The civil unrest behind the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, and the rise
of Islamic State, may be rooted in the region’s worst drought in 900
years.
THE incredibly complex chaos of
Islamic State and the upheavals of Syria and Iraq may have a very simple
cause: The region’s worst drought in 900 years.
A NASA study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres shows
the Middle East is in the grip of a mega-drought that began in 1998. It
has taken hold in Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey.
The
water shortage has been taking a steadily increasing toll on farmers
and the region’s ecology, with crop failures, dust storms and
record-breaking heat now an annual event.
But the true extent of the drought is only now becoming clear.
“The
range of how extreme wet or dry periods were is quite broad, but the
recent drought in the Levant region stands out as about 50 per cent
drier than the driest period in the past 500 years, and 10 to 20 per
cent drier than the worst drought of the past 900 years,” a NASA statement reads.
Syrian refugees carrying what they can in search of a better life — and rain? Source: AFP
Fingerprints in the rain
NASA
climate scientists have been mapping a database of the Mediterranean and
Middle East’s tree rings — the pattern in which a plant’s new growth is
laid upon itself each season — spanning several thousand years.
Tree rings are a kind of ecological fingerprint.
Each band reveals how much water the tree has been taking in, and how optimal conditions were for growth.
When a tree goes through a period of drought, the bands get thinner. The more thin bands, the longer the drought.
Mapping
when — and where — these trees were suffering water starvation offers
an opportunity to understand the natural variation in the areas weather.
“If
we look at recent events and we start to see anomalies that are outside
this range of natural variability, then we can say with some confidence
that it looks like this particular event or this series of events had
some kind of human caused climate change contribution,” says lead author
of the study Ben Cook.
In the case of the Middle East, a wide-reaching drought spanning more than 15 years has not been seen for more than 900 years.
Historical documents dating from 1100AD were used to corroborate the accuracy of the tree-ring map.
Abnormally persistent
drought, outlined by the dark brown and black spots in the top map, as
compared with the averages for similar periods dating back over the past
1000 years. Source: Geophysical Research — Atmospheres
No rain, no escape
The flood of refugees out of the Middle East and into Europe is a natural consequence of the conditions, the study infers.
Historically,
when there is drought in the Eastern Mediterranean, there is no escape
to the west. Both ends tend to suffer at the same time.
Which generates cause for conflict.
“It’s
not necessarily possible to rely on finding better climate conditions
in one region than another, so you have the potential for large-scale
disruption of food systems as well as potential conflict over water
resources,” says co-author Kevin Anchukaitis.
But the patterns established over thousands of years do suggest refuge: To the north.
When eastern North Africa is dry, Greece, Italy, France and Spain tend to be wet. And vice-versa.
A Turkish tank looks across the border to the north Syrian city of Kobane during its siege by ISIS early last year. Source: AFP
Devil in the detail
From these
patterns, the NASA scientists were able to identify the engines behind
the Middle East’s weather: The North Atlantic Oscillation and the East
Atlantic Pattern.
These regular wind patterns over the Atlantic are themselves driven by oceanic currents and temperatures.
Periodically they push rainstorms away from the Mediterranean, instead causing long dry winds to circulate in their place.
The NASA research shows that this time, however, the drought is different.
Its behaviour does not match the patterns clearly established over the past thousand of years.
“The
Mediterranean is one of the areas that is unanimously projected as
going to dry in the future [due to man-made climate change],” climate
scientist Yochanan Kushnir states in the NASA release.
If every nation that has so far pledged to cut down on its carbon
emissions made good on its promises, the global average temperature
would still rise 3.5˚ Celsius by the end of the century. According to a new study from MIT Sloan and Climate Interactive,
even with the hard-won commitments from nations around the world, we’re
still on track for “catastrophic” levels of planetary heating. If, that
is, the governmental targets aren’t stepped up, or paired with other
aggressive efforts.
In advance of the upcoming climate talks in Paris this year,
which many consider the world’s best shot at cementing an agreement to
limit global warming, nations have begun submitting what are known in
UN-speak as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs).
These
are basically declarations of intent for how a given country aims to
reduce or mitigate its carbon emissions—Norway, for instance, is pledging to reduce its carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030. The US is aiming for a 28 percent CO2 reduction by 2025. China, meanwhile, again made waves
when it announced it would match the US’s fuel efficiency standards and
launch a new cap-and-trade system for reducing pollution as part of its
plan.
It should speak to the scope of the climate problem that
even with all those reduction commitments on the books, we’re headed for
what scientists say are civilization-threatening levels of warming. To
reach that conclusion, MIT rounded up all such pledges that are on the
books, and analyzed the total impact they’d have on temperature rise.
The
study concludes that the commitments, if fulfilled, will indeed make a
serious difference—they will prevent an entire 1˚C of temperature
rise—but that they won’t prevent the global thermostat from spiking past
2˚C; the benchmark that’s long been considered the threshold for
dangerous warming.
The breakdown, according to MIT and CI, looks roughly like this:
“Sea level rise of 1 meter or more would be expected by 2100, with
the possibility of destabilization of the Greenland and West Antarctic
ice sheets, which would cause much more sea level rise and flooding of
coastal communities.”
It’s a full-scale planetary disaster, basically. Worst of all, of course, is business as usual. The
talks fail, there’s no treaty, and we go on burning fossil fuels like
it's 1999. That lands us at 4.5˚C, or 8.1˚F, worth of temperature rise
by the end of the century, if we maintain the status quo trajectory.
That’s also a nightmare scenario.
The World Bank, not exactly a liberal institution, did a report analyzing
the outcome of a 4˚C+ world: “4°C scenarios are potentially
devastating: the inundation of coastal cities; increasing risks for food
production potentially leading to higher under and malnutrition rates;
many dry regions becoming dryer, wet regions wetter; unprecedented heat
waves in many regions, especially in the tropics; substantially
exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; increased intensity of
tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity, including
coral reef systems.” More of the same, more of the worse.
Of course, some scientists say even 2˚C of warming would be a “disaster.”
But
it’s worth honing in on the silver lining here—1˚C worth of reductions,
the amount nations have already pledged to uphold—is a major
achievement, and a serious step forward from what has in the past been a
tortured, laborious, and unproductive negotiation process. There’s
reason to believe, with the costs of renewable power falling fast, and a
spirit of international cooperation slowly coalescing around the
climate problem, that a 2˚C target isn’t out of reach.
To date, electric vehicles have mostly been a curiosity, a means for
the wealthy to display their eco-credentials. In most big markets (the
US, the EU, China), they amount to less than 1 percent of new vehicles
sales. Consequently, most people, notably oil industry people, treat
them as a sideshow.
But that's going to change, soon, according to a new research brief from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. (The reportis accessible to clients only, but there's a write-up that draws on the research here.)
Electric cars are destined to climb the S curve
Technologies follow remarkably similar paths to broad adoption. They
putter along until they hit that magic sweet spot of value and
convenience — and then they take off. Adoption rapidly increases until
the market is close to saturated, when it trails off.
It looks like an S.
This great graph from asset management firm BlackRock shows a bunch of S curves, for different technologies:
The exact shape is different for every technology, and recently the curves have been getting steeper (for a variety of reasons we won't get into). But you get the idea.
Right now, electric cars are still in the putter-along phase, as costs continue falling toward the sweet spot.
How fast are costs falling? BNEF did a bottom-up analysis of four variables: "regulatory support for EVs; the cost of battery packs; the total cost of ownership of EVs relative to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles; and EV consumer technology adoption forecasts."
Long story short, here's what they found: Assuming oil prices rise slowly back to $70 a barrel between now and 2040 (more on that later), battery electric vehicles (BEVs) will become cheaper than ICE vehicles, in terms of total cost of ownership, around 2022.
That, BNEF says, is when they'll start climbing the S curve.
Electric vehicles will spread quickly
Here's what BNEF projects for 2040:
There's a lot to take in here, but notice three things.
First, sales of EVs (BEVs + plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, or
PHEVs) will grow to about 41 million in 2040. That will put total EV
ownership at about a 25 percent of the global fleet.
Second, by 2040, EVs will account for 35 percent of new vehicle sales (and rising).
Third, look what happens to poor plug-in hybrids. They never rise
above niche sales and are rather quickly rendered irrelevant by BEVs. I
wonder if we'll even see much development in the PHEV space, with this
kind of forecast floating around. Maybe for large commercial vehicles?
BNEF acknowledges that two things could substantially alter this forecast.
One is that oil prices could go even lower than expected. Note that BNEF's forecast is based on the Energy Information Administration's "low" reference case for oil prices, which has them rising to around $70 per barrel in 2040.
Theoretically, oil could keep falling, so BNEF modeled an extreme
case in which oil falls to $20 a barrel and stays there. Under that
scenario, EVs don't start rising up the S curve until about 2030, and
are only 25 percent of new vehicles sales in 2040 and 14 percent of the
total global fleet.
The other is that EV adoption could be accelerated by widespread
car-sharing and shared vehicle ownership enabled by self-driving cars.
If adoption is faster, prices fall faster and EVs spread faster. BNEF
modeled such a scenario and found that EVs would reach almost 50 percent
of new vehicle sales in 2040.
So, between 25 and 50 percent of new vehicles sold in 2040 will be electric — that's the range.
The great mystery of how EVs interact with oil markets
The Bloomberg analysis
by Tom Randall (drawing on the BNEF forecast) goes on to get into some
pretty speculative territory, saying that EVs could cause an oil crisis
by the 2020s.
The logic works like this: From 2011 to 2013, US oil production
surged almost 50 percent, thanks to fracking of shale oil. Typically in
that situation, OPEC countries would dial back their production, to keep
prices high. But OPEC declined to do that. So there was a supply glut,
and oil prices plunged.
After a brief recovery in 2015, prices kept going down, eventually
under $34 a barrel. (Much more on the baffling story of recent oil
prices is in this Brad Plumer post.)
What precipitated all this? About 2 million barrels a day of surplus supply, over and above demand.
So when, according to the BNEF forecast, will EVs begin displacing an equivalent amount of oil?
It depends on how fast EVs grow. Currently they're growing at 60 percent annually. That might slow, though. So here are three scenarios, showing 60, 45, and 30 percent growth:
Current growth in EVs would displace 2 million barrels a day by 2023,
45 percent growth by would displace that much by 2025, and 30 percent
growth (BNEF's forecast) would hit the target by 2028.
Now, there's nothing magic about 2 million barrels a day. It's
certainly no automatic trigger for an oil crisis. (Would that oil
markets were so mechanistic and predictable!) But it is an amount that
has been shown to be highly disruptive in the recent past.
And of course it won't stop there. As EVs head up the S curve,
they'll displace millions more barrels. This clip, from Bloomberg's cool video, gives some sense of the scale. The little explosion is at 2 million barrels a day. (Bloomberg)Maybe displacing 2 million barrels a day won't precipitate another oil crisis. But how about 10 million a day? Or 15 million?
There's a reckoning coming — all that remains to be worked out is the timing.
The details are hazy but the direction is clear
There are a million and one caveats about predictions like this.
Above all, they rely on oil-price forecasts that have a dismal record.
The Energy Information Administration scenario this research is based
on shows oil steadily recovering to $70 by 2040. But EIA itself
stresses "heightened volatility and high uncertainty in the price
outlook." And oil doesn't steadily do anything. Here are prices since
1980:
Oil prices lurch and swing. Guess how often oil industry analysts accurately predict those lurches and swings? Hint: rarely.
Given that the price of oil is a key determinant of EVs'
competitiveness, making predictions about the exact trajectory of EV
sales is just as futile as trying to predict the future price of oil.
What's more, the influence doesn't only run in one direction. When
analysts forecast EV sales, they tend to treat oil prices as exogenous,
i.e., an external variable. That makes things more computationally
tractable, but it's a bit of a fudge.
The fact is, by displacing demand for oil, EVs will exert downward
pressure on oil prices. EV prices will affect oil prices, and vice
versa. (If anyone is aware of EV forecasts that treat oil prices as
endogenous, let me know.)
Anyway, as with most models, it is difficult to make local,
short-term predictions with any great confidence; however, it is still
possible to make long-term, directional predictions.
EV costs are declining rapidly. In the reasonably near future — maybe
within a decade, maybe two — EVs are going to become cheaper and better
than comparable ICE vehicles. When that happens, adoption is likely to
accelerate, driving economies of scale that accelerate it even further.
When that happens, a whole bunch of oil is going to go unused. And
long before global oil use declines in large absolute terms, it will
decline enough to substantially affect prices.
Remember that a lot of today's more extreme oil extraction projects —
shale, tar sands, deepwater — are only economical with relatively high
oil prices. If EVs suppress the price of oil in decades to come, they
could spark serious retrenchment in the industry.
The exact timing can't be predicted, but the transition of EVs from
curiosity to destabilizing force is coming. The oil industry would do
well to wake up to it.
Nerdy addendum:
Two other results from the BNEF research are worth highlighting.
First, the rise in EVs will also boost electricity demand:
"Electricity demand from EVs will rise to 1,900TWh by 2040, from 2.5TWh
in 2015, contributing the equivalent of almost 10% of global electricity
demand in 2015." That's a lot!
As I've written manytimes,
the increasing penetration of battery storage will help stabilize
electricity grids and enable the penetration of much more wind and solar
power.
Second, the oft-voiced worry that EV batteries will use up all the earth's rare minerals is apparently misplaced.
BNEF's forecast does mean that by 2030, production of lithium and
cobalt, in particular, will increase substantially. But even in 2030, EV
batteries will require less than 1 percent of known lithium, nickel,
manganese, and copper reserves (4 percent of known cobalt reserves).
And after 2030, BNEF says, new battery chemistries are likely to take over, obviating the need for these minerals.
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