08/09/2016

Here’s What China, U.S. Just Committed To On Climate

Climate Central - 

The leaders of the U.S. and China committed their nations to the fight against global warming on Saturday when they handed arcane but momentous documents to the United Nation's top official.
The documents stated that the U.S. and China are ready to join a new global warming pact, putting it on course to potentially become international law before the end of 2016.
Largely because of global warming, this year is expected to be the hottest year on record, beating a heat record set last year, which beat the record set the year prior.
"We have a saying in America — that you need to put your money where your mouth is," President Obama said during the joint media appearance in China before G20 meetings began. "And when it comes to combatting climate change, that's what we're doing, both the United States and China. We're leading by example."
Leading — but how? The legal details are wonky but critical. Their story begins in Paris, and it doesn't end in China. Let us explain.

What's the Paris agreement?
Finalized during U.N. talks in Paris in December, the agreement sets out steps that each country will take to tackle global warming. China and the U.S. are the world's worst climate polluters, and the actions they have pledged are seen as crucial to the success of the pact.
Pres. Obama shakes hands with UN official Ban Ki-moon on Saturday and hands key paperwork to him. Credit: How Hwee Young/Reuters

In Paris, the U.S. agreed to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas pollution it releases in 2025 to about a quarter below its 2005 levels. China agreed to halt the growth in its annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 — something it appears to have already achieved.
Even if those and other nations' promises under the Paris agreement are kept, global temperatures may yet soar well above 2°C (3.6°F) compared with pre-industrial times — roughly twice the amount of warming recorded so far. Further climate negotiations in the years ahead will aim to keep warming below that dangerous level.

What did Obama just do?
To formally join the Paris agreement, a country must file an "instrument of ratification" with the United Nations. This is a signed letter or document confirming that a country is ready to start living up to its commitments under the pact.
America could have sent a bureaucrat to U.N. headquarters in New York to quietly file such a letter. Instead, Obama handed America's instrument of ratification directly to U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon in front of the world's press before meetings in China.
The high-profile ceremony was designed to send a signal to the world that its two biggest climate polluters remain committed to working together to solve the climate crisis, such as by supporting and promoting solar and wind energy, which could encourage others to do the same.

Is the Paris agreement an international treaty?
The Paris agreement is a binding treaty under the UN. But Americans use the word "treaty" to describe an international agreement that the U.S. Senate has agreed to join. Since Obama hasn't sought the blessing of the Senate for the new climate pact, the White House has been shying away from the use of the word "treaty."

Has the U.S. joined the Paris agreement now?
By submitting its instrument of ratification, the U.S. has indicated that it is ready to join the Paris agreement. After a number of other countries have done likewise, the agreement will "take force."

What does take force mean?
Once an international agreement takes force, countries agree to begin enforcing the rules of it within their own borders. The UN is an organization, not a government, and it can't force the U.S. or any other country to take measures to protect the climate. But countries that flout global agreements risk being ostracized or punished through embargoes and trade agreements.

When will the Paris agreement take force?
If at least 55 countries, collectively producing at least 55 percent of global climate pollution every year, file their instruments of ratification by Oct. 7, then the Paris agreement will take force for those countries before the next round of climate talks, scheduled for November. That currently seems likely.
"Entry into force is important, because if that were to fail, or be long delayed, that would sap confidence in the Paris process," said David Victor, an international relations professor at UC San Diego. "It's a visible sign of progress."
If the Paris agreement takes force before the November talks, countries that have joined the agreement by that time will huddle during the negotiations in a new decision-making committee. That would give those countries more influence than others over how the agreement will be implemented during the years to come.

Why isn't the Senate involved?
Under U.S. law, international agreements only require Senate approval if they force changes to domestic laws. In part because about half of the Senate publicly doubts climate science, the Paris agreement was legally crafted to allow Obama to sign it without Senate approval.
"More than 90 percent of international agreements the U.S. has joined have followed the same executive process the president just completed for the Paris Agreement, and did not require a trip through the Senate," said Alex Hanafi, an attorney at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.
Some aspects of the Paris agreement are legally binding — such as requirements that countries publish information about their pollution levels each year, and what they're doing to try to reduce that pollution.
French leaders and UN official Ban Ki-moon applauding after a global climate agreement was struck in Paris in December. Credit: UNFCCC/Flickr

These are already requirements under existing U.S. law, and they could give other countries confidence that Americans are living up to their promises.
"Transparency is critical to accountability in international agreements," Hanafi said. "The force of international law to compel countries to comply with their agreements is limited."
Other aspects of the Paris agreement are not legally binding. Most notably, hitting a pollution target that a country set for itself under the agreement remains entirely voluntary.
Not only do non-binding pollution goals circumvent the potential need for Senate approval of the Paris agreement, many experts say they could lead to better results. That's because the approach encourages countries to aim for difficult goals without fear of being punished if they fail.

What's Obama's hurry?
As greenhouse gases have piled up in the atmosphere, climate change has shifted from being a theory about a future threat to a hazardous fact of modern life. Temperatures have risen nearly 2°F since pre-industrial times, and the effects on droughts, heatwaves and floods are becoming clear around the world.
But this is about more than just science and the fate of humanity. Obama is working to establish a climate legacy before he leaves office in January. Democrats facing reelection are finding broad, if tepid, electoral support for efforts to slow global warming.
Although Obama seemingly paid little attention to climate change during his first term, climate action has been a defining focus of his second term. Obama's diplomats played crucial roles in encouraging other countries to show high levels of ambition during the Paris negotiations.
There's also the question of Obama's successor. If voters elect Democrat Hillary Clinton, America's newfound global leadership on climate action is unlikely to change much. If Republican Donald Trump is voted into office, the U.S. could quickly abandon that leadership, as Trump has said global warming is a hoax.

Could a Trump administration withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement?
If the Paris agreement takes legal force this year, it would be difficult for the U.S. to withdraw from it before four years have passed — the length of a presidential term. Of course, that doesn't mean that a Trump administration would be forced to take climate change seriously.
"Speculation on this point comes with a huge dose of uncertainty because of Mr. Trump's unpredictability," said Robert Stavins, a Harvard economics professor who is an expert on global environmental agreements.
As president, Trump "could simply not work hard to achieve" America's goals under the Paris agreement, Stavins said. He could also appoint a Supreme Court justice who would help to invalidate the federal pollution rules that are key to achieving America's commitments.
Even without withdrawing from the Paris agreement, "Trump could all but ensure that the U.S. [climate pledge] would not be achieved," Stavins said.

Could the Paris agreement end up saving the world?
The new agreement puts global pressure on countries to clean up their heavy industries and to protect the climate, but it contains huge gaps. It doesn't directly affect international shipping or aviation, both of which are heavy polluters, for which separate agreements are being pursued. Efforts to reduce a potent type of climate pollution released from refrigerators and air conditioners are being pursued through negotiations under yet another agreement.
"Of course, the Paris Agreement alone won't solve the climate crisis," Obama said on Saturday. "But it does establish an enduring framework that enables countries to ratchet down their carbon emissions over time, and to set more ambitious targets as technology advances."

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Pacific Pariah: How Australia’s Love Of Coal Has Left It Out In The Diplomatic Cold

The Conversation - 

Australia has sought to water down climate declarations made through the Pacific Islands Forum. AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will have some explaining to do when he attends the Pacific Islands Forum leaders' meeting in Pohnpei, Micronesia, this week.
Australia's continued determination to dig up coal, while refusing to dig deep to tackle climate change, has put it increasingly at odds with world opinion. Nowhere is this more evident than when Australian politicians meet with their Pacific island counterparts.
It is widely acknowledged that Pacific island states are at the front line of climate change. It is perhaps less well known that, for a quarter of a century, Australia has attempted to undermine their demands in climate negotiations at the United Nations.
The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – organised around an annual meeting between island leaders and their counterparts from Australia and New Zealand – is the Pacific region's premier political forum. But island nations have been denied the chance to use it to press hard for their shared climate goals, because Australia has used the PIF to weaken the regional declarations put forward by Pacific nations at each key milestone in the global climate negotiation process.
In the run-up to the 1997 UN Kyoto climate summit, Pacific island leaders lobbied internationally for new binding targets to reduce emissions. However, that year's PIF leaders' statement was toned down, simply calling for "recognition of climate change impacts".
Likewise, in the lead-up to the 2009 Copenhagen talks, Pacific island countries called for states to reduce emissions by 95% by 2050. But at that year's PIF meeting in Cairns, the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, convinced leaders to scale back the proposed target to 50%. Pacific media branded the outcome "a death warrant for Pacific Islanders".
Ahead of last year's Paris summit, Australia again exercised its "veto power" over Pacific climate diplomacy. Over the preceding years Pacific island leaders had made their climate positions quite clear, both at UN discussions in New York and in a string of declarations including the Melanesian Spearhead Group Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change, the Polynesian Leaders' Declaration on Climate Change, and the Suva Declaration on Climate Change.
Nevertheless, the official climate declaration issued after last year's PIF in Port Moresby was significantly weaker in several key areas. Most notably, it failed to call for global negotiations to limit global warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels. This is a threshold that Pacific island states have consistently argued should not be crossed, because that would threaten the very existence of low-lying states such as Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands.
These countries are understandably very unwilling to compromise on this position. At the Port Moresby meeting, Kiribati President Anote Tong suggested that Australia should leave the forum altogether if it was not prepared to back the islands' positions in global climate negotiations.
There is little doubt that Australian attempts to gag its Pacific island neighbours in these negotiations have aroused anger in the region. This has been compounded by the fact that Australians are among the world's highest per capita greenhouse gas emitters and the Australian government is committed to increasing exports of the dirtiest source of emissions – coal.

Pacific perspectives on Australia's coal addiction
If Pacific islands are to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, there is little doubt that most of the world's coal must stay in the ground. No serious policymaker disputes the basic fact that our carbon budget is severely limited. There is no scenario in which building new coal mines, and expanding existing ones, is compatible with effectively tackling climate change.
Pacific island governments are calling for a global move away from coal. In September 2015, the Pacific Islands Development Forum (a new regional body that meets without Australian representation) called for an urgent international moratorium on the development and expansion of fossil-fuel-extracting industries, particularly new coal mines.
Leaders from the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tuvalu issued a similar statement on the sidelines of the Port Moresby summit. President Tong wrote personally to world leaders before the Paris talks, asking them to support the moratorium.
Australia's view could scarcely be more different. It is the world's largest coal exporter, and both major political parties are financially backed by the coal lobby. Rather than move away from coal, the government is seeking to expand exports dramatically, with public subsidies and taxpayer-funded infrastructure.
Australia wants to keep its coal rolling. CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
These exports are still largely shielded from discussions about Australia's contribution to climate change. Because Australian coal is burned in China, Japan and elsewhere, the emissions are ascribed to those nations.
In 2016 Australia will export around 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, embodied in coal. By some estimates, over the next five years Australia's "carbon exports" will overtake those from Saudi oil.
Australia's coal addiction has implications for its relations with Pacific island neighbours. For a start, it has undermined any claim that decisions made at the Pacific Islands Forum represent the "true" Pacific voice on climate change.
The ramifications may go deeper still. While Pacific leaders still accept the need to meet with their wealthier and more powerful neighbour – Australia is a crucial partner in times of natural disaster and a key source of development aid – joint decisions made at the PIF are beginning to ring hollow. Island states are increasingly using other multilateral forums to pursue their interests.

Pacific leadership and global climate diplomacy
To be sure, Pacific island states have long pursued independent diplomatic strategies to tackle the root causes of climate change. The first UN proposal for multilateral climate action – which later became the Kyoto Protocol – was proposed in 1994 by Pacific diplomats working through the auspices of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).
Twenty-one years later, Pacific leaders were again crucial in securing the Paris Agreement, the first truly global agreement for tackling climate change. Last week US President Barack Obama told Pacific island leaders in Hawaii that agreement would have been impossible "without the incredible efforts and hard work of the island nations".
Pacific island states have been able to exercise global climate leadership despite Australia's efforts. How Pacific island countries pursued recent climate diplomacy is instructive. In the lead-up to the Paris talks, Pacific ambassadors to New York met regularly as the Pacific Small Island Developing States (P-SIDS) grouping, where previously they were more likely to meet under the auspices of the PIF.
Last year, the P-SIDS ambassadors wrote a "zero draft" of a Pacific island declaration on the global climate change negotiations, which ultimately became the strongly worded Suva Declaration on Climate Change. It had been finalised at the 2015 Pacific Islands Development Forum leaders' meeting and released just days before the watered-down Port Moresby statement. Unsurprisingly, Pacific states pursued the Suva position once they arrived in Paris.
These tactics proved crucial to the advancement of Pacific islands' position in the global climate talks. But Pacific states also acted on their own. Remarkably, the Marshall Islands was almost single-handedly responsible for the successful negotiation of an ambitious Paris Agreement.
Six months before the December Paris conference, the Marshall Islands government convened a series of private meetings that paved the way for the formation of a "high-ambition coalition" of climate-progressive states. By the second week of the summit, this group had swelled to include the United States, the European Union and more than 100 other countries. This coalition ultimately had a crucial say in formalising the agreement's 1.5℃ goal.
The Marshall Islands helped to galvanise what became an inexorable push towards a 1.5-degree target in Paris. Reuters/Jacky Naegelen
In the months before the Paris talks, Australia was not invited to join the high-ambition coalition. It attempted to join right at the summit's tail end, but was later snubbed by coalition members at the Paris deal's signing ceremony in New York in April.
There seems little doubt that Australia was left out in the diplomatic cold precisely because its climate "ambitions" are so dismally low. Indeed, when Australia announced its intended emissions targets for the Paris Agreement, the Marshall Islands' foreign minister, Tony de Brum, complained that if the rest of the world followed Australia's lead, his country, and other vulnerable nations on Australia's doorstep, would disappear.
The contrast could not be starker. While Pacific leaders are praised for their efforts to develop global climate solutions, Australia faces ignominy. Unless Australia changes direction, it will continue to be seen as an irresponsible middle power – a rogue state undermining global efforts to tackle climate change.
Australian governments will also find it increasingly hard to convince Pacific island countries they are a friend as well as a neighbour.

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Partisan Polarization On Climate Change Is Worse Than Ever

Vox - 

America, basically. (Shutterstock)
A month before the 2008 presidential election, sociologists Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright (of Oklahoma State and Michigan State, respectively) published a prescient study on the rapidly growing partisan gap on issues of environmental and climate protection.
They concluded by speculating that a win by Sen. John McCain, an outspoken climate champion, could represent "a sea change among Republican Party leadership on the issue of climate change," whereas an Obama victory "could see Republican trends toward increased skepticism continue for the next several years.
Well, we know how that turned out.
Now Dunlap and McCright (along with Oklahoma State's Jerrod Yarosh) have updated their study, giving us a fresh look at public opinion on climate change at the end of the Obama era.
The findings are dismal, if not very surprising: Polarization only accelerated after 2008, the gap between the parties is wider than ever, and the trend shows no sign of stopping.

The large and growing partisan gap on climate change
Let's look at some charts from the study, and then we'll have a think about what it means for US politics.
First, here's a chart showing how League of Conservation Voters (LCV) scores, which track the voting records of members of Congress, have changed over time.
(Dunlap et al, Environment)
As  you can see, environmental issues were reasonably bipartisan back in the 1970s. The parties began to drift apart in 1980, and then more sharply when Bill Clinton became president in 1992. In 2008, when Obama took office, there was another lurch, and now Republicans in Congress are very close to unified in opposition to all environmental legislation.
So, yes, polarization among US federal legislators has most definitely grown more extreme, to near-comical levels.
But what about public opinion? For that, we shift over to Gallup, which has been asking a set of climate-related questions pretty consistently since the late 1990s. It has the best longitudinal data available.
Here are responses to a question about whether the effects of climate change have already begun:
(Dunlap et al, Environment)
The partisan gap grows in the 2000s and then widens further in 2008. Democratic answers fluctuate, but overall they trend higher (though not yet reaching the heights of 2007, when Al Gore's movie came out). Republicans never again reach their peak of 2007, or their even higher peak of 1997.
Are changes in climate mostly due to human activity?
(Dunlap et al, Environment)
Again, the partisan gap grows wider in 2008, with Democratic numbers rising and Republican numbers never reaching their 2001 peak.
Do you personally worry about climate change?
(Dunlap et al, Environment)
The lines on this one look somewhat different, obviously shaped by the financial crisis, which left little room for additional worries. The size of the gap peaks in 2007, but remains large.
And so on through various other climate questions. The authors sum up the size of the gaps over time:
(Dunlap et al, Environment)
On  every question, the partisan gap grew between 2001 and 2008, and grew again (with one exception, where it remained steady) from 2008 to 2016.
What's more, the gap between self-identified conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats is far larger than the above numbers indicate, sometimes reaching into the 60s. And it's the committed partisans who are most likely to vote and wield influence over policymakers.
Taking these trends at face value, it looks like the GOP is going be under continuing pressure to keep climate skepticism central to Republican orthodoxy, at least for the foreseeable future.

Hopes for reducing polarization are mostly forlorn
There are three sources of hope for reducing polarization in the short term. Dunlap et. al. shoot them all down.
The first is education — better informing the public about climate science. The much-derided "information deficit model" has proven a failure in practice. "Two decades of news coverage and educational campaigns since 1997 have produced only modest increases in Americans' belief in the reality and human cause of climate change, with gains among Democrats often offset by declines among Republicans," the authors write. 
The second is better "framing," pitching climate to conservatives in terms more likely to appeal to their values — climate as a national security threat, or an economic opportunity, or a threat to God's covenant. However, dozens of studies have found small or negligible effects from these strategies. "The evidence so far gives little basis for optimism," they conclude.
The third is personal experiences with extreme weather events, which, it is often hoped, will drive home the reality of climate change. But what evidence exists shows that such experiences have little-to-no effect on climate beliefs, especially among committed partisans. People interpret their experiences through their preexisting worldviews.
"Again," Dunlap et. al. write, "the evidence thus far does not provide much support for optimism."
No help. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Why is polarization so resistant to change?
The reason increasing polarization on climate change remains so resilient is that it's not really about climate change. The issue has been swept up in a much larger, broader trend of polarization in US politics (which I have written about before). As Americans sort themselves into camps, both ideologically and geographically, political orientation becomes more and more a matter of identity — or as sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called it in her excellent account of white working-class communities in Louisiana, "deep story." 
Skepticism toward climate change and hostility toward climate policy have been yoked to conservative identity. To reject them is to risk rejecting that identity and harming the social relationships that come with it. And most people have much stronger commitment to their core identity than they do to any individual political issue.
Once an issue has been yoked to our core identities, we stop reasoning like scientists (gathering evidence, seeing where it leads) and start reasoning like lawyers (start with a conclusion, work backward to build a case). Yale psychologist Dan Kahan calls it "motivated reasoning"— "the unconscious tendency of individuals to process information in a manner that suits some end or goal extrinsic to the formation of accurate beliefs." In this case, the "end or goal" is preserving commitments core to identity.
Studies show that a college education and a self-identified understanding of the issue both tend to raise Democrats' concern over climate change, but the same factors have no effect, sometimes even a negative effect, on a Republican's concern. Why? Because Democrats, for basically tribal reasons, are likely to be open to the idea that climate change is a problem. Republicans, for basically tribal reasons, are unlikely to be open to the idea. A committed Republicans is apt to learn more about climate change in order to bolster the skeptical case.
(YPCCC)
Core identity commitments are extremely difficult to dislodge. Insofar as they shift, the change tends to originate inside the tribe.

The forlorn hope of focusing on clean energy
Many people (myself included) have noted that, despite their partisan opposition to climate action as such, pluralities and sometimes even majorities of Republicans favor many policies that would have the effect of reducing carbon emissions — local pollution regulations and clean energy support, especially.
Perhaps there's hope there? Dunlap and crew say no:
[A]s Lilliana Mason and other political analysts note, individuals can hold relatively moderate positions on many issues and yet be strong partisans committed to keeping the other party out of office. Thus, as long as rank-and-file Republicans vote for conservative candidates, and those candidates remain steadfast in opposition to climate change action, the former's receptivity to climate-friendly policies remains almost irrelevant—for the Congress they help elect will be highly unlikely to give such policies any consideration.
This is an important point to understand. Even someone with moderate opinions on particular issues is subject to the growing influence of "negative partisanship."
No help either. (Yale Project on Climate Change Communication)
In  a 2015 paper, political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster showed that "since 1992 and especially since 2008 … growing proportions of strong, weak and leaning party identifiers have come to perceive important differences between the parties and to hold extremely negative opinions of the opposing party. This has led to sharp increases in party loyalty and straight ticket voting across all categories of party identification."
Even self-identified moderates, centrists, and independents tend to vote like partisans these days.
And parties have shifted toward parliamentary-style discipline. If you vote for a Republican, even if you have moderate inclinations on clean energy and pollution regulations, even if the particular Republican you vote for has such inclinations, what you get is the party. And the party, institutionally speaking, is united against climate action.
(The inverse is not quite as true yet of Democrats, on climate anyway. There are still holdouts in coal and heavy manufacturing states.)
Political parties are generally shaped by a few core commitments, the concerns of big donors, and the influence of organized, engaged constituencies. The GOP's core ideological opposition to taxes and regulations, its big fossil fuel donors, and its most intense constituencies are all pushing it strongly toward skepticism, denial, and opposition on climate policy.

What to do?
This is all a bit depressing and hopeless. What to make of it?
Most of all, it clarifies the stakes of the 2016 elections (if additional clarity was needed). The continued hyper-polarization around climate change means it matters very, very much for climate policy which party controls Congress and the presidency for the next four years.
"Whether, and how, individual Americans vote this November," Dunlap et. al. write, "may well be the most consequential climate-related decision most of them will have ever taken."
But do we have to accept that we're stuck with partisan polarization in the world's richest country, toward the biggest challenge our species has ever faced? Is there nothing that can cleave climate off from the culture war, from the role it now plays in conservative identity?
Longtime readers know I'm very, very skeptical toward most such efforts. But I'll discuss a few thoughts along those lines in a subsequent post, which will address the question of just how Republican sentiment on decarbonization might be shifted.

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These Gorgeous New Alaska Maps Could Transform Our Understanding Of The Arctic

Washington Post - Chris Mooney

This Arctic digital elevation model image centers on Kodiak Benny Benson State Airport, a public and military airport located five miles southwest of the city of Kodiak. The image highlights the rugged relief surrounding the three runways of the airport and clearly depicts vegetation, buildings, coastal features and the drainage network of the area. Elevation transitions smoothly from blue (low elevations) to green (medium to higher elevations) to red (peaks). (Paul Morin, PGC)
Late last week, the White House announced something seemingly mundane — a series of new topographic maps of the U.S.’s only Arctic state, Alaska. Ninety percent of the enormous state has now been mapped at a far higher resolution than ever before – 2 meters — through satellite-based imaging combined with high-powered computing.
The announcement represented the fulfillment of a pledge that president Obama made almost exactly a year ago in Kotzebue, Alaska, when he visited the state to highlight climate change.
Mapping may sound rather dull — but the more closely you examine what has been accomplished here, the more you realize it is the kind of advance that could have a profound impact on scientific understanding of the entire Arctic, the most rapidly changing part of the globe.
“Elevation data is one of the most fundamental datasets for both earth science and all aspects of mapping and cartography,” said Paul Morin, who led the research at the University of Minnesota’s Polar Geospatial Center, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. “It tells you the shape of the Earth and it tells you what the Earth is. That’s key for all kinds of things, from the biology to plate tectonics and glaciology.”
“It’s a complete game-changer,” added Fabien Laurier, a senior policy adviser at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. “Elevation may not sound all that exciting, but the range of applications is almost limitless.”
Mount Aniakchak is a volcanic caldera located in the Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve in the Aleutian Range of Alaska. Aniakchak is one of the wildest and least visited places in the National Park System. The area was proclaimed a National Monument on Dec. 1, 1978. (Paul Morin, PGC)
The new data will complement an ongoing project by the U.S. Geological Survey to map Alaska at a still higher resolution using lasers and radar.
The lack of good maps of Alaska was covered extensively by the Post’s Lori Montgomery in 2014. As she put it then:
Alaska, it turns out, has never been mapped to modern standards. While the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is constantly refining its work in the lower 48 states, the terrain data in Alaska is more than 50 years old, much of it hand-sketched from black-and-white stereo photos shot from World War II reconnaissance craft and U-2 spy planes.
Errors abound. Locals tell of mountains as much as a mile out of place. Streams flow uphill, and ridges are missing because a cloud happened by when the photo was taken.
Rather than flying planes over Alaska, the new maps were created based on high-resolution telescopic images captured by polar orbiting satellites operated by DigitalGlobe. Images of a 17-by-120 kilometer area were snapped once, and then snapped again, 45 seconds later — by which time the rapidly orbiting satellites had already moved a large distance away. Thus, each image showed the same square of terrain but at different angles.
Then, a supercomputer dubbed Blue Water, at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, computed the elevation of all objects in the landscape by rapidly comparing every object in every pair of images.
Wolverine Glacier is a valley glacier in the coastal mountains of south-central Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. For climate change monitoring, satellite imagery can be collected and elevation models produced at regular intervals — weekly, monthly or annually — to observe and document changes as they occur. Elevation transitions smoothly from dark blue (low elevations) to light blue (medium to higher elevations) to red (highest elevation). (Paul Morin, PGC)
Computing power is what made this possible. “We calculated that if we were to try to do this on a very powerful desktop gaming computer, it would take you about 20,000 years to run the same data through,” said Morin.
And the Alaska maps are just a beginning. An elevation mapping of the entire Arctic, based on the same technique, is slated to be released by the close of 2017.
“The highest resolution for publicly available maps of the Arctic region is 30 meters, compared to less than 1 meter for the rest of the United States and the rest of the industrialized world,” says Mark Brzezinski, executive director of the Arctic Executive Steering Committee at the White House.
As the Arctic comes into high resolution, Morin and Laurier said scientists will be able to study the impacts of climate change by satellite. As glaciers melt, they slump. As permafrost thaws, the ground collapses. As wildfires rage, trees vanish.
And all of these types of changes can, increasingly, be quantified remotely.
“If you’re trying to figure out the amount of carbon in a stand of trees, you can actually more precisely estimate that now, because you’ll know the height of the trees, and if you can tell what type of trees they are, you can tell what carbon’s in there,” said Morin.
Brzezinski added that, at a time when numerous Alaskan native villages are either contemplating, or on the path towards, relocation in the face of rising seas and declining sea ice, digital elevation mapping can tell you where it might be a safe place to relocate.
In sum, at a time of dramatic Arctic change, a sinking of just a few meters will now be something that scientists can document from afar. Expect a wealth of research to result.
We can’t stop the dramatic transformation of the Arctic, perhaps, but we will be able to observe it at extremely high resolution.
“By the end of 2017, all of us, with access to a computer, can zoom in to places that were as remote as can be until this mapping is revealed,” said Brzezinski.

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The Oceans Are Heating Up. That's A Big Problem On A Blue Planet

The Guardian - 

An increase in water temperatures is having a profound effect that, with hidden stores of frozen methane thawing out, will soon start to feed on itself
‘We see the effects of warming on land: the floods, the droughts, the refugees headed towards temporary safety.’ Photograph: Malcolm Francis/NIWA
So, just as a refresher, it’s always good to remember that we live on an ocean planet. Most of the Earth’s surface is salt water, studded with the large islands we call continents.
It’s worth recalling this small fact – which can slip our minds, since we humans congregate on the patches of dry ground – because new data shows just how profoundly we’re messing with those seven seas. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has published an extensive study concluding that the runaway heating of the oceans is “the greatest hidden challenge of our generation”.
When we think about global warming, we usually fixate on the air temperature. Which is spiking sharply – July was the hottest month ever measured on our planet. But as the new study points out, 90% of the extra heat that our greenhouse gases trap is actually absorbed by the oceans. That means that the upper few meters of the sea have been steadily warming more than a tenth of a degree celsius per decade, a figure that’s accelerating. When you think of the volume of water that represents, and then try to imagine the energy necessary to raise its temperature, you get an idea of the blowtorch that our civilization has become.
We see the effects of warming on land: the floods, the droughts, the refugees headed towards temporary safety. But the same scale of convulsion is under way beneath the opaque waves. The IUCN found fish fleeing toward the poles, disrupting fisheries that lasted throughout the Holocene; it found coral reefs bleaching at an ever-accelerating rate; it found, maybe most ominously, that “the warming is having its greatest impact upon the building blocks of life in the seas, such as phytoplankton, zooplankton and krill.” That is to say: we are profoundly mucking around with the very bottom of the planet’s most basic chains of life.
These risks will accelerate as the oceans warm faster: their temperature could rise four degrees celsius if we let the planet keep warming. And as that happens, of course, the warming will start to feed on itself. There are, the IUCN reminds us, huge quantities of methane frozen beneath the sea. Each degree of temperature increase will thaw some of that.
There’s only word for what we’re doing, and that is “insane”. On an ocean planet, we are wrecking the ocean. On an ocean planet, we are wrecking the ocean.
And we’re doing it needlessly. Engineers have done the work to provide us with the tools we need. We have solar panels. We have wind turbines (which, when placed offshore, have become nifty little artificial reefs). We have good data to show that if we deploy them with great speed, we can affordably power the planet without wrecking it.
Alas, we also have a fossil fuel industry, which has managed to prevent any real action for decades – it has lied, it has lobbied and it has poured uncountable largesse on our political class. (And on other elites: somewhat unbelievably, BP is currently sponsoring an exhibition on the relics of “Sunken Cities” at the British Museum.) As a result, we have disappearing ice caps, crackling forest fires and record rainfalls.
But we also have, thanks to them, a vibrant and rising movement to defend the Earth. In North Dakota today, Native Americans are laying their bodies on the line to block a new oil pipeline across the Missouri river. They are calling themselves Water Protectors. We would do well, all of us, to take up the same avocation.
Because we live on an ocean planet.

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