Warming cost estimates cheat our children

Economic calculations saying future generations are at least as important as we are make a strong argument for replacing fossil fuel electricity generation with renewable energy sources like wind. Credit: Caveman Chuck Coker/Flickr

The financial benefits of reducing CO2 emissions, and avoiding the climate change they would bring, is at least 2.6 times larger than the US government estimates. And, according to Laurie Johnson of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, DC, and Chris Hope at the University of Cambridge, UK, they could be much higher. Undervaluing the damages, which play a part in how the US government makes decisions about climate issues, borders on insanity, Laurie told me. “What we have to ask ourselves is what our children are going to think of us,” she said. “We’re being very self-destructive, but also deeply unethical. We’re not even trying to minimise how much worse it’s going to get. They’ll look back at all this science and how everything is changing, and see how we treated the damages so trivially and did so little.”

In 2010 some of the top departments in the US government got together to publish the first estimates of the money value of benefits from CO2 cuts. The benefits come from avoiding losses through damage caused by climate change. Called the social cost of carbon (SCC), this value is important because it affects rules on CO2 emissions, such as those from cars and power stations. Using three models that linked climate and economics, the government departments decided that the SCC was $21 per metric tonne of CO2*. Thanks to its importance for future climate rules, Laurie had watched the value being calculated closely – and was worried about what she saw.

“One of the models includes infectious disease damage estimates that are highly questionable,” she told me. “The models also estimate net gains from agriculture from now up to 2300 globally. By contrast the insurance industries appear to be estimating $25 billion dollars for crop losses in the US this year. That’s just one year for one country, and their calculation is for more than two hundred years, all countries. It also estimates a couple of billion in extreme weather damages globally over that period. Last year, in the US alone, there was over $50 billion dollars’ worth of extreme weather damage. Overall, it’s a very problematic estimate.” While the faults are plain, correcting any of these areas with more accurate values is a big problem itself. So Laurie and Chris looked at two other areas that they also felt had been worked out badly, but were simpler to tackle.

CO2-focused breeding can arm crops for food fight

Growth of modern farmed rice varieties rise proportionally less when CO2 levels go up than wild types. Lewis Ziska and his colleagues said that more effort needs to be made in plant breeding to make sure crops benefit from higher CO2 levels. Credit: Héctor de Pereda/Flickr

While CO2 emissions from humans burning fossil fuels are wrapping the world in a worryingly warming blanket, they could also help make our crops grow faster. But more direct effort is needed to make the most of this chance, say Lewis Ziska from the US Department of Agriculture and an international team of scientists. “Plant breeders often assume that on-going breeding efforts, for example for pest or disease resistance, would by themselves lead to adaptation to any rise in background CO2 levels,” Lewis told Simple Climate. “We’ve shown that this is not the case.”

Throughout the 20^th century crop breeding has been one part of a green revolution that has made farmers today able to produce much more food from their fields. But Ziska notes that these improvements in crop yields are slowing. Though climate change and the droughts it brings makes this problem even harder, the gas driving it could provide a way out.

“The gains of the green revolution with respect to population growth have ended,” Ziska said. “As agricultural scientists our goal is to ensure a safe and nutritious supply of food.  It is clear we will have to do so with fewer resources, specifically arable land, water and fertilizer. We have long recognized that CO2 is, by itself, a resource as it supplies plants with carbon, the basic building block for growth. Hence we are urging a systematic active effort in selecting cereal lines that could respond to rising CO2 levels by increasing their yields.”

This view springs from a wide range of evidence Ziska and his colleagues brought together in a paper published in the research journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B this week. This included Ziska’s own research showing how CO2 concentrations affected wheat bred during the 20^th century, when CO2 rose from around 290 parts per million (ppm) to 380 ppm. That study showed that higher CO2 concentrations increased the amount of wheat produced by forms developed nearer to 1900 more than modern varieties.

Developed countries duck warming responsibility

Beijing Normal University’s John Moore, Xuefeng Cui and their collegues assessed the relative impact on future warming if developed and developing countries follow the pledges to cut CO2 emissions they made at the UN climate change conference in Cancún, Mexico, in November 2010, shown here. Credit: UNclimatechange/Flickr

Disputes between leaders of rich and poor countries currently mean little comes from meetings where they’re meant to draw up plans to slow and stop climate change. But developed countries’ existing promises would achieve just 1/3 of any warming slowdown, even though we’re responsible for more than 2/3 of CO2 emissions before 2005. That’s according to a team of mainly Chinese researchers who have tried to settle these fights using “earth system” models, considering both natural and human factors. “Developed countries need to take more responsibility in climate mitigation by cutting more carbon emissions and helping developing countries to control carbon emission while maintaining economic development,” said Xuefeng Cui from Beijing Normal University (BNU).

At the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in Cancún, Mexico, in November 2010, leaders agreed to try and limit the global temperature rise to 2°C higher than pre-industrial levels. They also agreed that doing this needs deep, but fair, cuts in the amount of warming-causing greenhouse gases humans emit. But they still argue about how to share those cuts. That prompted Cui and his team to make an unusual effort to use science to show what is fair.  “The arguments in the IPCC process demand some fact-based reasoning rather than just the ‘blame game’,” team member John Moore told Simple Climate. “Our study is the first interdisciplinary study by climate, social, economic, and ecological scientists and policy makers to look at the historical responsibilities and effect of future mitigation by applying state-of-art earth system models,” Xuefeng added.

Getting such a broad view meant that the team had to develop entirely new methods for their research, published online in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA on Monday. “Most scientists are interested in the real impacts rather than assigning responsibilities,” Moore said. “These are more abstract philosophical and moral points than they tend to consider.” It took a 37-strong team of scientists to develop the approach, and one of the two earth systems models, they used. Whole earth system models are needed to understand the effects plants, animals, land and oceans have on climate.

Rich versus poor obstructs climate progress

One of the more bizarre scenes at Rio+20 was reigning 2011 Miss Universe Leila Lopes and Executive Board Member of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) Dr. Dennis Garrity meeting to call for a goal to halt land degradation and to scale up successful community projects to combat desertification. Credit: UNCCD

Every morning the news is full of fighting – between individuals and groups, within and between countries. When people seem to disagree over nearly everything, it’s strange to expect our leaders to come together for the good of us all, and the whole planet. But that’s exactly what they tried to do last month in Brazil at the Rio+20 UN conference on sustainable development that I recently covered hopefully here on Simple Climate. Will this meeting be remembered as fondly in 20 years’ time as the original “Earth Summit” meeting in Rio de Janeiro 20 years ago that its name refers to? If most reactions to the new agreement reached by political leaders are anything to go by, then no. While rich and poor countries’ competing priorities are largely responsible for the apparently weak wording, some hope of removing key stumbling blocks did emerge from the 45,000-person meeting.

On 22 June, world leaders signed a 49-page document called The Future We Want. As well as renewing the original Earth Summit deal, it charts a road to bringing through sustainable development goals when the UN Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015. It encourages a greener world economy, reducing consumption and improving energy systems. It calls for an international system to conserve high seas biodiversity, action to stop land being degraded and becoming desert, and support for small island developing countries. But the deal’s language lacks power, typically using “should” rather than “must”. And overall there was little about protecting the environment, and much about supporting fair economic growth – a fact that has been strongly attacked by some.

If these goals weren’t already seen as weak in the developed world, that outlook was clinched by how they were formed. The document had been agreed by civil servants even before world leaders began arriving in Rio, meaning that they instead spent their time announcing national initiatives. But the funding for these seems tiny, when the amount needed to meet the goals is estimated to be thousands of billions of dollars. The Sustainable Energy For All initiative – one of UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon’s highlights of the meeting – saw Brazil commit $4.3 billion to promote universal energy access for its citizens. The US promised $2 billion in grants and loans to support public-private energy partnerships, while businesses and investors committed more than $50 billion to the same scheme. Japan pledged $3 billion in international aid for the green economy – even though the final treaty is vague on what the green economy actually is.

Hope from a surprising source that we can control consumption

Members from Avaaz and 350 unfurl a giant trillion dollar bill at Copacabana Beach, calling on world leaders at Rio+20 summit to end fossil fuel subsidies and invest them in clean energy and sustainable development. Credit: Barbara Veiga taken from Hotel Othon.

In 1992, I was 15 and had never used the internet.  The dramatic changes that have happened in my life and the surrounding world in the meantime are a good reminder of how long 20 years is. This week, politicians and organisations from around the world have gathered in Rio de Janerio, Brazil, for the “Rio+20” summit. The name refers to how many years it is since the “Earth Summit” meeting that set out a grand plan for the world to develop sustainably was held there. Much could have been done in that time – but has it?

According to the UN Environment Partnership, the number of passenger flights doubled, and energy and heat generation increased by two-thirds between the original Earth Summit and 2008. Worldwide forest area has shrunk by an area larger than Argentina, and population has increased by 1.5 billion, more than a quarter. Sustainability and climate change are intimately linked, for example with a warmer planet potentially harming wildlife and also agriculture. Since the Earth Summit, the world has warmed by 0.4°C on average, with the ten warmest years since records began in 1880 happening after 1998.

Volunteer computers broaden climate model forecasts

Climate Researcher Dan Rowlands. Credit: Oxford University

Possible world temperatures in 2050 cover a wider range than previous official forecasts suggest, with the increase on the hotter side, scientists have said this week. That conclusion is based on a massive experiment, running 10,000 simulations using donated time on more than 30,000 computers through the climateprediction.net project. “The warming could be nearer to 3ºC rather than 2ºC higher than the average from 1961-1990 by 2050,” said Oxford University researcher Dan Rowlands.

Today, the most used predictions for future climate come from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC brought together models from around 20 of the best groups in the world doing research in this area in the Climate Model Intercomparison Project phase three, or CMIP3. But with such a small number of models, they couldn’t explore the range of future temperatures well.

“The IPCC knows this,” Rowlands told Simple Climate. “So, its uncertainty estimate is based on results from much simpler climate models. A lot of people have questioned whether they’re missing a lot of the key processes that might become important as the climate changes.”

But to predict what climate change will do to the world in detail, scientists need models like those used in CMIP3. “Say you’re looking at flooding in the UK in 2050, you need some meteorological drivers to put into your flood model from these large, complex, climate simulations,” Rowlands explained. “People in that field basically use the range from CMIP3, because that’s all that exists. We wanted to go out and challenge the uncertainty range of warming projected in CMIP3.”

Building climate adaptation on flooded fields

Emma Tompkins from the University of Southampton has been studying why people do things that help their whole community adapt to climate change. Credit: International Institute for Sustainable Development

Even as many governments seem too paralysed to act on climate change, some people and organisations are beginning to adapt to its challenges and threats. And there are cases where their efforts are providing benefits that can be enjoyed by their communities, without receiving any financial reward. While such acts currently don’t get much attention, Emma Tompkins from the University of Southampton, UK, and Hallie Eakin from Arizona State University think they’re fairly common. Emma told me that private actions like farmers allowing their fields to flood to protect more developed areas downstream could be worth millions. “The cost of adapting to climate change could be significantly reduced if we can harness that, and encourage greater provision of these public goods,” she said.

When Hallie and Emma first met, they were surprised to find that they both knew cases where people were acting in this way. Emma had heard tell of farmers in the UK and France who let their fields be flooded to protect others. Meanwhile Hallie knew that small coffee growers in Mexico deliberately encouraged a greater variety of plants to increase soil stability and reduce the risk of landslides in an area prone to hurricanes. “We then became increasingly interested and started finding evidence it wasn’t just the two of us having

Fossil fuel exporting countries should adopt green taxes

The danger that someone else might impose taxes that reduce fossil fuel consumption before fuel-exporting countries should motivate them to get there first. That’s according to Steven Davis from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, and his colleagues, who have looked at the links between international trade and CO2 emissions. Their “Supply Chain of CO2 Emissions” shows where goods, services and the fossil fuels the world burned, generating power and emitting CO2, came from and went to in 2004. They found that 10.2 billion tons of CO2, over one-third of global emissions, came from fossil fuels traded internationally. 6.4 billion tons of CO2 were used to make traded goods. “The sheer magnitude of emissions that are traded internationally show an inherent flaw of trying to design an effective national program to manage carbon,” Davis told Simple Climate.

Last year, Davis and his Carnegie institution colleague Ken Caldeira showed that in 2004 on average each US citizen consumed goods imported from other countries whose production emitted 2.5 tons of CO2. For Europeans, the figure sometimes exceeded four tons per person. This CO2 benefits people in the country the goods are consumed in, but is not counted as being emitted there. Instead only CO2 directly produced in a country is considered in international negotiations seeking to fight climate change by limiting emissions.

But as CO2 emissions are also closely tied to economic growth, developing countries – and China in particular – are fighting hard to retain the right to emit and develop themselves further. Developing/developed world conflict is a regularly feature of climate negotiations, including in the Copenhagen summit in 2009 that failed to produce a binding treaty to control CO2 emissions. Yet, many countries did make their own pledges to cut CO2 emissions. One potential tool they can use to reduce CO2 emissions is through tax, for example China’s resource tax, and Australia’s upcoming tax on its biggest emitters.

Europeans not all at sea on marine climate threats

An illustration of some of the invasive species that are entering the Mediterranean as its seawaters warm. Credit: Glynn Gorick/CLAMER

While the public is rightly concerned by sea-level rise, climate change’s impact on European seas will also affect people through shifts in where bacteria and fish are found. That means that as well as the distant threat of property damage, the risks of disease, unemployment and hunger are raised. Those are among the findings collected in a 200-page book summarising research done since 1998 about climate change’s effects on Europe’s ocean environments. “The main message is that changes are happening,” said Carlo Heip, Director of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. “The second thing is that they are happening much faster than we thought.”

Heip was among scientists unveiling the results of the Climate Change and European Marine Ecosystem Research, or CLAMER, project in Brussels, Belgium, on Wednesday and Thursday this week. Funded by the European Commission, CLAMER brought researchers from 17 European marine institutes both to create this summary, and look at how well-known the messages within it were among everyday people. “The European Commission has spent, over the last ten years or so, hundreds of millions of Euros in research to find what the impacts of climate change are on the environment, including the marine environment,” Heip said. “They wanted to know, first of all, what the public knows about it, how this research has contributed to public knowledge, what people’s perception is and whether they are willing to do something about it.”

Alongside compiling their book of science, to find out what people think, the scientists surveyed 10,000 people from 10 European countries in an online poll. In January, in association with Brussels-based TNS Opinion, they questioned 1,000 people each from Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Ireland, United Kingdom, Norway and Estonia. The results showed that Europeans are concerned about climate change’s impact on the seas, with sea level rise and coastal erosion among their leading worries. Not only this, but their estimates of sea level rise and temperature generally matched scientific forecasts, suggesting that “some fundamental messages” are spreading widely.

More turtles could become fish supper with warming

University of Queensland's David Booth and Andrew Evans have tested the effect of temperature on the swimming ability of the endangered green turtle. Credit: Nick Holmes

The moment they break open the shells their mother laid them in, baby green turtles face arguably the most dangerous journey of their lives. Despite spending most of their time out in the open sea, these endangered creatures are born from clutches of eggs in deep nests in coastal and island sand dunes. Though it may take them several weeks to dig their way out of the sand, once they emerge, they rapidly plunge into the sea, and then swim continuously for about another 24 hours. On that voyage, they must run the gauntlet of hungry fish, who are thought to eat three in ten hatchling green turtles on average.

Last week, the University of Queensland’s David Booth and Andrew Evans showed that a hotter climate would harm the baby green turtles’ ability to swim away from this early death. That’s despite warmer seas improving their swimming ability. “We also found that hatchlings that emerged from cooler nests had a better swimming performance,” Booth told Simple Climate. “However the effect of nest temperature was greater than the effect of the change in water temperature. We predicted that if there were both a 2ºC rise in nest temperature and water temperature, there would be a net decrease in green turtle hatchling swimming performance, thus increasing the chances that hatchlings would be eaten by predatory fish.”