Lethal Heating: 01/26/18

26/01/2018

We’re Climate Researchers And Our Work Was Turned Into Fake News

The Conversation - Michael Grubb

rawpixel.com / shutterstock

Science is slow. It rests on painstaking research with accumulating evidence. This makes for an inherently uneasy relationship with the modern media age, especially once issues are politicised. The interaction between politics and media can be toxic for science, and climate change is a prominent example.
Take the recent “deep freeze” along the US east coast. To scientists, it was one more piece of a larger jigsaw of climate change disrupting weather systems and circulation patterns. This includes dramatic changes seen in Arctic sea ice and the knock-on effect on temperatures elsewhere in northern latitudes – both warming and relative cooling. To President Donald Trump the cold snap was a chance to mock climate change, and some sceptics suddenly talked about an impending ice age.

Fiction. Breitbart

Colleagues and I experienced similar frustrations in late 2017, after we published a paper in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience, in which we concluded that there was more headroom than many had assumed before we breach the goals of the Paris Agreement. We found ourselves not only on the front page of the main British newspapers, but globally, as far-right website Breitbart ran with a story that a small band of buccaneering scientists had finally admitted that the models were all wrong – a fiction rapidly picked up by the more rabid elements in the media.
The essence of good science is to continually update, challenge, improve and refine, using as much evidence as possible. Single events rarely make for good science. And if every painstaking evaluation, updating work from years ago, may be portrayed as demolishing everything that went before – particularly at the whim of non-scientific agendas – then we have a major dilemma. The edifice of science is built with small bricks and this research was no exception.
We emphatically did not show that climate change was “less bad” or “happening slower” than previously thought. Our work built on the many previous scientific studies that had looked at the risks of unchecked emissions and the prospects for limiting warming to 2℃ above pre-industrial levels. The Paris Agreement went further, aiming to “pursue efforts” towards a more ambitious goal of just 1.5℃. Given we’re already at around 1℃ of warming, that’s a relatively short-term goal. Greater ambition therefore requires greater precision.

Ten more years of this? Or 20? kamilpetran / shutterstock

Our study took a microscope to that question. Where previous estimates were drawn from a range of mostly long-run models that looked at century-long changes, we instead focused on a precise definition and current starting point, and other factors which matter far less in the long term, but a lot if the goal is much closer.
Some of the earlier estimates seemed to imply a “headroom to 1.5℃” of less than a decade of current emissions – clearly unachievable given the long timespans and huge inertia. We estimated about 20 years – equivalent to global CO₂ emissions falling steadily from now until hitting zero in around 40 years – and made it plain that it still looks, to put it mildly, a formidable ambition. Other studies have since come to similar conclusions.

A (non-)story of revolution
The more detailed reporting by those correspondents who attended the scientific briefing was accurate enough (even if some of their headlines and lead-ins weren’t), but that was soon lost in the misrepresentations that followed. Doubtless we could have done more to explain how our conclusions arose from what were actually quite minor scientific developments. Some instead turned it into a story of revolution in climate science. Scientists are also human, and these sceptic reactions reinforced a natural initial inclination among other researchers to defend their previous numbers. Some took to Twitter to do so, but themselves seemed to confuse the media headlines with our actual conclusions.
Some challenges could yet be proved right. There could, for example, be more pent-up warming currently being masked by other pollutants or already lurking in the oceans. When the goal is close, other heat-trapping emissions (like methane) also matter a lot more. Our study – like earlier work – had its share of caveats and uncertainties.

There may be even more heat lurking in the oceans. Maksimilian/shutterstock

Unfortunately, while good science embraces uncertainty, politics abhors it and the media seems confounded by it. That in turn pressures researchers to simplify their message, and treat existing estimates – often, from a range – like a position to be defended. It is a risky trap for scientists, however eminent and well-intentioned, to wield overnight reactions to parry months of painstaking peer review and refinement that lie behind analyses published in leading journals.

Science against spin
So how should science respond? The climate policy implications are easy: nothing significant has changed. We have but one planet, and both the physical and economic processes that are driving climate change have enormous inertia. If a big ocean liner were steaming into dense fog in polar seas, only a fool would maintain full speed on the basis that the technicians were still discussing the distance to the first big iceberg.
One underlying challenge is indeed around the communication of uncertainty. This is a well-worn track, but it bears repeating. The job of science is not just to narrow uncertainties, but to educate about the risks that flow logically from it. Like a medical prognosis from smoking, the fact that things might turn out better or worse than the average is not a good reason to keep puffing. You won’t know until it is too late whether the damage has been slight, or terminal.
But science also needs to embrace and embed another obvious feature of medical practice: a doctor would never look at just your temperature to diagnose your condition. So part of the problem stems from using a single indicator for complex processes. Too much debate treats temperature (and especially the most recent global average) as the sole indicator, whereas many other factors are at play including sea levels, ocean acidity, ice sheets, ecosystem trends, and many more.
These other trends need to be reported in context, just as economics news reports not only GDP but debt, employment, inflation, productivity and a host of other indicators. And scientists themselves need to improve the art of communication in a world where research can be spun, within hours, into a story of past failure, rather than the reality of continuous improvement.

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Why Climate Change Is Worsening Public Health Problems

The Conversation - Chelsey Kivland | Anne Sosin

People collect water piped in from a mountain creek in Utuado, Puerto Rico on Oct. 14, 2017, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans were still without running water. AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa

Around the world, the health care debate often revolves around access.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, recently announced: “All roads lead to universal health coverage.” Discussions for how to translate this vision into a road map for action is central to the agenda of the WHO’s executive board meeting this week in Geneva.
Yet focusing on access is not enough. The imperative for access must be paired with a frank acknowledgment that climate change is making communities around the world more vulnerable to ill health. A 2017 commission of The Lancet, a leading health research journal, tracked the effects of climate change on health and found evidence of harms “far worse that previously understood.”
Even as we move to close the access gap, a string of natural disasters in late 2017, including successive hurricanes and widespread forest fires, threaten to widen the vulnerability gap.
As a global health professional (Sosin) and a cultural anthropologist (Kivland), we have witnessed how the global exchange of health technology, expertise and aid has contributed to dramatic gains in the delivery of health care in Haiti and other settings, especially around infectious diseases. Yet climate change threatens to undermine the health gains in vulnerable communities across the globe.
As firsthand witnesses to sharp health disparities globally, we argue that world leaders need to insist that any health care strategy must address the social and environmental vulnerabilities driving poor health in the first place.

The health burden of climate change
Climate scientists argue that global warming is exacerbating extreme weather events. And natural disasters are often the source of health crises, particularly in fragile settings. Consider the case of Puerto Rico. The official death toll of the storm was estimated at 64; however, later reports have estimated that the disruption of health care services contributed to upwards of 1,052 deaths on the island.
Lagging recovery efforts have exposed how natural disasters deepen the relationship between socio-economic inequality and health disparity. In Puerto Rico, where poverty rates are double those of the poorest continental state, people already struggling with illnesses such as diabetes and kidney disease have seen their conditions worsen as the long-crumbling health care system is overwhelmed with patients and neglected by the mainland government.
The health impacts of the storms may persist even beyond the restoration of health services.
Hurricane Harvey exposed the toxic afterlife of disastrous storms. Storm damage to 40 industrial sites released chemical toxins linked to cellular damage, cancer and other long-term health problems. As The Lancet’s Commission on Pollution and Health found, air, water and soil pollution is now the leading environmental cause of death and disability, accounting for more than 9 million deaths annually. These numbers will only grow in the face of climate-induced disasters.
Restoring health care systems is vital for these communities, but it will merely treat the symptoms and not the causes of post-disaster illness. We believe that policymakers must address the link between environmental and health crises.

Haiti as case study

Men in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, collect water on Nov. 11, 2017. Years after Hurricane Matthew nearly devastated Haiti, its vulnerability only increases. Reuters/Martinez Casares

We have learned this lesson from our work in Haiti. Once a death sentence in rural Haiti, today HIV is largely controlled thanks to widespread access to antiretroviral therapy. The prevalence of the disease in pregnant women fell from 6 percent to just over 2 percent in the 10-year period from 1993 to 2003. Likewise, vaccines against cholera, introduced in 2015,have proven to be up to 90 percent effective against the disease.
However, even as vaccine coverage continues to grow, the population remains at risk for cholera and other emergent threats. Only 58 percent of the population has access to safe water and only 28 percent has access to basic sanitation. These conditions worsen in the wake of natural disasters. Hurricane Mathew in 2016 triggered spikes in cholera and other waterborne diseases, especially diarrhea, the second leading cause of death among children.
Hitting the one region of Haiti that had not yet been denuded of trees and vegetation, Hurricane Matthew seemed to complete the destruction of the country’s food systems.
Since the late 1980s, the erosion of waterways, loss of habitats and destruction of agricultural land have fueled the importation of cheap, processed foods. Rice and pasta have replaced a diet once rich in fruits, vegetables and whole grains. The high-sugar, low-nutrition foods contribute to the dual health burdens of obesity and under-nutrition.
These trends are ongoing, but they are exacerbated by the disastrous shocks of extreme weather events, which are made more likely by climate change. As Hurricane Matthew came ashore, it decimated fishing villages and tore through farming communities, killing livestock, uprooting crops and denuding backyard fruit trees. The United Nations estimated that 800,000 people suffered food shortages.

Closing the vulnerability gap
Haiti is often cast as behind the global curve. But as a reflection of the dangerous intersection of climate change, poverty and ill health, it is in fact predictive of what is to come in the rest of the world. Haiti teaches us that our own health is not bound up simply in the present decisions we make about health care systems but rather more broadly situated in the changing natural environment.
Closing the access gap has been a long battle and the gains cannot be underestimated. Yet the challenge ahead is even more daunting. Whereas increasing access has centered on extending health care technologies to underserved populations, closing the vulnerability gap will require approaches that extend beyond the health sector and national borders.
In the past year, the health care debate in the U.S. has centered on attempts to limit or expand access to care. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has left the Paris climate accord and unraveled environmental protections for national and transnational corporations – with little resistance from health advocates. We believe that leaders must recognize that environmental policy is health policy. Rollbacks of environmental regulations will cause far greater consequences on health, in the U.S. and globally, than any health care bill.
Fixing health care systems while we undermine the environmental conditions for health are a textbook example of what Haitians describe as “lave men, swiyè atè"—washing your hands but drying them in the dirt.

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The Billionaire's Guide To Surviving Global Warming – With Ian The Climate Denialist Potato

The Guardian - First Dog on the Moon

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Fighting Climate Change? We’re Not Even Landing A Punch

New York Times - Eduardo Porter

The dry bed of Lake Poopó in Bolivia, where steady warming over the last 30 years evaporated what little water was left. Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times

In 1988, when world leaders convened their first global conference on climate change, in Toronto, the Earth’s average temperature was a bit more than half a degree Celsius above the average of the last two decades of the 19th century, according to measurements by NASA.
Global emissions of greenhouse gases amounted to the equivalent of some 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year — excluding those from deforestation and land use. Worried about its accumulation, the gathered scientists and policymakers called on the world to cut CO₂ emissions by a fifth.
That didn’t happen, of course. By 1997, when climate diplomats from the world’s leading nations gathered to negotiate a round of emissions cuts in Kyoto, Japan, emissions had risen to some 35 billion tons and the global surface temperature was roughly 0.7 of a degree Celsius above the average of the late 19th century.
It took almost two decades for the next breakthrough. When diplomats from virtually every country gathered in Paris just over two years ago to hash out another agreement to combat climate change, the world’s surface temperature was already about 1.1 degrees Celsius above its average at the end of the 1800s. And greenhouse gas emissions totaled just under 50 billion tons.
This is not to belittle diplomacy. Maybe this is the best we can do. How can countries be persuaded to adopt expensive strategies to drop fossil fuels when the prospective impact of climate change remains uncertain and fixing the problem requires collective action? As mitigation by an individual country will benefit all, nations will be tempted to take a free ride on the efforts of others. And no country will be able to solve the problem on its own.
Still, the world’s diplomatic meanderings — from the ineffectual call in Toronto for a reduction in emissions to the summit meeting in Paris, where each country was allowed simply to pledge whatever it could to the global effort — suggest that the diplomats, policymakers and environmentalists trying to slow climate change still cannot cope with its unforgiving math. They are, instead, trying to ignore it. And that will definitely not work.
The world is still warming. Both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week that global temperatures last year receded slightly from the record-setting 2016, because there was no El Niño heating up the Pacific.

Warmer and Warmer

The balance after 30 years of climate diplomacy: a hotter world with more greenhouse gases.

By The New York Times | Sources: NASA (temperatures); Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (emissions)

While the world frets over President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement, I would argue that the greatest impediment to slowing this relentless warming is an illusion of progress that is allowing every country to sidestep many of the hard choices that still must be made.
“We keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome,” said Scott Barrett, an expert on international cooperation and coordination at Columbia University who was once a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Climate diplomats in Paris didn’t merely reassert prior commitments to keep the world’s temperature less than 2 degrees above that of the “preindustrial” era — a somewhat fuzzy term that could be taken to mean the second half of the 19th century. Hoping to appease island nations like the Maldives, which are likely to be swallowed by a rising ocean in a few decades, they set a new “aspirational” ceiling of 1.5 degrees.
To stick to a 2-degree limit, we would have to start reducing global emissions for real within about a decade at most — and then do more. Half a century from now, we would have to figure out how to suck vast amounts of carbon out of the air. Keeping the lid at 1.5 degrees would be much harder still.
Yet when experts tallied the offers made in Paris by all the countries in the collective effort, they concluded that greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 would exceed the level needed to remain under 2 degrees by 12 billion to 14 billion tons of CO₂.
Are there better approaches? The “climate club” proposed by the Yale University economist William Nordhaus has the advantage of including an enforcement device, which current arrangements lack: Countries in the club, committed to reducing carbon emissions, would impose a tariff on imports from nonmembers to encourage them to join.
Martin Weitzman of Harvard University supports the idea of a uniform worldwide tax on carbon emissions, which might be easier to agree on than a panoply of national emissions cuts. One clear advantage is that countries could use their tax revenues as they saw fit.

A coal-fired power plant in Kentucky. Attempts to embrace carbon capture as a climate strategy have collided with concerns about condoning the use of fossil fuels. Credit Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

Mr. Barrett argues that the Paris agreement could be supplemented with narrower, simpler deals to curb emissions of particular gases — such as the 2016 agreement at a 170-nation meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, to reduce hydrofluorocarbon emissions — or in particular industries, like aviation or steel.
Maybe none of this would work. The climate club could blow up if nonmembers retaliated against import tariffs by imposing trade barriers of their own. Coordinating taxes around the world looks at least as difficult as addressing climate change. And Mr. Barrett’s proposal might not deliver a breakthrough on the scale necessary to move the dial.
But what definitely won’t suffice is a climate strategy built out of wishful thinking: the proposition that countries can be cajoled and prodded into increasing their ambition to cut emissions further, and that laggards can be named and shamed into falling into line.
Inveigled by three decades of supposed diplomatic progress — coupled with falling prices of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries — the activists, technologists and policymakers driving the strategy against climate change seem to have concluded that the job can be done without unpalatable choices. And the group is closing doors that it would do best to keep open.
There is no momentum for investing in carbon capture and storage, since it could be seen as condoning the continued use of fossil fuels. Nuclear energy, the only source of low-carbon power ever deployed at the needed scale, is also anathema. Geoengineering, like pumping aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s heat back into space, is another taboo.
But eventually, these options will most likely be on the table, as the consequences of climate change come more sharply into focus. The rosy belief that the world can reduce its carbon dependency over a few decades by relying exclusively on the power of shame, the wind and the sun will give way to a more realistic understanding of possibilities.
Some set of countries will decide to forget Paris and deploy a few jets to pump sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to cool the world temporarily. There will be a race to develop techniques to harvest and store carbon from the atmosphere, and another to build nuclear generators at breakneck speed.
It will probably be too late to prevent the Maldives from ending up underwater. But better late than never.

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Climate Change As Seen From Space

The Conversation - René Garello

Artist’s view of Aqua, a NASA satellite in orbit around the Earth since 2002 that studies the water cycle. AIRS/Flickr, CC BY

The French National Centre for Space Research recently presented two projects for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions (CO₂ and methane) using satellite sensors. The satellites, which are to be launched after 2020, will supplement measures carried out in situ.
On a global scale, this is not the first such program to measure climate change from space: the European satellites from the Sentinel series have already been measuring a number of parameters since Sentinel-1A was launched on April 3, 2014, under the aegis of the European Space Agency. These satellites are part of the Copernicus Program (Global Earth Observation System of Systems), carried out on a global scale.
Since Sentinel-1A, the satellite’s successors 1B, 2A, 2B and 3A have been launched successfully. They are each equipped with sensors with various functions. For the first two satellites, these include a radar imaging system, for so-called “all weather” data acquisition, the radar wavelength being indifferent to cloudy conditions, whether at night or during the day. Infrared optical observation systems allow the second two satellites to to monitor the temperature of ocean surfaces. Sentinel-3A also has four sensors installed for measuring radiometry, temperature, altimetry and the topography of surfaces (both ocean and land).
The launch of these satellites builds on the numerous space missions that are already in place on a European and global scale. The data they record and transmit grant researchers access to many parameters, showing us the planet’s “pulse”. These data partially concern the ocean – waves, wind, currents, temperatures and more – showing the evolution of large water masses. The ocean acts as an engine to the climate and even small variations are directly linked to changes in the atmosphere, the consequences of which can sometimes be dramatic, including hurricanes. Data collected by sensors for continental surfaces concern variations in humidity and soil cover, whose consequences can also be significant (drought, deforestation, biodiversity, etc.).

IMAGE

Masses of data to process
Processing of data collected by satellites is carried out on several levels, ranging from research labs to more operational uses, not forgetting formatting activity done by the European Space Agency.
The scientific community is focusing increasingly on “essential variables” (physical, biological, chemical, etc.) as defined by groups working on climate change (in particular GCOS in the 1990s). They are attempting to define a measure or group of measures (the variable) that will contribute to the characterization of the climate in a critical way.
There are, of course, a considerable number of variables that are sufficiently precise to be made into indicators allowing us to confirm whether or not the UN’s objectives of sustainable development have been achieved.

Boreal AJS 3 drone is used to take measurements at a very low altitude above the sea. boreal-uas.com

The identification of these “essential variables” may be achieved after data processing, by combining this with data obtained by a multitude of other sensors, whether these are located on the Earth, under the sea or in the air. Technical progress (such as images with high spatial or temporal resolution) allows us to use increasingly precise measures.
The Sentinel program operates in multiple fields of application, including: environmental protection, urban management, spatial planning on a regional and local level, agriculture, forestry, fishing, healthcare, transport, sustainable development, civil protection and even tourism. Amongst all these concerns, climate change features at the centre of the program’s attention.
The effort made by Europe has been considerable, representing an investment of over 4 billion eurosbetween 2014 and 2020. However, the project also has very significant economic potential, particularly in terms of innovation and job creation: economic gains in the region of €30 million are expected between now and 2030.

How can we navigate these oceans of data?
Researchers, as well as key players in the socio-economic world, are constantly seeking more precise and comprehensive observations. However, with spatial observation coverage growing over the years, the mass of data obtained is becoming quite overwhelming.
Considering that a smartphone contains a memory of several gigabytes, spatial observation generates petabytes of data to be stored; and soon we may even be talking in exabytes, that is, in trillions of bytes. We therefore need to develop methods for navigating these oceans of data, whilst still keeping in mind that the information in question only represents a fraction of what is out there. Even with masses of data available, the number of essential variables is actually relatively small.

Identifying phenomena on the Earth’s surface
The most recent developments aim to pinpoint the best possible methods for identifying phenomena, using signals and images representing a particular area of the Earth. These phenomena include waves and currents on ocean surfaces, characterizing forests, humid, coastal or flooding areas, urban expansion in land areas, etc. All this information can help us to predict extreme phenomena (hurricanes), and manage post-disaster situations (earthquakes, tsunamis) or monitor biodiversity.

IMAGE

The next stage consists in making processing more automatic by developing algorithms that would allow computers to find the relevant variables in as many databases as possible. Intrinsic parameters and information of the highest level should then be added into this, such as physical models, human behaviour and social networks.
This multidisciplinary approach constitutes an original trend that should allow us to qualify the notion of “climate change” more concretely, going beyond just measurements to be able to respond to the main people concerned – that is, all of us!

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