When things go awry, something must change.

Wow, what a holiday season this has been! I've run across so much distressing news I can hardly process it. I should give myself a break from this computer. But here's one I have to write about. Read these three statements, which I grabbed off a website pertaining to dairy farming in Wisconsin:

Amish dairy farmers at risk of losing their living and way of life as their buyers drop their milk.

Wisconsin loses 14 percent of Grade B dairy herds in last year.

USDA program overwhelms Quad City-area food banks with milk.

These statements suggest that we have an overabundance of dairy farms in the land, especially in Wisconsin. But as with all changes in the economic world, it's tough for people to acknowledge that they should change their way of life. It's understandable, one can sympathize, but if people are permitted to continue with programs that have to be heavily subsidized, we all bear the burdens of their choices. Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes not. In the case of dairy farming, there is the obvious financial burden of subsidizing activities that produce unwanted excess, But there's more to the story, as the following little tale illustrates: 

The body of water known as Green Bay, which juts out from Lake Michigan on its west side, is becoming overcome with algal growths that stem from excess nutrients in the water.  A story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel describes dead zones in the waters as a result of nutrient-laden runoff from dairy farms along the western shore of the bay.

When I was a kid, we lived in Green Bay, Wisconsin. In the 1930s, my family often went to a beach on the bay, just on the edge of town. Later, when I had small kids of my own, we couldn't take them to that beach. It was closed because of pollution from the paper mills into the Fox River and thence into the bay. We went further north into Door County to find shoreline that was reasonably clean. Later the paper mills had to clean up their act, and the beach outside town could reopen. Now the more sinister pollution problem is agricultural runoff. I say "sinister" because the pollution from farmlands is spread over a large area, and it's likely to get worse as the Trump Administration rolls back environmental safeguards. The farming community seems to be totally in support of the rollbacks, in spite of their damaging effects on the environment.

There are solutions, but dairy farmers, on the whole, do not seem interested in changing their way of life, including practices with respect to the ways they use the land. We need fewer dairy cattle, which could come from the conversion of land to grow food crops using ecologically (and economically) sound regenerative agricultural practices. There is no mystery about how to do this. Regenerative agriculture is practiced very successfully in the Midwest in many situations. Watch Gabe Brown’s TEDx talk to learn more.  We can reduce greenhouse gases and thus mitigate global warming by reducing our reliance on animal-based food, and moving to ecologically sound methods of farming, such as regenerative agriculture and permaculture. We can also make a renewed commitment to the proper use of the world’s soils.  Change doesn't come easily when we're locked into traditional ways of doing things, but adapting to change is inherent in maintaining a viable social structure. 

This topic strikes close to home for me. My grandparents on both sides were farmers.  My maternal grandparents, Michael and Mary Kedinger, emigrated to the United States from Germany. They farmed for some years on 60 acres they owned in Kewaunee County, then owned a farm near Algoma not far from Green Bay.  My mother was born there.  I assume they sold that farm, but in any event, the records show them owning a farm near Cimarron, Oklahoma before returning to Wisconsin. They then bought a farm in Oconto County, which borders on Green Bay.  Eventually, Michael and Mary left farming and moved to Green Bay.  My paternal grandparents, Sam and Estelle Brown, along with my great-grandfather, also farmed.  They owned land west of Green Bay, near Mill Center. 

I don't know the details of my ancestors'  struggles to make a living,  Both couples had large families, nine children that grew to adulthood.  Eventually, they left farming, and none of their children stayed on the farms.  As a child growing up in my maternal grandparent's house in Green Bay during the depression years, I was aware of our somewhat straightened economic circumstances.  Coping with change must have been difficult then, as it is today. But they found the strength to meet it head-on. I suspect that in the process they learned something I found in a quote from  Stephen King: "The scariest moment is just when you start".

When will climate change start to matter?

Let me ask you something: Can you name an experience you’ve had, something that affected you or your family in the past year or so, that you would attribute to global warming? Maybe you recall that you couldn’t fly somewhere because of torrential rains, or that last summer was especially hot, or maybe you have a vacation home in Florida that was damaged by a hurricane. But you can’t be sure that those events were related to global warming. Such things have been going on for a long time. Chances are that if you’re concerned about global warming, it’s not a result of personal experience with it, but rather because you’ve read reports written by scientists that point to the existence of greenhouse gases and the manner in which they contribute to warming of the Earth’s surface. If you accept their reports, and the conclusions they draw from their data, that the Earth is warming as a result of human activity, you could be concerned—even a climate change activist. Or not, depending on your political and social history and present situation.

Paul Hawken

Ten years ago Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger authored an article in YaleEnvironment360, entitled Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing the Public on Climate Change. They attempted to explain survey results pointing to a significant decline in the public’s belief that global warming is occurring, or that human activities contribute to climate change. For the most part their proffered explanations for the tepid responses to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth revolve around notions of political psychology: “many people have a psychological need to maintain a positive view of the existing social order, whatever it may be. This need manifests itself, not surprisingly, in the strong tendency to perceive existing social relations as fair, legitimate, and desirable, even in contexts in which those relations substantively disadvantage the person involved.” In other words, unless the driving forces are staring us in the face, we’re inclined to stick with the status quo, if departing from it requires sacrifices and uncomfortable changes that we’re forced to acknowledge.

As we greet the New Year we might ask whether things are different from a decade ago. The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have definitely grown more urgent. The special report recently published is decidedly sharper in tone than those preceding it. It carries a sense of urgency and specificity that reflects the most recent results from the field: we will be experiencing the effects of global warming much earlier than previously assumed. If we don’t take substantial actions soon, things will get very bad a few decades down the line. And people still yawn and say, “more doom and gloom!”. That’s too bad, because the scientists are right.

Those involved in the effort to arouse the public to a heightened awareness of climate change find themselves struggling with how to do it. What will it take to get things moving toward mitigation? The tenor of many articles that deal with this question is surprisingly similar to Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s. For example, Laurence Tubiana, a former French ambassador to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and CEO of the European Climate Foundation, echoes their sentiments in an article in Project Syndicate. However, she goes on to emphasize the vital role that expectations play in human behavior. She writes of a convergence of expectations as an enforcement mechanism in changing human behavior. As an example, enormous progress is being made in implementing solar energy. In the state of Florida, where I live, Florida Power and Light is in the midst of one of the largest solar expansions ever in the southeastern U.S., with more than 3.5 million new solar panels added in the last two years alone and millions more on the way. Next year, solar will outpace coal and oil combined as a percentage of FPL’s energy mix. I doubt that most of the people in Florida would have predicted that shift, or that Google is close to supplying all its energy needs from renewable sources. That’s a pretty big deal; Google consumes more electricity in all its operations than San Francisco. To borrow a phrase from Tubiana, society is moving from a mindset of Impossible to Inevitable. Without question, large-scale implementations of existing technologies such as wind, solar, electric cars and vast improvements in energy storage capacity are moving from impossible to inevitable.

Social forces are very important. The idea of global warming is becoming a meme, an element of culture that spreads throughout society like something infectious. Nongovernmental agencies are peppering the developing world with devices and tools to confront climate change. People don’t always get it right, about what global warming will entail, but when they associate the occurrences of more powerful hurricanes, or forest fires in California, or flooding in Wilmington, North Carolina with global warming, they’ve moved a step closer to accepting the immediacy of climate change. That’s good, but it’s not good enough. If the developed world is to effectively counter the long-term consequences of global warming, we’ve got to stop thinking only in terms of what it might do to the resale value of a condo in Florida, or whether New York City will be a good place to live in twenty years. What happens in Bangladesh doesn’t stay there. We’ve got to think wide.

The present political climate across the globe does not look promising for fostering cooperation between nations. But we must have it if human society is to rescue the planet from global despoiling of its resources. If we’re fortunate, we’ll come to realize in time that justice and fairness, coupled with respect for nature, give us what we need. Which brings me to note that on January 7, one of my heroes, Paul Hawken, Executive Director of Project Drawdown, will receive a lifetime achievement award of the National Council for Science and the Environment, one more in a long list of recognitions for all that he’s accomplished. Let’s help celebrate by reading the book he's been instrumental in creating.

Theodore Roosevelt, we need you!

The Trump administration recently offered more than 150,000 acres of public lands for fossil-fuel extraction near some of Utah's most iconic landscapes, including Arches and Canyonlands national parks, and leased public lands for fracking near Bears Ears, Canyons of the Ancients and Hovenweep national monuments and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.  Environmentalists were not happy. Ashley Soltysiak, director of the Utah Sierra Club, said "Utah is our home and the reckless sale of our public lands with limited public engagement is simply unacceptable and short-sighted."

Fracking in these areas would worsen air pollution problems in the Uinta Basin and use tremendous amounts of groundwater. Utah just experienced its driest year in recorded history.  With its necessary networks of fracking wells, compressor stations, pipelines and roads, fracking is detrimental to the quality of public lands and wildlife habitat.  It involves injecting toxic wastewater into the ground, thus polluting rivers and groundwater.  And how about the fact that it may trigger earthquakes that damage infrastructure and property, and pollutes the air with dangerous toxins? The federal government's own report shows that oil and gas production on public land contributes significantly to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Why is the Trump administration, led in this case by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, hell-bent on ramping up fossil fuel extraction on public lands, threatening wildlife, public health, and the climate? This year the BLM has offered more than 420,000 acres of public land in Utah for oil and gas extraction. The agency plans to auction another 215,000 acres in March. The Trump administration also has issued new policies, which are being challenged in court, to shorten public-comment periods and avoid substantive environmental reviews.  And the leases are going for bargain basement prices. Recently, 134,000 acres were leased in Utah for as low as the federal minimum of $2 per acre.

This is pretty stupid behavior, even by the low standards set by the Trump administration.  Why sell off so much of America’s natural heritage in this way? It seems that Donald Trump is too self-centered to be able to entertain a notion of a national legacy of natural resources. Perhaps it’s just the work of calculating Ryan Zinke, building some credits for when he leaves his job at Interior at the end of the year.  But I think there’s more, and it’s to be found in the politics of the 2020 presidential election. Beginning in the early days of the 2016 campaign, Trump has been pushing the message that the United States will be first in energy, and completely independent of other nations.  Now that he’s President, he’s fixated on making fossil fuels the linchpin of a strategy to get us there. If he should be in a position to run for a second term, you can be sure that the theme of energy independence grounded in fossil fuels, regardless of what it costs in environmental terms, and in spite of the looming threats of climate change, will be a major element of his campaign. Meanwhile, we should do what we can to stop this absurd rush to sell off the nation’s national treasure on the cheap. Support the National Resources Defense Council, Earthworks, Earthjustice and other environmental advocacy non-profits.

Maybe we can take a bit of heart from this quote from a Forbes Magazine panel discussion of energy policy under the Trump administration: “[I]t was agreed that the energy industry cannot “stand behind” the new administration, waiting on industry-favorable actions at the federal level; our industry must strengthen its capabilities to engage respectfully with local, state and federal agencies, local landowners, communities and other stakeholders.” We can’t get too excited by those sentiments, to judge by past behaviors, but there’s a ray of hope there.

Be sure to look for the documentary, “Paris to Pittsburgh”, available on TV from National Geographic. Kudos to Michael Bloomberg for sponsoring this lovely, encouraging note.

To finish this on yet another positive note (among which I count Zinke’s imminent departure), the new 2018 Farm Bill contains several provisions that directly or indirectly affect global warming. The effects on global warming are not huge, but they’re steps in the right direction, and every bit counts.  The bill maintains the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) without new punitive work requirements.

It expands funding for the Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentives program, which helps low-income shoppers purchase more fresh fruits and vegetables from local farmers. It also increases research and support for organic farmers, new farmers, and farmers of color, and includes a new Local Agriculture Market Program, which will strengthen regional economies and better connect farmers with consumers.

On farmland conservation, the bill maintains overall funding for programs that help farmers safeguard their soil and protect air and water quality. This provision is very much in line with the aims of the Drawdown initiative I’ve mentioned previously.  So, we keep on keeping on.

  

Science you can believe in

As a progressive voter, I joined with many others in celebrating the terrific gains the Democratic party made in the US House elections.  At last, there seems to be hope of cracking through the brittle political stalemate of the past several years.  But I’m not really a party animal.  I want to see progressive actions on many fronts, but there is one above all that demands our attention and action:  We must act forcefully to put the brakes on climate change. Does that seem like more of the usual squawking of a climate-change chicken? It may seem so, but I am a scientist, not a chicken.  Like all good scientists, I am committed to the notion that by working at it, we can come to know empirical truths.  Not some Platonic notion of absolute truth, but a hard-won understanding grounded in experiment, observation, modeling—all that goes into testing and confirming hypotheses so thoroughly that we can bet our very lives on what we believe. 

Consider the recent successful landing of Curiosity Rover on the planet Mars. What can we say about the kind of empirical truth that makes it possible to send Curiosity Rover to the planet Mars and receive gorgeous videos of its surroundings?  To successfully bring off that amazing venture, the number of things that must be known, and the relationships between them is enormous.  Because all that myriad of empirical truths exists, the whole—the marvelous achievement of launching an object from planet Earth to land successfully on a precisely chosen area of Mars, 96 million miles distant—is successful, a triumph of human intelligence.

On October 8, 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a special report on limiting global warming to 1.5^o. In the panel’s judgment, limiting global warming to 1.5^o, as opposed to the presently set goal of 2.0^o, would lessen some of the environmental impacts. The panel said, “With clear benefits to people and natural ecosystems, limiting global warming to 1.5^o compared to 2.0^o could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society”. So much that is important for many of the planet’s people is bound up in those words, but how many who read them will feel their importance?  What it comes down to is that the vast majority of us who are not scientists must place our faith in what climate scientists tell us. Thousands of experts on climate-related matters from nations all over the world have contributed in ways large and small to the exceptional understanding we now have of Earth’s climate system.  They’re warning us of what lies ahead because they believe collectively in the soundness of the overall assessments produced by the IPCC’s work.  In this respect, they are like the thousands of scientists that made their individual contributions to the success of the Curiosity Rover mission. 

The fate of the planet does not hinge on whether we choose to accept the soundness of the science that has gone into making the Curiosity Rover program the marvelous success it is.  By contrast, it is simply a fact that if we don’t accept and act soon upon the advice of the IPCC, the planet will change in ways that will cause misery and eventual loss of human life on a scale never before seen.  That sounds overly dramatic, but humanity is facing a rising climate change the likes of which has not occurred on Earth during the epoch in which human beings have evolved and come to “rule” the planet.  We must keep this vital point in mind: It is true that the planet’s climate has changed immensely in past epochs, much more dramatically than we can expect that it will over the next few hundred years.  But those changes came about when there were no human beings on the planet! We have to concentrate on the changes we can see coming in the very short run of decades, not thousands of years.  

We are the causative agents of the changes that are upon us.  Detailed analysis of ice cores drawn from the Greenland and Antarctic ice show that the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere right now is far greater than it has been at any time during the past 800,000 years.  Only our most vigorous and quick actions can forestall the worst effects of this, and we’ve got to halt further additions. We’ve come to take for granted the prowess of science in almost every aspect of our lives.  Now we’re being told something we don’t especially want to hear.  The fate of society depends on whether we pay attention and act.

One last thing: Some of you may have caught videos of the Town Hall Meeting that Bernie Sanders recently organized in Washington D.C..  You can find some of the materials on YouTube, but an interview of Senator Sanders by Naomi Klein is a good introduction. There will be more of these Town Hall meetings to come.  I urge you to look for them.

We have not “world enough and time."

In his poem, “To His Coy Mistress” the 17^th Century English poet and politician Andrew Marvell has a young man warning his mistress of the shortness of life:  But at my back I always hear/ Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. Recently, the mandated annual report of governmental agencies on climate change was released—it was not good news. It reiterated what scientists have been saying for quite a long time now:  we don’t have a lot of time in which to make changes that will slow the rate of increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and—as rapidly as possible—bring the level down to pre-industrial levels. 

If Marvell were alive today and a progressive member of the US house or senate, he might well be pressing upon his colleagues the shortness of time with respect to climate change.  The increasing extent of public awareness of climate change is encouraging, but it has not progressed to an understanding of what can be done about it, or a political consensus on steps that must be taken.  Trump, finally caught in a corner with this latest report, whined that all the other industrial nations of the world were not taking steps, so why should we?  We can’t solve the problem on our own, he says. The fact that he pulled the US out of the Paris Accords, coupled with his feeble ability to recognize and remember things he’d rather ignore, accounts in part for his ignorance of facts such as that nations all over the world,  including European nations and China, have been moving rapidly to deploy renewable energy sources, reform transportation, and so on. But the world, and the US especially, is not moving fast enough.

In prior blog posts, I’ve called attention to Project Drawdown, a comprehensive plan to reverse global warming by taking many steps, each of which can contribute to a slowing or reversal of the levels of greenhouse gases. The book, Drawdown, available from Amazon, Target or any other online bookseller, is beautiful and inexpensive; I hope you’ll buy a copy.  The surprising conclusion one reaches from perusing the book is that many of the most important moves the world can make are not really high tech—education of girls in places where there is poverty; reforming our food production and distribution networks to avoid waste; move toward plant-based diets; restore depleted lands by growing perennials that return carbon dioxide to deep root systems—there are many inventive and feasible ideas to be considered.  But all the measures we might imagine employing relate in one way or another to energy.  The generation and uses of energy form an interlocking and often interdependent system. Technologies and new science will be necessary components of a successful response to the threats of climate change. 

For example, there is so much going on in solar energy as a renewable source of energy!  The advances being made exceed anyone’s expectations of only a couple of years ago. For example, First Solar, an American company, has come up with a novel method for depositing cadmium telluride thin films that has led to an entirely new generation of large, highly efficient panels such as the one shown, that produce electricity at a cost of about 20 cents per watt.  Only two years ago that was 60 cents per watt.  When Congress cut down on the support of startup industries related to energy a few years ago, the solar industry nearly disappeared in the US. We never seem to learn patience to go with level-headed planning and the search for bright new people and ideas.  In any case, there is every reason to expect that advances in solar energy generation will produce ever cheaper electricity.  But there are no panaceas to be had in these technological finds. Cadmium telluride is costly stuff, and cadmium is toxic.  We need to find materials that are great solar grabbers, cheap and readily disposed of when necessary.

Another large challenge is storage of electricity for the time between the moment it is captured and when it is used, probably in some remote location and at a different time of day.  An Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on the Status and Challenges in Decarbonizing our Energy Landscape was recently held at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, CA.  This was a highly technical program, focused heavily on conversion and storage of solar energy.  There are promising developments in battery technology, but the way is long.  To illustrate where research is headed, here are the titles of two of the talks: Organic-Based Aqueous Flow Batteries for Massive Electrical Energy Storage.  Pathways for Carbon Dioxide Transformations Using Sunlight.

One sees opinion pieces here and there proclaiming that the giant technology corporations, with their commitments to fully carbon-neutral operations, could lead the way to massive drawdowns in carbon emissions for world society.  But as pointed out in a World Economic Forum paper, it’s not that simple.  In the large cities of the world, two-thirds of the carbon emissions arise from consumer choices and their supply chains.  And although we might argue for the moral imperative for humans to change their dietary proclivities, it seems unlikely that residents of countries with rapidly growing economies will want to forego a diet rich in meat; just the wrong sentiment if we want to reduce carbon emissions traceable to food production.  Here too, however, there is reason for optimism that the rapidly developing technology of cell-based meat production will have a massive effect before too long.

But this much is true: whatever pathways are followed to wean society away from heavy use of greenhouse gases, we must get onto them soon and follow them with vigor. Like Marvell’s young man, we can, if we just listen, hear Time’s chariot drawing near. Is your US Representative and Senator listening?

Can Food Tech help save the Planet?

The best-selling book, Drawdown, lists a total of 80 solutions to the threat of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.  If these solutions were implemented in a timely way it would be possible to reverse the increases in greenhouse gases that have occurred during the past century or so. Drawdown is a wonderful book. I urge you to buy a copy and ponder which of the 80 solutions you might play a role in implementing.  Interestingly, switching to a plant-rich diet ranks number 4 in importance among those solutions.  It’s my favorite solution, not just because it would play a major role in abating the increase in greenhouse gases.  A plant-based diet would improve human health and would be among the most readily adaptive to nations at all stages of development.

I recently became aware of a new technology that could replace our ecologically wasteful practices in the production of animal-based food, one that raises new possibilities and new questions:  growing animal cells in cultures.  In the final day of a recent USDA-FDA public gathering on cell-cultured food technology it came down to essentially one question: If it looks like meat and tastes like meat...can you call it meat?

Representatives of food technology companies that start with cells from animals and grow them into meat products like burgers, nuggets, fish or sausages, say the products are, effectively, meat and should be labeled accordingly. Brian Spears, CEO of New Age Meats, said he served cell-based pork samples to his friends and reporters and they didn't notice a difference from traditional products. "It was perfectly mistakable for meat because it is meat," he said. "When we go to market and label this, it would be simply dishonest to label it as anything other than meat."

You can guess who doesn’t like that idea. Traditional meat producers seem to think that they have a lock on words like “beef”, “pork” and even the word “meat”. We’re talking here about something quite different from products made to look, feel and taste as much as possible like meat; for example, the Impossible Burger, made from plants and consisting of simple ingredients, including wheat protein, coconut oil, and potato protein. Many other vegetarian substitutes for animal-based foods are formed largely from soy or mung beans.  By contrast, the new cell-based products are formed from cells taken from animals and then colonized in some manner to multiply.   

This is all new to me.  I’m in the dark about the cellular compositions of the new –ahem—meat products.  I have no idea about how the new materials will be prepared and presented to consumers in grocery stores, about their susceptibility to spoilage, contamination and all the rest.   But when I reflect on the expenditures of energy, water and other resources required to make a typical animal-based food product such as an egg or chicken nugget, I so want this new technology to succeed!

Consider what it takes to produce a typical quarter-pound burger:

·         About 460 gallons of fresh water

·         About 13 to 15 pounds of feed, mainly corn and grain

·         About 65 square feet of land

·         A total of about 4 pounds of greenhouse gases, including methane

Add to that the environmental damages occasioned by animal wastes.  All this for one measly quarter-pound piece of meat!  As the per capita incomes in nations such as China climb, the citizens of these countries are avid to adopt American ways of life with respect to diet and many other niceties.  If all of the earth’s humans were to enjoy an average American’s standard of living, the Earth could sustainably support only about 1.2 billion people. The agricultural enterprise that undergirds animal-based food industries produces enormous amounts of animal wastes that eventually pollute rivers, streams and ground waters. The big hurricanes that swept over the US during the 2018 season showed us once again how fragile our ecological framework actually is. An estimated 5500 pigs and 3.4 million chickens were killed in flooding following hurricane Florence. North Carolina, the second-largest pork producing state in the U.S., has more than 4000 open-air ponds filled with a mix of water and hog manure and urine—plus the remains of animal carcasses, blood, and chemicals from pesticides.  Several of these hog ponds have leaked into surrounding areas during flooding, exposing communities to E.coli, salmonella, and antibiotic-resistant MRSA. People forced to live in the vicinities of these facilities suffer a diminished quality of life and continuing threats to their health. It’s not all that hard to become a vegetarian.  If you’ve never given it a try, why not start by setting aside one day of the week as a purely vegetarian food day? There are literally thousands of websites that offer great recipes: Forks over Knives, Dr. McDougall's recipes, just to cite a couple. With a bit of practice, you can even eat vegetarian or vegan in most restaurants - just ask. You too can help save the planet, while you live a longer and healthier life.

The latest IPCC Assessment meets Republican Luddites

Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new assessment of the speed and scope of human-caused temperature rise.  It is indeed a sobering report, a responsible and soundly based set of recommendations as to the steps that must be taken if the limits to warming spelled out in the Paris Accords are to be met, and warnings of what is to come if they are not.  Predictably, some find it a scare tactic, lacking in sober analysis of the realities.   The report is controversial in terms of its assessments of some potential directions for mitigation.  Peter Shellenberger writes in Forbes that it is unreasonably critical of the potential of nuclear power to partially address the need for energy from non-greenhouse gas emitting sources.  From what I can see of the matter, I agree with him.  It’s important to look toward new nuclear technologies that bypass most of the issues the reports frets about, including safety.  This is an area that deserves more, not less investment.  But the report as a whole is compelling and frightening to those with the imagination to look beyond the immediate present. 

The Guardian has an extensive coverage of reactions to the report. The most disheartening aspect of reactions to the IPCC report is the reaction of Republican party politicians.  Since the Republicans voted in 2011 to no longer accept the recommendations of the IPCC, the party line has been to unreservedly reject IPCC recommendations.  In the wake of this latest assessment, one after another Republican politician has eagerly reached for a microphone to mock it.  What is so sad about this display is that this very real threat to human society should not be a matter of local US politics.  The IPCC is an agency of the UN, a global alliance of nations. To turn everything that comes from UN into a political football is irresponsible.  When the fruits of their short-sighted blockage come home to haunt this nation, these tinhorn so-called representatives of the people will have faded from view, leaving it to their progeny to try to figure out how to make their way in vastly changed world.   Ignorance is bliss, they say, but not forever.

What Happens in the Arctic leaves the Arctic!

.

It seems that there’s been a lot of research news of late about the arctic climate.  It’s something to think about because we’re mostly not in a good position to make the connection between what’s happening in those frigid, icy domains and the climate we experience on a daily basis.  Here are a few things I’ve run across lately:

It's getting warmer up in the Arctic.  Look at this graph, above.

It shows the average temperature measured at about 6 ft from the surface at a large number of arctic sites.  The dotted line is the averages of those numbers over the period 1981-2010.  This graph tells us that the temperature has been steadily rising, as measured by several different groups and organizations.  The temperature has gone up about a degree Centigrade, or about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since 1900. This does not seem like all that much.  Notice however that the rate of warming has been accelerating alarmingly.  In just the most recent two decades, it’s jumped up about two degrees Centigrade, about 3.5 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit.  The message here is that a future warmer Arctic climate is arriving on an ever faster schedule.

   
      A new article in Scientific American covers some of the consequences of what’s happening in the Arctic.  “A new study finds that rapid warming in the Arctic—where temperatures are currently rising faster than anywhere else on Earth (the italics are mine)—may be altering certain summertime atmospheric circulation patterns in ways that affect the weather in North America, Europe, and other mid-latitude regions.” Because this warming is relatively new and coming on strong, all the answers as to what will happen to mid-latitude weather as a result of the warming are not yet in evidence. But some things we’ve already seen, and models furnish predictions of what may come. One strong effect is showing up: more persistent hot-dry extremes in the mid-latitudes. 
S
      Some of the observed winter effects are counter-intuitive. A warmer, more ice-free Arctic can produce anomalously cold conditions further south, especially over Eurasia. There is a lot more to learn about the global climate effects, but we can be sure that the trends will accelerate in the years ahead.  Just because climatologists have an incomplete understanding of how Arctic warming affects weather in the mid-latitudes, we can’t take the view that nothing much is likely to happen.  Our recent summer and winter experiences are a mere warning of what is coming as the Arctic ice shrinks and then disappears, and Atlantic Ocean currents push warmer water into the Arctic.

3     
     Then there’s the problem of the permafrost.   I recently learned from an article in National Geographic that nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere’s landmass sits atop permafrost. The figure that shows a view of Earth looking down on the North Pole shows  us where it is.  The darkest shade is permanent permafrost, and the lighter shades depict areas in which the permafrost may thaw to some degree seasonally.  As you can see, there’s a lot of permafrost. The deepest parts have been there more than half a million years.

It’s estimated that twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere is stored in the permafrost.  But it's beginning to melt.  As it does, microbes will begin to digest the stored vegetative matter, releasing carbon dioxide and methane.  Just about everyone is now aware that methane is about 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, though it has a shorter lifetime in the atmosphere. These processes will add substantially to the increasing levels of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels and the many other sources we talk about.

To add to the problems associated with melting of the permafrost, measurements show that permafrost regions contain relatively large amounts of mercury, Hg.  As melting occurs over the next century, that trapped Hg could be released.  Not a good thing!!

The world’s oceans are warming. Even without El Niño, oceans surged to record-high temperatures last year as they absorbed the bulk of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, deforestation and farming. The increased evaporation at the surface that results is “fuel for hurricanes and other storms,” said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.  Hurricane Lane is giving Hawaii a near miss as I write this. Catastrophic flooding has hit the big island and much more seems in store. Trenberth compared the storm in Hawaii to the floods in Kerala, India, that left at least 324 dead and 220,000 homeless a month or so ago. “The ocean heat content globally was at record high levels last calendar year and now it is higher still and the highest on record,” Trenberth said. “The hurricanes that do occur can become more intense.”

Unprecedented wildfires continued to scorch western states, choking cities like Seattle with smoke, a  year after back-to-back storms wreaked havoc on Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, and a wave of historic wildfires helped cause a record $306 billion in damages.  No wonder then that  James Temple dubbed 2017 in his article in the MIT Technology Review  “The Year Climate Change Began to Spin Out of Control.”

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a proposal to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan with a rule that, by the agency’s own calculation, could cause 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030 due to increased emissions. Optimists think that much of this eventuality is not likely to come to pass; coal is coming to the end of its run, despite Trump and his coal-friendly allies. “The world has shifted dramatically in the last few years to the point where we are going to get pretty close to the targets in the Clean Power Plan even without it,” said Jason Bordoff, director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.  Anyway, just to make their point again, the White House has also put forward a proposal to gut fuel economy standards. It would allow vehicles to spew an additional 600 million metric tons of carbon dioxide ― equivalent to the annual emissions of Canada ― by 2030.  I expect that there will be pushback against this absurd ruling on a state-by-state basis.  The intransigence of climate change deniers is a thing to behold. United States Senator James F. Inhofe (R, Ok) is living demonstration that it is possible to be incorrigibly wrong-headed. Here he is: “I maintain that the best course of action remains to completely overturn the endangerment finding so that there is neither statutory nor legal need for any greenhouse gas regulations. I will continue to work with President Trump and Acting Administrator Wheeler toward this goal.”

We get caught up in the daily dueling and take cheer in whatever steps are made toward mitigating the emissions of greenhouse gases, but the fact is that a lot of damage already done will make itself felt far into the future.  Even if we could stop immediately the emissions of all greenhouse gases, we’d still have something like the present 410 ppm of CO₂ to contend with, an ocean that has warmed significantly, and glacial melting at a harrowing rate. And of course, we’re not stopping, or even abating the rate of additions of greenhouse gases.

I’m writing this from our summer home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The headwaters of the Tahquamenon river lie about 35 miles to the east.  Think of human society as a person in a canoe, moving with the beautiful dark waters of the river, which flows eastward through vast tracts of cedar.  There is a future somewhere downstream, but there’s no reason to be concerned about it. Just lately, though, there’s been this slowly building sound of water rushing. How curious!  What could it be?  The Tahquamenon falls, the third largest falls east of the Mississippi River, has a drop of about 50 feet, and is 200 feet across.  It will be tough to negotiate the falls in a canoe. Subscribe to This New World

Bye-bye, Three mile Island

Bloomberg Businessweek recently reported on the decision of the energy company Exelon to close the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in September, 2019.  The company gave as its reason the inability of the nuclear plant, located in Pennsylvania, to produce electricity at a cost that's competitive with cheap natural gas, a product of the shale boom, which ironically is a big deal in that very state.  I would not presume to argue with the short-term economic argument offered by the company, but in terms of the social welfare of society, this looks like a bad decision.

Let’s put to one side some of the timeworn arguments in opposition to nuclear power plants as a source of electricity.  Three Mile Island is famous, or infamous if you like, for having the only meltdown occurrence in a US nuclear plant.  The incident occurred in 1979, and produced a meltdown of the nuclear fuel in one of the reactors.  The accident garnered national media attention, and the anti-nuclear energy forces went on the offensive.  When all the dust had settled, and after seemingly endless investigative studies, “comprehensive investigations and assessments by several well respected organizations, such as Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, have concluded that in spite of serious damage to the reactor, the actual release had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.”   “The approximately 2 million people around TMI-2 during the accident are estimated to have received an average radiation dose of only about 1 millirem above the usual background dose. To put this into context, exposure from a chest X-ray is about 6 millirem and the area's natural radioactive background dose is about 100-125 millirem per year for the area. The accident's maximum dose to a person at the site boundary would have been less than 100 millirem above background.”  All the studies mean that the only thing that got hurt as a result of the meltdown was the operating company’s wallet.   

Since its return to operation without the damaged reactor, the facility has operated safely, is well-maintained and not at the end of its operating lifetime.  Three Mile Island is a major factor in the economy of the region.  Last year it sent $1.5 million in taxes and other payments to the local township, county and school district.  It employs 675 workers, many of whom are skilled engineers and mechanics, some of whom have trained with the U.S. Navy or in universities. Shutdown of the facility will be a big blow to the local economy.  But the deeper reason why it should not be closed has to do with climate change, and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Replacing the nuclear reactor with a fossil fuel-burning substitute means that more carbon dioxide will be emitted, whereas we should be focused on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.  In addition, while natural gas power plants are relatively free from the many harmful emissions that characterize coal-fired plants, such as particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide, there is no guarantee that a company that bases its choices of energy source for electricity solely on current costs of production won’t be tempted to switch to coal at some point down the line, especially given the push for coal on the part of Trump’s agency heads (see my previous blog).  Furthermore, the production of natural gas from shale deposits is rife with stories of damaged ecosystems, especially fresh water sources, and pollution around wellhead operations.  

It’s been argued that nuclear energy now plays a less important role in our energy mix as wind and solar power continue to grow in importance. But this argument misses an important factor: the variable capacity of wind and solar to deliver power at a given time and place.  We need sources such as hydropower with pumped storage and nuclear, which are continuously available to balance power demand loads. Neither is without weaknesses that must be carefully considered, but until some radically new way of utilizing the sun’s energy or perhaps capturing the energy in ocean currents comes to fruition, we need these sources.  Most of all, we sorely need a political and economic system free to think and act long-term, not at the mercy of the stock market or political demagoguery, to guide our way to a drawdown of greenhouse gases.   How do we get there?

Our anti-environment administration; renewing hydropower with pumped storage

The figure at left summarizes the various sources of greenhouse gases for the US.  Notice that electricity is a substantial contributor.  The reason, of course, is that about 63 percent of electricity generation is produced from plants employing fossil fuels, which upon combustion, convert to carbon dioxide.  Most of us have every reason to wish this dependence on carbon were much smaller.  Solar and wind power have come increasingly into the mix, and we can expect those contributions to increase rapidly in the years ahead.  But so much potential progress is being blocked by appointees in the Trump administration. Rick Perry’s time as the head of the Department of Energy is severely hamstringing the country’s economic development and energy security.  The detestable Scott Pruitt has finally been kicked out at EPA, but Trump has replaced him with Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist who worked for Murray Energy, the nation's largest coal producer.  Its CEO, Robert  E. Murray,  has been  an avid backer of Donald Trump.   Then there’s the appointment of  Daniel Simmons, a conservative scholar and renewable energy critic to be the head of the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).  EERE’s mission is to create and sustain American leadership in the transition to a global clean energy economy.  It’s difficult to imagine a less appropriate person to pursue this important mission. Simmons recently served as vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research, a notoriously conservative think tank, supported primarily by fossil fuel money.  It advocates greater fossil fuel use and opposes the international climate agreement signed in Paris. If Simmons’s views on renewable energy, and his mindless favoring of fossil fuel over renewable energy enterprises in the US budget and environmental policies, find their way into practice, it would be a shameful betrayal of the public trust.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote in this blog about hydropower. In retrospect, I think I may have been more skeptical of its promise than I need have been.  Since that blog appeared, the New York Times published a beautiful interactive article on a $3 billion plan to combine the virtues of renewable but variable solar energy with the stored energy capacity of hydroelectric power. This is long-range, and years from completion, but the story is instructive and a pleasure to read and watch. In brief, the idea is that during the daylight hours a pumping station downstream from Hoover Dam would pump water that has already run through the hydroelectric station back upstream to Lake Mead.  The pumping station would be powered by a gigantic solar farm. The solar energy would in effect be stored by raising the water back up to the lake level so that it can be utilized again for electric power generation. While the solar farm is inactive, during nighttime, the energy it collected from the sun would be recovered in the dam.

This is not a new idea.  Pumped storage, as it is called, is already practiced at about 40 locations.  But this would be larger than any currently in operation.  It needs to be said that pumped storage is not going to be a huge factor in the nation’s energy budget, but, every bit helps. That philosophy is inherent in Project Drawdown, an imaginative approach to mitigating the increase in greenhouse gas levels via many different actions, some potentially very large, such as reforestation, regenerative agriculture, reduced reliance on animal protein and education of women and girls in developing nations.  

I must say that writing about pumped storage and Project Drawdown makes me feel refreshed after having to write about the visionless, narrow-minded and ultimately selfish machinations of our current executive leadership in Washington.  I only hope they don’t succeed in doing irreparable damage before the American people wake up.

         I urge you to have a look at the Drawdown site.  Watch Paul Hawken's interviews--he's inspiring.

A world too hot to handle

Some people choose not to believe that global warming exists, that in fact such a thing cannot be said to exist.  On an exceptionally cool day in the middle of summer they may say, “Feel this great air, the cool breeze. Last year on this date it was hot, a real corker. What’s all this talk about global warming?”  One could agree that a single day’s—or even an entire season’s—weather cannot address the question of what is happening at a global level.  Weather is local; by itself it’s but a piece of much larger and more complex phenomena.  The local weather by itself can’t help us decide whether or not the planet is warming.  For that we need a lot of measurements, point-by-point, over the globe, and over time.  And we need realistic models of how the atmosphere is affected by a host of different factors, including large scale movements of air masses, the interactions of the atmosphere with the oceans and other large bodies of water, Earth’s rotation—the list goes on.  The ability of the weather experts on the Weather Channel to predict with some assurance the general features of the weather in any major city on the planet several days into the future derives directly from these models.  They run on powerful computers such as those at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), located in Camp Springs, Md. that are constantly being updated with new observational data collected from land, sea and air.  The fact that the weather can be predicted reliably for several days in advance, is… well, you should be amazed, considering the incredible complexity of  the problem.  

In a similar way, climatologists build models for the global climate, to forecast what’s in store over longer periods of time for the planet as a whole.  Scientists have been collecting data and other observations for many years, and have developed ever more realistic mathematical models of the climate. They incorporate land and water features of the planet, solar radiation, lunar effects, the transport of energy from tropical zones to toward the pole, oceanic currents, the exchanges of gases between sea and atmosphere, the effects of Earth’s rotation, events such as volcanic eruptions when they occur—the list goes on and on.  These calculations are carried out on multimillion dollar supercomputers, testing this or that factor—for example, the size of the Arctic ice cap throughout the year—to learn just what does make a difference in climate, and where. There is no presupposition as to what the calculations will reveal, When the results are in, everything is analyzed and checked for possible errors. 

I find it bewildering beyond measure that people in power, in government and the private sector, who should be rational, intelligent, with the best interests of society at heart, can dismiss all the hard-won science as unimportant, or even conniving on the part of some people with murky motives. Meanwhile, the weather at many places on the globe is whispering to us, not so subtly. Here are a few summer heat stories from around the world:

·       Greece has just experienced a terrible forest fire, its worst in more than a decade.

·       Over 70 people have been killed by the heatwave in Canada's Quebec providence, as temperatures rose up to 95 degrees. There's not a lot of air conditioning in Quebec.

·       The longest heat wave in Britain since1976, along with drought, has turned the landscape to brown from its customary green.

·       In Japan, an unprecedented heat wave has been judged responsible for 65 deaths, and more than 22,000 were hospitalized due to the extreme weather.

 

The World Weather Attribution Project  has just released a damning report arguing that the sizzling heat and wildfires burning the planet are largely anthropogenic in origin—human caused.  It's tiresome, having to repeat these facts and findings, knowing that most people aren't paying attention, don't really care, or lack the background to read such materials and incorporate them into their own worldview and daily life practices. But let's keep keeping on, in whatever ways we can. 

 

Our extended family is gathered this week up in Michigan's upper peninsula. Twenty three of us, spanning four generations. Two of our great grandchildren, twins, are celebrating their sixth birthdays today.  A beautiful day in the UP. May it ever be so, but I just don't know.

·       Wildfires have been raging through the Swedish forests above the Arctic Circle, where temperatures have risen to 86 degrees Fahrenheit.

·       Portland recently broke three consecutive daily record temperatures. Thursday's 99 degrees was the hottest August 18 in their recorded history. Friday's 100 followed suit. Saturday also broke 100 degrees, rounding out the streak.

Ah, it’s just the weather.  Comes and goes. Meanwhile the concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrochlorofluorocarbons continue to rise, putting a bit more heat in the bank, as it were, for still faster melting of glacial ice, more violent weather events, shifting climate that brings drought and extreme heat to places that are becoming less and less friendly to human habitation.