Thanks to Brad Plumer at Vox, I noticed a valuable debate between energy advisors to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: Read more…
Remembering Gordon Hamilton – An Edge-Pushing Prober of Eroding Ice
By Andrew C. Revkin
Pushing the frontiers of science on tough questions is hard enough. But doing so when the effort requires research teams to face deadly hazards at the ends of the Earth takes things to another level.
In probing the fast-changing ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, Gordon Hamilton of the University of Maine exemplified the qualities in the rare breed of scientists, engineers and field staff willing to go to extremes — literally — to help clarify the pace at which seas will rise as warming glacial ice melts. He was also a great teacher, according to colleagues back home in academia.
Now he is gone, as Justin Gillis describes in a beautifully written appreciation. Gillis spent time with Hamilton when reporting a fine article on Greenland’s ice retreat in 2010. I hope you’ll read the story and join me in sending condolences — and appreciation — to Hamilton’s family, friends, students and colleagues.
Here’s an excerpt and a link to the rest: Read more…
News Coverage of Coal’s Link to Global Warming, in 1912
By Andrew C. RevkinStarting in the late 1930s, Guy Stewart Callendar, a British engineer and amateur meteorologist, stirred the field by calculating that rising carbon dioxide levels were already warming the climate. Check out his 1938 paper on the subject: “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature.”
By 1956, The New York Times was writing on combustion-driven global warming.
But when did news coverage begin?
The earliest (and most concise!) article I’ve seen was published on Aug. 14, 1912, in a couple of New Zealand newspapers, the Rodney and Otamatea Times and Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette: Read more…
Climate Silence Goes Way Beyond Debate Moderators
By Andrew C. Revkin
With three presidential debates and one for vice president behind us, David Leonhardt posted a helpful tally of debate questions — decrying the lack of a single question on one of the key issues facing humanity in this century and beyond: human-driven climate change. (The issue was touched on twice by Hillary Clinton in answers to other questions.)
Paul Krugman and a host of environment-minded commentators weighed in, as well.
I put it this way on Twitter: “When journalism merely mirrors public worries, what happens? Zero debate questions on #climatechange.”
But of course there are deeper issues afoot. Read more…
Can Humans Go From Unintended Global Warming to Climate By Design?
By Andrew C. Revkin
Geoengineering is in the wind more and more these days, particularly the use of sun-blocking aerosols as a cheap, temporary counterweight to greenhouse-gas-driven global warming.
In pondering the plausibility or desirability of such a tool, it might be useful to start with a thought experiment:
1) Suppose humans are not heating the climate and oceans through the buildup of heat-trapping carbon dioxide. (This is only a thought experiment.)
2) Presume our capacity to understand Earth systems and devise sophisticated technologies continues to build. (Keep in mind this isn’t a given if budget priorities don’t shift.)
3) Consider the cost, in lives and money, exacted by today’s climatic extremes, let alone those worsened by warming. Many such costs can be reduced by developing suitable crops and water systems or building resilient communities. But not all. Then, on a very long time scale, consider the prospect of an inevitable new ice age.
Sifting these notions, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there will almost certainly come a moment when humans will start designing our climate and not simply perpetually adapt to its vagaries.
On a small scale, there’s already weather modification, from the Midwest to China. Researchers are even examining ways to stifle hurricanes. In the long run, you can be sure that humanity will do everything it can to avert an ice age, given the challenge of sustaining civilization with advancing miles-high ice sheets. (Revisit Thornton Wilder’s “Skin of Our Teeth” for a surreal view of this challenge.)
So far, humanity’s main climate intervention, through emissions of vast amounts of greenhouse gases, has been an unintended consequence of pursuing the most convenient energy choice — fossil fuels.
Efforts to curb that pulse of gases haven’t amounted to much, even with the Paris Agreement taking legal force on Nov. 4.
With all of this in mind, it could be argued that the momentum driving global warming is simply speeding the journey toward an inevitable juncture when we will start engineering the climate.
We’ve been terrible at managing emissions. Can we shift from unintended global warming to managing climate by design?
Welcome to the geoengineering debate.
I encourage anyone interested in climate change science and policy to read on for the rich discussion of geoengineering that follows, involving some of the analysts and scientists most involved in examining next steps. They include Oliver Morton of The Economist, Raymond Pierrehumbert of Oxford University, and Gernot Wagner and David Keith of Harvard.
The specific focus here is whether recent scientific conclusions about the inevitability of thousands of years of global warming have left out possible interventions involving brightening the planet to reflect some incoming solar energy. Read more…
Today’s Climate Progress and Tomorrow’s Climate Challenges
By Andrew C. Revkin
These are creditable developments, but the world is still a very long way from preventing profound long-term climate change.
As Brad Plumer pointed out on Vox today, “Getting serious about climate change would require more than nibbling around the edges of energy policy.”
There’s always a fine balance in gauging how to convey the value of incremental progress against the scale of a huge problem. Putting too much weight in small steps can obscure glaring gaps in addressing the grander challenge. The gaps are absolutely there, as I’ll explain below. Read more…
Species, Interrupted – Why it Matters When Extinction Silences a Tree Frog
By Andrew C. Revkin
When someone notable attains a certain age, newspapers assign reporters to draft advance obituaries, with just the top two or three paragraphs to add when the inevitable happens. As news spread late last month of the death of “Toughie,” the last known Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog, I used Twitter to muse on whether media will have to start doing the same thing for species of living things that are on the brink of extinction:
As Elizabeth Kolbert has so powerfully chronicled, we’re in the early stages of a great wave of such vanishings. My species-scale “obits” have included that of Miss Waldron’s red colobus (2000, although this monkey popped back on the radar, at least for now), the Yangtze River dolphin, or baiji (2006, although this species, as well, is not yet officially declared gone) and the Chinese paddlefish (2009).
Of course, most extinctions will be of as-yet-untallied species whose disappearance will largely be evident through statistical extrapolation. To me, that’s what gives extra weight to the high-profile passings that people do witness — like that of the Yangtze dolphin and now the last known Rabbs’ frog, which had spent its last years in a special habitat at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
These losses are the tip of a much larger iceberg of biological erasures.
With this in mind, I urge you to read the Op-Ed article on this remarkable amphibian by Joseph R. Mendelson III, the director of Zoo Atlanta and a leader of the team that discovered the species in Panama in 2005 — just as a wave of a novel and devastating amphibian fungus was sweeping the region. Zoo Atlanta had also safeguarded some members of the Rabbs’ frog species, with the next to last known specimen on the planet (like Toughie, a male) dying at the zoo in 2012.
In his Times article, Mendelson laments the evolutionary erasure this way: Read more…
Florida’s Vulnerability Tested as Hurricane Matthew Hugs Coast
By Andrew C. Revkin
The state’s level of disaster amnesia was being tested Friday as Hurricane Matthew, after killing at least 330 people in Haiti, began plowing along Florida’s densely developed east coast as a major hurricane. On Friday morning, forecasters saw declining odds of a landfall, meaning the 11-year “drought” for major hurricane strikes could remain intact.
That won’t be much solace to those facing damage from the storm’s high winds and surge. The storm was predicted to move on along Georgia’s shores before making a loop back toward south Florida, although weakening. Late at night the most likely storm track shifted slightly east, potentially lessening damage. [Figures updated Oct. 7, 3:40 a.m.]
Read more…
Building a ‘Good’ Anthropocene From the Bottom Up
By Andrew C. Revkin
Over the last few years, I’ve gotten to know a determined cast of characters in academia aiming to identify paths to a good Anthropocene — Anthropocene being the closest thing there is to common shorthand for this span of human-dominated planetary history unfolding around us.
One such researcher is Elena M. Bennett, an ecosystem ecologist and geographer at McGill University. She’s the lead author of “Bright Spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene,” published in the October edition of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. The paper describes an effort to identify and propagate social and environmental projects that could reverse a centuries-long pattern in which human prosperity has come at the cost of substantial harm to ecosystems and excluded communities.
Bennett describes the work in a “Your Dot” contribution here: Read more…