Lethal Heating: 11/18/16

18/11/2016

Probing Worst-Case Environmental Outcomes Under Trump and the G.O.P.

New York Times - Andrew C. Revkin

Why are some Christian climate sceptics going green? Interview with Andrew Refkin

As the election results emerged last Wednesday (a “black elephant” more than a “black swan”), I focused on the prospect, however slim, of reasonableness on environmental and energy issues in a Trump White House.

Hidden behind the flow of fact-free tweets and edge-wooing stump statements, Trump’s campaign had posted reasonable ideas when the Science Debate organization asked questions on the role of science funding in fostering innovation (it’s great, unless it’s climate science, evidently) and the merits of a post-fossil energy system.

The “perhaps” qualifier made it clear that the campaign’s response on renewable energy didn’t come from the master of declarative superlatives himself:

“Perhaps we should be focused on developing energy sources and power production that alleviates the need for dependence on fossil fuels.”

But it did imply that someone in Trump’s policy camp was thinking beyond pandering (onetime solar hawk James Woolsey, perhaps?). David Victor of the University of California, San Diego, has written on the prospect of limited damage.

But it’s important to be realistic and consider the darker possibilities (perhaps probabilities, if Trump’s early appointments are a barometer).

First read the “listicle from hell” of 11 steps Trump and a Republican Congress can pursue, assembled yesterday by David Roberts and Brad Plumer at Vox, with the points helpfully distilled in a tweeted image by Cris Robertson here:

IMAGE

Here’s the introduction:

Unified Republican control of the federal government over the next two years augurs a sea change in US environmental policy like nothing since the late 1960s and ’70s, when America’s landmark environmental laws were first passed.

If Donald Trump and the GOP actually follow through on what they’ve promised, this time around will be a lurch in the opposite direction. Federal climate policy will all but disappear; participation in international environmental or climate treaties will end; pollution regulations will be reversed, frozen in place, or not enforced; clean energy research, development, and deployment assistance will decline; protections for sensitive areas and ecosystems will be lifted; federal leasing of fossil fuels will expand and accelerate; new Supreme Court appointees will crack down on EPA discretion.

Some of these moves will be easy for Trump and Republicans in Congress to pull off. Others will be harder: Senate Democrats and environmental groups in court will fight them tooth and nail, as they did during the Reagan and Bush years. But there’s no escaping the fact that the GOP is in a strong position to demolish and reshape the regime of environmental protection that has been built up over the past 50 years.

Jerry Taylor, a libertarian who favors a carbon tax. Credit Niskanen Center

Read the rest at Vox.com, but please return to consider some more thoughts on a Trump presidency offered by Jerry Taylor. Taylor is one of the most interesting voices for me in Washington on climate policy given his path to supporting a carbon tax and other steps after spending years at the free-market-focused Cato Institute challenging the need for substantial steps to blunt human-driven global warming. Taylor, now heading his own organization, the Niskanen Center, still seeks a limited-government approach but has enthusiastically made the conservative case for a carbon tax.

He sent the following note around this morning. Please click the links and read:

While much of Washington is still in shock over the Trumpocolypse, the Niskanen Center has wasted no time reorienting itself to new political realities. Yesterday on our blog, my colleagues David Bailey and David Bookbinder offered a close look at how far Republicans could go in the course of unwinding federal climate action. While the Paris agreement and the Clean Power Plan are almost certainty dead and gone, significant legal and political obstacles confront Republicans wishing to go further. The climate fight that’s likely coming will be pitched and bloody.

Today, I offered my own thoughts on the impact the elections have had on those of us who support carbon taxation in the GOP. While it’s not impossible to imagine scenarios where carbon taxation still goes forward in the 115th Congress, it’s obviously less likely now under a Trump administration. There are lessons to be learned from last week, however, that should inform our efforts in the future, and I discuss them on our blog today.

Many of you have contacted me since the election to ask about Myron Ebell, the head of the Trump transition team at EPA. I shared my thoughts about Myron (who I’ve known professionally for about 20 years) with reporter Danny Vinik in Politico yesterday. Danny writes an excellent profile for those interested in where environmental policy may be heading in the next four years.

But do not despair! Washington energy attorney Brian Potts makes the case yesterday in Forbes that I would make a great choice to run the EPA in the upcoming Trump administration. Don’t hold your breath.

Related | The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which runs one of the critical hubs for climate analysis, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has just published “guidance for the next U.S. presidential administration and Congress on the importance of better understanding and predicting weather, water, climate, and other aspects of the Earth system.”

I hope it’s read by the Trump team, not because this’ll convince Trump that the warming impact of greenhouse gases is a serious threat. With or without global warming, there’s a solid argument that improved understanding of planetary dynamics, particularly the climate system, is essential to sustaining human progress given how risks rise as populations expand, build, farm and concentrate in zones that are implicitly vulnerable to hard knocks like floods, droughts, heat and severe storms.

Here’s part of the news release:

“[The] UCAR white paper emphasizes that focused investment of federal resources in the atmospheric, Earth, and related sciences will make significant contributions addressing important societal needs. These include protection of lives and property, expansion of new economic opportunities, enhancement of national security, and strengthening U.S. leadership in research and development.

“More than ever, federal support of research and education into the Earth system is critical to the nation,” said UCAR President Antonio J. Busalacchi. “We are on the verge of a new era of prediction, based on understanding how the entire Earth system works. This will have a direct, positive impact on lives and livelihoods.”

…The white paper proposes federal support for advanced computer models, new observing systems, and more powerful computing resources, as well as a strong science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education system. Its proposals include a National Academies’ decadal survey, involving representatives of the public and private sectors, which would develop priorities for weather research and forecasting.

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Forty Years Of Measuring The World’s Cleanest Air Reveals Human Fingerprints On The Atmosphere

The Conversation - Sam Cleland | Melita Keywood | Paul Fraser | Paul Krummel

Cape Grim, on the northwest tip of Tasmania, is exposed to some of the cleanest air in the world. CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology, Author provided

In 2016, an isolated scientific outpost in northwest Tasmania made a historic finding. The Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station measured carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere exceeding 400 parts per million.
This wasn’t the first time the world has breached the symbolic climate change threshold – that honour was reached by the northern hemisphere in 2013 – but it was a first for the south.
Behind these recent findings is a history of Australia’s role in global scientific advancement. The Cape Grim station has now been running for 40 years and the resulting data set chronicles the major changes in our global atmosphere.

A national response
In 1798, Matthew Flinders’ encounter with Cape Grim confirmed to Europeans that Tasmania (then Van Diemen’s Land) was separated from the mainland of Australia.
Fast forward to the early 1970s and a small group of innovative scientists were hatching a plan to take advantage of Cape Grim’s isolation and unique geographical position. The site soon became one of the world’s most significant atmospheric measurement sites, meticulously measuring and recording some of the cleanest air that can be accessed on the planet.
There were two threads to the beginnings of Cape Grim. One was the young scientists at CSIRO, keen to pioneer an emerging field of science. The second was a call from the United Nations for global governments to work together to set up a network of monitoring stations. The Australian response was championed by Bill Priestley and Bill Gibbs, the respective senior climate figureheads at CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology.
The scientific community decided that Cape Grim was the most appropriate site for a permanent monitoring station, thereby establishing in 1976 the Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station.
The first set of instruments lived in an ex-NASA caravan. Today the station is managed by the Bureau of Meteorology and housed in a permanent building that features state-of-the-art infrastructure, including a tower fitted with important monitoring equipment. Many of the early pioneering scientists are still actively involved in this research.

The first set of air monitoring instruments lived in an ex-NASA caravan. CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology

The world’s cleanest air
The station, part of the World Meteorological Organisation’s Global Atmosphere Watch network, was sited at Cape Grim to take advantage of the “roaring forties” - the prevailing westerly winds that bring clean air from over the Southern Ocean to the station.
Air that arrives at the station from the southwest is classified as “baseline” air. Having had no recent contact with land, it represents the background atmosphere and is perhaps some of the cleanest in the world.
While we focus on this clean air, most of the instruments monitor continuously, regardless of wind direction, and can detect pollution from Melbourne and other parts of Tasmania in certain conditions.
The station measures all major and minor greenhouse gases; ozone-depleting chemicals; aerosols (including black carbon or soot); reactive gases including lower-atmosphere ozone, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds; radon (an indicator of changes to the land); solar radiation; the chemical composition of rainwater; mercury; persistent organic pollutants; and finally the weather.
The Cape Grim Air Archive, initiated by CSIRO in 1978 and soon adopted into the operations of the station, is now the world’s most important and unique collection of background atmospheric air samples, underpinning many research papers on global and Australian emissions of greenhouse and ozone depleting gases.

The Cape Grim station maintains an archive of air from the 1970s to today. CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology, Author provided

The human fingerprint
Cape Grim data are freely available and have been widely used in all five international climate change assessments (1990-2013), all ten international ozone depletion assessments (1985-2014), in four State of the Climate Reports 2010-2016 and in lower-atmosphere ozone assessments.
Measurements at Cape Grim have demonstrated the impact of human activity on the atmosphere. For example, CO₂ has increased from about 330 parts per million (ppm) in 1976 to more than 400 ppm today, an average increase of 1.9 ppm per year since 1976. Since 2010 the rate has been 2.3 ppm per year. The isotopic ratios of CO₂ measured at Cape Grim have changed in a way that is consistent with fossil fuels being the source of higher concentrations.

Cape Grim has documented the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology, Author provided

Cape Grim has also demonstrated the effectiveness of action to reduce human impacts. The decline in concentrations of ozone-depleting substances measured at Cape Grim demonstrates the progress of the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to phase out the use of these chemicals, and leading to the gradual recovery of the ozone hole.
Measurements at Cape Grim have contributed significantly to global understanding of marine aerosols, including some of the first evidence that microscopic marine plants (phytoplankton) are a source of gases that play a role in cloud formation. With 70% of the Earth’s surface covered by oceans, aerosols in the marine environment play an important role in the climate system.
Cape Grim data are also used by the Australian government to meet international obligations. For example, the station’s greenhouse gas data have independently verified parts of Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, which reports Australia’s annual emissions to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Persistent organic pollutants have been reported to the Stockholm Convention on these chemicals and Cape Grim mercury data will be reported to the Minimata Convention.
Data collected from the Cape Grim Station have been used in more than 700 research papers on climate change and atmospheric pollution. By working with universities Cape Grim is a training ground for the next generation of climate scientists.

CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology

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Australia Ranked Among Worst Developed Countries For Climate Change Action

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Two reports place the country near the bottom of the league for emissions level, use of renewables and action to combat global warming

A banner from a march in favour of tackling climate change in Melbourne. In the climate change performance index, released at the UN climate talks in Marrakech, Australia was ranked fifth-worst for emissions and policies among developed countries. Photograph: Ratnayake/REX Shutterstock

Australia has been singled out again as a climate laggard, being ranked fifth-worst for emissions and policies among developed countries and among the six worst countries in the G20 when it comes to climate action.
In the climate change performance index, released overnight at the UN climate talks in Marrakech, Australia comes ahead of only Kazakhstan, South Korea, Japan and Saudi Arabia.
The 58 countries assessed by Climate Action Network Europe and Germanwatch are responsible for 90% of global energy-related carbon pollution. They are then ranked according to their emissions level, the trend in emissions, the deployment of renewable energy, the energy intensity of the economy and climate policies.
Australia is near the bottom of the countries, labelled as having “very poor performance”.
Australia’s hostile relationship between federal and state climate policies was noted in the report, which said: “While the former were rather unambitious and uninspired, the latter managed to some extent to take independent action.”
The finding came following comments from the prime minister and federal ministers, criticising state-based renewable energy and emissions targets.
Since previous rankings, Australia improved slightly with its emissions trend but dropped in energy efficiency.
The Australian Conservation Foundation’s chief executive, Kelly O’Shanassy, said: “The government spruiks its climate credentials but Australia remains a laggard on cutting climate pollution.
“The world is watching as our pollution rises and governments support new mega-polluting coalmines.”
O’Shanassy said Australia must not proceed with Adani’s Carmichael coalmine.
Meanwhile, the federal minister for energy and the environment, Josh Frydenberg, used his time in Marrakech to lobby the US in favour of Adani’s Carmichael coalmine, complaining about US activists funding a campaign to stop the huge project from proceeding.
In a separate study from the London School of Economics, researchers examined the consistency of actions of G20 countries, compared with the goals of the Paris agreement.
It found Australia – as well as Argentina, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the US – were “falling behind with their national climate mitigation action”.
“These countries lack overall framework legislation or regulation on climate change, need to move from sectoral to economy-wide targets and extend the timeframe of their targets to 2030,” the report said.

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