More on secular shifts and episodic events

In my most recent blog, I made an effort to distinguish between two categories of things which should form the basis of our discussions regarding climate change. These are:

• Episodic Events
• Secular Shifts

Episodic events are of short duration-they come and go:  tornadoes, extreme heatwaves, hurricanes of exceptional power, floods.  They grab our attention right now.

Secular shifts, on the other hand, are of long duration, consistently moving in a single direction: sea-level rise, the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, global population increase.

The major message of my blog was that, although we become preoccupied with episodic events and fret over them, it is the secular shifts that threaten disaster for humanity.

It follows from this that when we look at the daily stream of articles and opinions regarding climate change and the environment, we should try to ascertain the extent to which the topic of the discussion is important for one or more secular shifts.  Here are a few examples drawn from the recent flow of environmental and climate news.

• The White House recently announced that it is considering the relaxation or elimination of existing EPA regulations regarding methane emissions from natural gas facilities. Why is this important?  Methane is often found as a chief component of natural gas; it’s a fossil fuel in its own right. When it is consumed as a fuel, carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, is produced.  But when methane sneaks out of oil wells, escapes from pipelines or is vented as a nuisance, and becomes a component of the atmosphere,  it’s a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane emissions have increased markedly in recent decades; methane is now responsible for about a quarter of the planet’s warming. Relaxation of the regulations on methane emissions could result in substantial increases in the rate at which the planet warms, the single most important secular shift we face. 

• We humans are able to live day-to-day, individually or as communities, only within a rather narrow range of temperature.  This fact becomes more salient as the planet warms and weather patterns shift. A large percentage of the earth’s people live in tropical or temperate climate zones.  India has a population in excess of 1.3 billion and contains nearly a fifth of the world’s population.   It has seen six major droughts and drought-like situations in 10 of the last 17 years, devastating India’s farm economy.  The driving force for this unfortunate shift has been lower south-west monsoon rainfall.  Latest studies by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) show that average rainfall during the monsoon period is falling as the Indian Ocean gets warmer. For example, Chennai, a southeast Indian city of 10 million, receives most of its rainfall during the annual two-month autumn monsoon season. In recent decades, however, droughts have become more intense.  At the same time, temperatures have risen substantially during the hot months of the year. Air conditioning is a luxury; most people just have to sweat it out during the hottest periods. Water is so scarce in working-class neighborhoods of the city that the government has been forced to spend huge amounts of money to desalinate seawater, bring the water by train from hundreds of miles away, and distribute it from an army of water trucks into neighborhoods where household taps have been dry for months.  This is a city of 10 million people!  At the same time, the Indian government has documented hundreds of deaths due to extreme heat.

To add insult to injury,  despite the lower total rainfall there have been episodes of extreme downpour.

We in the US make up about 5% of the world’s population. Understandably, we tend to form judgments about global conditions from what we experience in our own country.  But what happens in India is more representative of the challenges facing most of humanity.  The more extreme climatic conditions seen in semi-tropical regions are in many cases portents of what is to come in our country.  All these episodic weather events are the products of secular changes in the planet’s climate, driven by increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases. 

• What about the heat in the U. S.?  The Union of Concerned Scientists recently issued a report on the increasing number of extreme heat events all over the world, and particularly in the United States. Their projections, based on analysis of data covering decades and modeling of expected future weather patterns, shows that the U.S.faces a potentially staggering expansion of dangerous heat over the coming decades.  Dallas, TX , for example, has experienced 31 above 1000 degree days during 1971-2000.  It’s projected to experience 93 such days during 2036-2065 and 124 days during 2066-2099. The trend line suggests that in 2020 Dallas can expect to have perhaps 40 or so days of extreme heat, with all that implies for heat-related illnesses and fatalities, to say nothing of the huge demands for energy to operate air conditioning machinery. The body’s ability to survive at a temperature of 1000 depends on humidity and the availability of water to maintain hydration, but for the elderly and people in poor health, that level of heat is life-threatening.  The air conditioning and refrigeration needed to counter the heat waves consumes exceptionally large quantities of energy.  Episodic extreme heat events worldwide can be expected to increase in number and intensity as the planet continues to warm,  producing a vicious cycle of added energy consumption, thus amplifying the secular shift of global warming.   

• 
  Tropical forests globally are being lost at a rate of more than 60,000 square miles per year.  A global initiative to restore large swaths of forest,  termed the Bonn Challenge, was launched in 2011.  Countries were to make commitments to restore large areas of the world’s deforested and degraded land by 2020. Since then the goal regarding the area to be restored has been increased to about 1.3 million square miles by 2030.  That’s a lot of land, about twice the area of Alaska. Ideally, reforestation is a great pathway to mitigating the continued increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Forests are capable of soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They can improve farmers’ lives in many parts of the world, improve drinking water quality, and provide increased habitat protection for wildlife.  So if the Bonn Challenge could be met, it would represent a significant effort to mitigate the secular change in greenhouse gas warming. 
  But as explained in a recent article in the journal Science, “many short term fixes fail to produce environmentally and socially beneficial long-term outcomes”. One of the most common missteps is to favor single-species tree plantations over restoring native forest ecosystems. This obviously has negative consequences for biodiversity and carbon storage, and typically works to the disadvantage of native populations.  Some nations have indeed planted a lot of trees on abandoned poor quality land or land not suited for food production, but much of the restoration involves using trees that are intended for harvesting at some point.  To maximize the benefits of restoration, trees must be left in place for longer times, encouraging diversity in the ground cover and promoting wildlife habitation.  Tearing up the Amazon rainforest to plant coffee trees or create a palm oil plantation is a step backward.  Done right, restored forests could sequester a significant amount of carbon dioxide and help limit global warming and enhance the lives of millions of people. On the other hand, a potentially great secular initiative could slip into being a disappointing episodic event. 

• I have long been an avid follower of efforts to revolutionize agricultural practices globally.  It’s such an obvious place to begin making a serious dent in the rate at which greenhouse gases are being added to the atmosphere.  And this, after all, is the single most important factor in determining how disastrously our anthropocentric imprints on climate change turn out. Agriculture is the world’s largest industry. About a billion people are engaged in farming.  About half the world’s habitable land is pasture and cropland.  Agriculture is essential, and potentially the single most powerful force for improving the lot of humankind generally.  It’s also one of the worst polluting industries on the planet. Of course, there isn’t just one “agriculture”.  This so-called industry varies from pitiable scratching in unproductive ground to behemoths of midwest farmland, costing as much as $400,000 and more--and that’s just for the tractor!  

The huge diversity in agriculture, based on economic factors, the conditions of the land and a host of other climate-related factors, precludes any single approach to raising agriculture’s contributions confronting climate change. It is quite evident, however, that there is room for massive reforms in conventional farming in the US and many other developed nations. Those reforms come under the general heading of regenerative farming practice.  The conventional practices that have become dominant emphasize monocultures, plowing practices that result in topsoil erosion, and heavy use of pesticides and herbicides.  The big ag corporations love it, they’ve grown rich by making the farmers dependent on them.  But there are winds of change a blowin’.  Here’s one example:

One of the precepts of regenerative agriculture is to leave the land as undisturbed as possible.  No-till practices leave the soil able to develop deep root systems with cover crops, which form deep root systems and promote sequestration of water and carbon dioxide. Their roots produce nodules that fix nitrogen which feeds the crops, and holds the soil in place in heavy rainfall, reducing runoff. To read a nice story on how this is playing out in midwest farm country, check this link.   Cover crop acreage is still small, but it’s increasing rapidly. According to a U.S. Department of Agriculture census, cover crop acreage increased 50% nationally during 2012-2017.

As the prospect of global warming looms ever larger, more attention is being paid to how we can offset our current dependence on fossil fuels by switching to renewable energy sources.  There is great enthusiasm for many promising modalities, especially solar and wind, and including also technologies for energy storage which will be essential to sustaining a balanced system with massive capacity.  But I’m not beamish about many of the rosy scenarios being drawn.  California recently set a goal of carbon-free electricity by 2045. This is an ambitious goal.  It ‘s sobering to realize that, ambitious as it is, it does not address the transportation sector, which produces two-thirds of the state’s emissions.  I recently came across this quote on the web:

“Humanity is owed a serious investigation of how we have gone so far with the decarbonization project without a serious challenge in terms of engineering reality.”  

– Michael Kelly, Prof. Electrical Engineering, Cambridge 

The issue of how to get to a carbon-free economy, especially one that might not include nuclear energy, has not been satisfactorily addressed by people who should know how far we are from that goal.  It’s true that, to the extent they can be deployed, renewable energy sources are capable of mitigating the continued increases in greenhouse gases.  But their capacity to do that is actually less than what is achievable by implementing many of the solutions described in Project Drawdown, a roadmap with which everyone should be familiar.