networks, resulting in a drastic reduction in typhoon deaths. In neighboring Myanmar, by contrast, deaths from natural disasters have risen in recent years. Indeed, the deaths that occurred there last year in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis cannot be separated from the fact that Myanmar has an authoritarian regime that prevents international assistance from reaching those in need, rendering its citizens unable to cope with extreme weather disasters - events that are expected to become more frequent with climate change.
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Multiyear ice covering Arctic is effectively gone - expert
The multiyear ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished, a startling development that will make it easier to open up polar shipping routes, according to an Arctic expert.
Vast sheets of impenetrable multiyear ice, which can reach up to 80 metres thick, have for centuries blocked the path of ships seeking a quick short cut through the fabled Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They also ruled out the idea of sailing across the top of the world.
But David Barber, Canada's Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, said the ice was melting at an extraordinarily fast rate.
"We are almost out of multiyear sea ice in the northern hemisphere," he said in a presentation in Parliament. The little that remains is jammed up against Canada's Arctic archipaelago, far from potential shipping routes.
Scientists link higher Arctic temperatures and melting sea ice to the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.
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Interactions with Aerosols Boost Warming Potential of Some Gases
For decades, climate scientists have worked to identify and measure key substances -- notably greenhouse gases and aerosol particles -- that affect Earth's climate. And they've been aided by ever more sophisticated computer models that make estimating the relative impact of each type of pollutant more reliable.
Yet the complexity of nature -- and the models used to quantify it -- continues to serve up surprises. The most recent? Certain gases that cause warming are so closely linked with the production of aerosols that the emissions of one type of pollutant can indirectly affect the quantity of the other. And for two key gases that cause warming, these so-called "gas-aerosol interactions" can amplify their impact.
"We've known for years that methane and carbon monoxide have a warming effect," said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York and lead author of a study published this week in Science. "But our new findings suggest these gases have a significantly more powerful warming impact than previously thought."
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