Probabilities reveal shape of climate change

Planners looking to prepare for floods, like this one in Venice, Italy, would like better local information on climate change – and now David Stainforth and his colleagues are helping deliver it. Image courtesy http://www.WorldIslandInfo.com, Allison Lince-Bentley, used under Flickr Creative Commons license.

If you want to plan for the future, or even for the present, knowing that our climate is changing, what’s the best way to do it? That’s a question that David Stainforth from the London School of Economics, Sandra Chapman from the University of Warwick and Nicholas Watkins from the British Antarctic Survey have puzzled over. And while David is co-founder of the climateprediction.net project that borrows spare time on peoples’ computers to run climate models, he doesn’t feel that models are always the best source of information.

“It’s clear to me that the detailed local information on how climate is changing, and what it will be like in 2050, can’t be had from climate models today,” David told me. “They’re just not that good. And yet I work a lot with the adaptation and impacts community, who are interested in what’s happening ‘here’, on a very local basis.” So together David, Sandra and Nicholas have turned to measured data, devising a simple way to pick the most important local climate changes from it.

Weather stations around the world monitor daily conditions, and combine to create a record containing occasional extremes, lots of ordinary days, and everything in between. Knowing how common these conditions are is important for people who want to prepare for future climate change. “For flood risks, you’re worried about going over certain rainfall amounts in a given time,” David explained. “Managers of overheating buildings are worried about what proportion of the time temperatures pass certain levels.”

Warming brings home the value of a meal

The 2012 Plant Hardiness Zone Map unveiled by the US Department of Agriculture this year shows average annual extreme minimum temperatures based on data from 1976-2005. In this version 2012 is modified to use the same colour code as 1990. Much of the US was one 5°F (2.8°C) half-zone colder in the 1990 Plant Hardiness Zone Map compared to the latest version. Credit: US Department of Agriculture/Friend of the Earth

Part one of two

Over the past few days I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy the kind of celebrations that would have been called feasting in the past. They’ve brought home how important food is as basic fuel, a source of pleasure and a reason for friends and family to get together. This year, that importance has drawn me increasingly to research into what climate change means for our food supply. What I’ve covered only begins to scrape the surface of the effects we can expect. However, these studies highlight how life could become yet harder for farmers, and what that could cost us all.

The warming world has already noticeably changed plant growing conditions, for example shifting the regions they are suited to grow in the US. In January, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) redrew its map of planting zones to reflect warming seen since the 1990 version. Partly due to climate change, and partly due to new technology and better weather data, many places are now one 5°F (2.8°C) half-zone warmer. At around the same time, Chinese researchers found that the phases in the seasonal cycle of crop growth in their country had shifted between 1960 and 2008. Springtime events are now 6-15 days earlier and Autumn events 5-6 days later, they found.

Climate provides weak power to predict African violence

Two boys from the Local Defence Unit (LDU) in Kitgum, Northern Uganda, whose job is to protect the people at a refugee camp from attacks and kidnappings by the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has been responsible for much violence in East Africa in recent years. Credit: John & Mel Kots/Flickr

Rainfall and temperature changes are linked to conflict in East Africa, but have less power to predict violence than links to political, economic and geographical factors. That’s according to one of the most detailed studies into climate-violence relationships yet, done by John O’Loughlin from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his team-mates. “Fears of climate wars across Africa are exaggerated,” John told me. “Any effect of climate change will likely be localized and subject to other conditions.”

One political argument made about our changing climate is that it will bring more violence, particularly in Africa. For example, in 2009, US President Barack Obama told the United Nations that a warming world represents an “urgent, serious, and growing threat” because “more frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict”. But, with a background of looking in detail at where violence happens and having studied African conflicts before the 1990s, John was concerned that the evidence didn’t back such statements. That’s even though other researchers have reported statistical links between climate and conflict. “I believe that previous studies were limited by data problems and also that the policy discussions were not connected to the research findings,” John explained.

John’s team described how they fixed this in a paper published in the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA on Monday. Previous attempts to study climate-violence have either lacked detail, looking at data per country, per year, or have been too narrowly focussed to allow generalisations, they wrote. John added that this type of work needs detailed data on both conflicts and all the factors that might predict it. Collecting the information needed on conflicts as well as political, health, location and other possibly predictive data was the biggest challenge in the work, he said.

Focus on uncertain climate cliff-edge invites disaster

Scott Barrett from the Earth Institute at Columbia University says existing climate negotiation strategies have failed. Credit: Earth Institute

Countries trying to agree climate deals based on avoiding dangerous ‘cliff-edge’ limits will not work. That’s according to Scott Barrett and Astrid Dannenberg from the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York, who’ve modelled the negotiations in a simple game. They found that uncertainty about the threshold at which their actions hurt everyone made players ignore the deals they made almost every time.  “We found that if the threshold for catastrophic climate change were certain, Mother Nature would essentially enforce an agreement to avoid the threshold,” Scott told me. “The fear of falling off of a cliff disciplined everyone to do what was needed, collectively, to avoid falling off. When the threshold was uncertain, this effect collapsed. Uncertainty about the impact made no difference at all.” And with science unable to be completely certain where the limit is, Scott and Astrid think that how climate deals are put together must change.

Scott got the idea that knowing where the cliff-edge is important because of the two different ways climate can affect the world. The first is ‘gradual’, where small emissions add a little to greenhouse gas levels in the air and raise global temperatures slightly. The second is ‘abrupt and catastrophic’, where small emissions push part of the world’s climate over a limit into a new state. “The second kinds of change are more important to welfare,” he said. “The effects tend to be uniformly negative – think of 5 meters of sea level rise, or the possibility of warm temperatures releasing methane stored in tundra, causing a rapid rise in temperature. The effects also occur quickly, meaning that adaptation will be harder. For both reasons it seemed to me that countries would have a stronger reason to prevent this kind of climate change than the gradual kind.”

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.

Temperature rises could hamper developing world growth

Higher temperatures can lower productivity in non air-conditioned factories like this one owned by bead manufacturer Kazuya in Nairobi, Kenya, says MIT’s Ben Olken. Credit: Amy the Nurse/Flickr

Higher temperatures play a role in economic progress that brings bad news for poorer countries. Their development efforts may be slowed as the world warms further, suggest researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Looking at over 50 years of weather data, MIT’s Ben Olken and his colleagues showed that every 1°C temperature increase shaves 1.3 percent off a poor country’s growth, over the course of a given year. That can have a big impact, considering the World Bank projects that developing countries’ economies will grow by 5.4 percent in 2012. “The key points of our study for thinking about climate change are that a) the impact seems to be larger for poorer countries and b) there is at least the possibility that the economic magnitude of the costs of higher temperatures for poorer countries could be quite large,” he told Simple Climate.

People have been asking whether temperature influences how rich a country is for centuries, with historian Ibn Khaldun discussing it in his book Muqaddimah in 1377. But researchers are still trying to tease out the various ways it can play a part even today. Getting a grip on this subject becomes more important as the world warms in response to human CO2 emissions, Ben noted. “Given the interest in global climate change, the link between temperature and economic growth is clearly important to understand,” he said. “While there are many studies that try to simulate these impacts, we thought it was very important to try to look, historically, at what actually happens when it gets warmer. When we thought of doing this, we were very surprised that nobody had really done it before.”

Ben, MIT’s Melissa Dell and Northwestern’s Ben Jones brought together temperature, rainfall and economic output data for 1950-2003 from 125 countries. In a paper published in the July edition of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics they compared temperature and rainfall changes against economic growth. By studying year-to-year changes they could avoid assumptions about what links exist and remove the effects of unchanging national factors. Looking at economic growth both in the same year as the weather data and up to ten years later allowed them to see how long any impacts lasted. While economic growth in poor countries was affected by temperature, there was little effect on growth in rich countries. Changes in rainfall have relatively mild effects on national growth in both rich and poor countries. Their data showed that these were permanent effects on growth, rather than temporary dips in output after which the countries continued the progress they were making before.

Economy-CO2 link reveals GDP weakness

The key US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) site where CO2 concentrations in the air are monitored, at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Unlike CO2 emissions, these CO2 concentrations can be readily measured directly, so Edward Ionides, José Tapia Granados, and Óscar Carpintero used them to study their link with global GDP. Credit NOAA

Researchers have confirmed a relationship that is making climate change tough to fight: economic growth and atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been tightly linked for the past 50 years. That’s what the University of Michigan‘s Edward Ionides and co-workers found by looking at levels of the greenhouse gas and gross domestic product (GDP), an important measure of countries’ financial performance, at a worldwide level. “GDP growth is like a proxy for CO2 concentration growth,” Edward told Simple Climate. “Under business-as-usual conditions, these two quantities are measuring essentially the same thing. This highlights a problem with using GDP as a measure of progress.”

Until now, much research on the link between CO2 and economic growth has looked at figures for each country. Some think using each country’s CO2 emissions separately “should be more informative”, Edward said. But there are problems with recording emissions accurately, plus goods or services used in one country often result in CO2 emissions in another. So, with Michigan colleague José Tapia Granados, and Óscar Carpintero from the University of Valladolid, Spain, Ionides went to the worldwide level for “a new and simpler perspective”.

As well as the total of all countries’ GDP, they used precisely measured atmospheric CO2 levels, rather than the more uncertain emission figures. “In addition, concentration of CO2, rather than the level of emissions, is the variable directly determining the global climate,” Óscar said. “Change in the atmospheric concentration is the result of emissions – mainly from burning fossil fuels, since natural emissions from volcanoes are estimated as a tiny fraction of man-made emissions – minus removals by natural sinks.”

Atmospheric CO2 (monthly average) as measured in air samples collected at Mauna Loa, Hawaii from Feburary 1958 to Februrary 2012. Units are parts per million by volume. Estimated preindustrial concentrations, at levels between 200 and 300 ppm, would be far out of the graph. The graph is often known as the Keeling curve. Credit: University of Michigan

Recycling carbon taxes can benefit planet and pocket

Yoram Bauman, The Stand-Up Economist

Tax is a dirty word to virtually all of us. Burning fossil fuels is making a dirty mess of the atmosphere and causing climate change. But taxing CO2 emissions from the fuel we consume could help clean up both the environment and the stain taxes leave on our payslips. That’s what “the world’s first and only stand-up economist”, Seattle, Washington based Yoram Bauman says. But he’s not joking, and it’s not just an idea either – such a tax already exists in British Columbia (BC), Canada.

“It’s a tax on the carbon content of fossil fuels,” Bauman explains. “Burning gasoline in your car, for example, releases about 19.3 million metric tonnes of CO2 per quadrillion BTU – which in English translates to about 2.3kg CO2/litre. So the British Columbia carbon tax, which will hit Can$30/tonne CO2 this summer, works out to about Can$0.07/litre, or about £0.05/litre. For coal-based electricity the tax amounts to Can$0.03/kWh, or about £0.02 pounds/kWh. Everybody has to pay the carbon tax on fossil fuels that they burn in the province of British Columbia, so that affects companies as well as individuals. In return, they get lower rates for personal and corporate income taxes: every dollar of carbon tax revenue is “recycled” through tax cuts that benefit individuals and create jobs. Now, you could argue that Can$30/tonne CO2 is not enough to dramatically reduce emissions, and that’s certainly true, especially in the short run. But it’s a terrific step in the right direction.”

Taken from the book "The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, Volume 1: Microeconomics" Credit: Yoram Bauman/Grady Klein. Click to see a larger version.