Much is being made of a new paper in Nature Geoscience in which the authors recalculate "Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C." Whether the authors are justified in their marginally optimistic conclusions — and there's plenty of debate about that — there really isn't much in the way of policy guidance here. Just look at this money quote in Nature: “The Paris goal of 1.5 °C is not impossible — it’s just very, very difficult,” says lead author Richard Millar, a climate researcher at the University of Oxford, UK. Or as Millar and his colleagues put in in their…
“The monitoring of the atmosphere, of the surface of the Earth, of what’s going on in the ocean and under the ice — all of that is overwhelmingly funded by the federal government.” — Former Obama science adviser John Holdren The other day a friend of mine who works in Beijing as a foreign correspondent suggested that of all the acts of stupidity committed by Donald Trump since assuming office, the thing that bothers him the least is the decision to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement. Haven't we actually moved beyond relying on government to reduce carbon emissions? he asked. Isn…
The Conference Board of Canada, usually described as a business-friendly think tank, has come out with a report that is refreshingly honest, and even a bit subversive — especially if you pay extra attention to some sidebars, consider what the authors deliberately left out, and are at least a little familiar with the science of power consumption and generation. The full report, which is behind a freewall — it is downloadable for the cost of supplying your contact information — concludes that converting Canada's economy to a carbon-free energy mix won't actually cost all that much. But what I…
The release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels is, conceiveably, the most important environmental issue in the world today. — "Costs and benefits of carbon dioxide," Nature, May 3, 1979 Actually, the scientific understanding of the dangers posed by rising CO2 levels date back much further — at least 100 years — but 1979 was a watershed year, with all sort of reports and high-level meetings organized in response to the growing recognition that we had a serious problem on our hands. Since then, no major corporation, government or organization can justify being…
The most charitable comment I can come up with for the just-released Department of Energy Staff Report to the Secretary on Electricity Markets and Reliability is the refusal of the authors to use what is surely a candidate for Most Overused Term of the Year: resilience. Not that resilience isn't important, but it's to their credit that the staffers responsible for telling Secretary Rick Perry sort-of what he wanted to hear understand that reliability is really what it's all about. After all, if there's one thing that defenders of fossil fuels and nuclear power like to remind us more than…
The number of people who still aren't worried about climate change — or the number of voters willing to elect someone who feels that way, which is pretty much the same thing — is still depressingly high. But many others have long since moved on to the practical issues of how to respond to the consequent ecological disruption. This category includes scientists, artists, captains of industry, and those who are actually charged with dealing with the myriad problems involved. They all seem to be coming to the same conclusion: humans would rather stay at home and adapt rather than move to safer…
ILLUSTRATION: THE CLIMATE PROJECT Eleven years ago David Guggenheim and Laurie David managed to turn a documentary about a most unlikely subject — a slide show by a man famous for being too dull to be elected president — into an Oscar-winning international hit. The reaction to An Inconvenient Truth convinced the film's star to assemble and train an army of climate-crisis presenters now known as The Climate Reality Project. Guggenheim and David are gone, replaced by a new editorial team, but the star is back with An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Most of the reviews so far are less than…
In what New York Magazine is calling the most-read article in the publication's history,  David Wallace-Wells writes about what will happen if we don't stop burning fossil fuels soon. In a nutshell: the climate "will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us." This has made more than a few climatologists rather cross. The argument is that because "The Uninhabitable Earth" focuses on an unlikely worst-case scenario, and therefore might needless scare the public into inaction. There are a few questionable statements regarding the science of climate change. You can…
How many kids should you have? Used to be the answer was "none of anyone's damn business." But that's not the approach a pair of sustainability experts took in a new paper that concludes the single-most powerful thing anyone can do about climate change is having fewer offspring. In "The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions" (Environmental Research Letters, 12 July 2017) Seth Wynes of Sweden's Lund University the University of British Columbia and Kimerbley Nicholas of UBC find that the greenhouse gas emissions associated…
A study published in Science at the end of June should have found its way onto the front pages and screens of every community newspaper and local news program in the country. But it didn't. At least, not around these parts. Which is a shame, because it's precisely the kind of story we've been waiting for all these years. (Apologies to the spirit of Douglas Adams). I'll do my best to rectify the oversight. In "Estimating economic damage from climate change in the United States," a team of researchers led by Solomon Hsiang, who specializes in public policy at the University of California,…
Anyone asked to identify the two biggest forces for change in the world today could do worse than choose artificial intelligence and climate change. Both are products of technology whose effects are only beginning to be felt, and the ultimate consequences of both will almost certainly be transformative in every sense of the word. Other than that, there hasn't been much tying them together. Until now. Welcome to Climate City, a label that a group of current and former data analysts and entrepreneurs has applied to Asheville, N.C. It might seem an unlikely spot for revolutionary thinking on…
Nature Climate Change has wandered into political science with a study from Stanford University. Seth Werfel's examination of the "crowding-out" effect — the idea that humans have a tough time pursuing more than one strategy to solve a problem — is worth considering, even if its finding aren't exactly earth-shattering. The problem is laid out right off the top and requires no further explanation: Household actions and government policies are both necessary to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, household behaviour may crowd out public support for government action by creating the…
Apologies for the blatant exploitation of an ostensibly tangential news story to drive traffic to this blog. But I think there is a connection, and it's high time I resurrected Class M. The spark is, of course, the revelations about Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's contempt for the people who elected him. Toronto doesn't deserve to be embarrassed, at least not in this manner. The latest affront to decency comes in the form of a drunken rant during which the mayor threatens to kill someone. Sooner or later, the city will be relieved of Ford, but in the meantime, we can contemplate how it is that a man…
Among those who spend their working lives and/or spare time worrying about climate change, there are many subjects that still provoke heated debates, so to speak. Chief among them is the wisdom or folly of turning to natural gas as a "bridge" between the carbon-intensive oil- and coal-dominated present and the clean renewable future that we all know is coming sooner or later. The opponents just found their case a little bit stronger thanks to another controversial issue: nuclear power. Natural gas is, as anyone with a basic grasp of the fundamentals of greenhouse gas forcings can tell you,…
Inside Climate News reports that "The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated." Is this a good thing or bad? The conventional response would be that it represents a loss of commitment to the subject. Dean Baquet, the paper's managing editor for news, says not all: ... environmental stories are "partly business, economic, national or local, among other subjects," Baquet said. "They are more complex. We need to…
The pseudoskeptical argument goes something like this: the last decade hasn't been significantly warmer than the previous decade, so global warming has stopped. And because the causes of anthropogenic climate change have not stopped, the link between fossil fuel combustion and global warming is therefore broken. This is, of course, complete nonsense. The video above from the good people at Skeptical Science should be widely disseminated. I have little to add, other than to emphasize we always have to take the long and truly global view, one that takes into account that most of the Earth's…
Every now and then someone who ordinarily makes a fair amount of sense writes something that serves only to remind us that even the extraordinarily smart can be extraordinarily wrong. So it was with Sam Harris's defense of gun rights, The Riddle of the Gun. First, Harris insists that "the correlation between guns and violence in the United States is far from straightforward." He doesn't really attempt to bolster that argument with relevant facts, though, and there there's little point in an all-too-easy exercise in debunking. In fact, that's not even his central thesis. No, that would be good…
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The other day I found myself looking for reading material in a clinic waiting room and for the first time ever I picked up a copy of Bloomberg Businessweek. It's not that I never used to care about business. I just found business publications and business journalists rarely demonstrated a decent level of understanding of the forces behind the financial numbers that dominated their reports. (And yes, I include The Economist in that generalization.) But BBW was different. The edition contained a half dozen science, environment and technology stories that tweaked my interest and all of them were…
OK, no one can predict a specific weather event months in advance. But what we can do is anticipate expected frequency of events. Back in February of this year, Nature Climate Change published a paper, Physically based assessment of hurricane surge threat under climate change, (PDF bypasses Nature's paywall) that predicted more frequent storm surges for New York City thanks to the changing climate. Here's the abstract: Storm surges are responsible for much of the damage and loss of life associated with landfalling hurricanes. Understanding how global warming will affect hurricane surges thus…