Climate Feedback

The political debate over climate change is ratcheting up in the two notable holdouts to the Kyoto protocol – Australia and the United States. The current issue of Nature takes a look at upcoming national elections in both countries, and what role climate change is playing in each.

We got started on this special package of features knowing we wanted to flag the 24 November elections in Australia. Political experts differ, but most polls and other observations suggest that climate is a more defining factor now than at other times when Liberal prime minister John Howard has been up for re-election. In our piece, Sydney-based journalist Stephen Pincock reports on the climate moves the Howard government has been making, and whether that will be enough for him to come from behind in opinion polls that have him trailing his Labor opponent Kevin Rudd. Keep tabs on the latest with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s election site.

Once we got going on the Australian situation, we couldn’t help but start wondering about the US presidential election. It’s still nearly a year away, but the rhetoric about energy policy is flying fast and furious. Every leading candidate, for both the Democratic and Republican nominations, has a serious-sounding platform about how to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. The question, of course, is who will actually be elected and what will he (or she) actually do? Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson has spun a hypothetical piece about what the new president might be able to accomplish in leading the US in climate policy. (For a more science-fiction take on this scenario, check out Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novel Sixty Days and Counting, in which a newly-elected president tries to save the world from a global-warming-triggered meltdown.)

And finally, we had been looking for other ways to tackle the complex suite of climate-related bills now moving slowly through the US Congress. We collected together a group of experts from science, industry, policy, and environmentalism to talk shop about what we might expect in terms of mandatory emissions cuts, and when. It was a lively discussion in the conference room of Nature’s Washington offices, fueled by coffee and a large number of sugary pastries from the bakery downstairs. Which, when you come to think about it, is never a bad way to go about solving the world’s problems.

Alexandra Witze, chief of correspondents for America, Nature

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 16, 2007
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Posted by Oliver Morton on behalf of Alex Witze

It’s not easy being a US state climatologist -- reporters call you every time a freak storm happens, the title generally carries more glory than pay, and every once in a while the governor starts paying attention to what you’re doing.

Patrick J. Michaels, the longtime state climatologist for Virginia, has finally thrown in the towel. A noted sceptic on climate change (see our earlier story), Michaels retired this summer after saying the position had become too politicized for him to function.

Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson has a brief update here (Oct. 4 issue, page 521[I'll post a link when the issue goes live]). A note of warning to the guy who replaces Michaels: you might steer clear of accepting funding from the oil and gas industry while you’re in the job.

-- Alex Witze

Posted by Oliver Morton on October 03, 2007
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Alex Witze

Everybody’s been reviewing the new book on hurricanes and global warming, and Nature is no exception. We’ve got not one, but two reviews of Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming.

In Nature proper, James Elsner of Florida State provides the academic’s reading. He pulled off a nice metaphor for the lead of the review (calling the book ‘a reconnaissance flight into the turbulent debate over a link between hurricane activity and global warming’), which made me a tad envious. I thought I was being clever with my own lead for a review of the book, which appears online on Nature Reports Climate Change. Unlike Elsner, I chose to riff off the reputation of the book’s author, Chris Mooney, and his recent work on how scientists can best ‘frame’ their results for the public.

Both reviews, though, will tell you the main point of the book: the battle over hurricanes and climate change, with MIT’s Kerry Emanuel and Colorado State’s Bill Gray taking starring roles as antagonists. Storm World is a colorful glimpse into this highly publicized corner of tropical meteorology, with scientists trading barbs at conferences and via media appearances. It’s also a good book to read as hurricane season in several ocean basins nears its peak: at the time of this writing, Hurricane Flossie was bearing down on the Big Island of Hawaii with its category-3 strength winds.

Alex Witze
Nature's chief of correspondents for America

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 14, 2007
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Posted by Olive Heffernan on behalf of Alex Witze

This week’s issue of Nature has several news stories related to climate change.

First up, we’ve got a look at the bill introduced recently in the US Congress by Senators Jeff Bingaman (New Mexico) and Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania). It’s the latest in a rush of climate bills that have been coming before Congress in recent months, spurred by the Democratic takeover in January. The Bingaman/Specter plan isn’t as stringent as other bills that would slash emissions more drastically, but has the backing – at least so far – of groups that don’t typically support emissions cuts, like utility companies and labor unions. So some observers think this new bill could form the backbone of an eventual compromise for US climate-change legislation.

It’s hard to keep track of all the bills that are out there these days. Some handy places to check for comparisons are a Senate website and the World Resources Institute chart. We might have put the latter chart into the news story this week, but it used old numbers for a draft version of the Bingaman/Specter bill, and is being updated now with the final version.

Another chart didn’t make the news section this week – that’s a figure appearing in the July 13 issue of Science, in a Perspectives piece by Peter Cox and David Stephenson of the University of Exeter. It’s a simple chart showing how uncertainties in model predictions change over time, with the total uncertainty being the least 30 to 50 years in the future. The Cox/Stephenson paper basically argues that climate model projections need to become more useful and relevant on this time scale; any changes for the next 30 years are essentially already ‘in the system’, and changes after about five decades out are too uncertain to say anything really meaningful about. Focus on that sweet spot, they say, and climate modelers are serving society’s needs better.

The original Science piece is here; our news piece, which also wraps in a tiny bit of the newly-released US Climate Change Science Program report on climate scenarios, is here.

Alex Witze
Senior News and Features Editor
Nature

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 20, 2007
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Posted by Olive Heffernan on behalf of Alex Witze

There are only 17 months left until the US presidential election, which means it’s time for the jockeying to begin in earnest. On climate issues, this means that the leading candidates from both parties have in recent weeks been competing to see who can be greener than thou.

Most notable has been the recent about-face pulled by Illinois senator Barack Obama, the fledgling star of the Democratic party, on coal-to-liquids technology. Illinois is a state with a lot of coal, and so it was perhaps not surprising when earlier this year Obama supported legislation that would give tax breaks to the coal industry to develop coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology. The problem is that CTL is a major emitter of greenhouse gases, even if much of the resulting carbon is captured in sequestration. So recently Obama backed off his support of CTL, saying he thinks it is a good idea only if the technology improves to the point of emitting fewer carbon emissions over its life cycle than conventional fuels. A political move to be sure, but one with significant energy ramifications, given Obama’s prominence in the race so far.

Obama’s leading rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, has no such problems: she represents New York, a state with little interest in coal. She has instead come out with alternative energy plans that rely heavily on taxes and research money to shift the US away from dependence on foreign oil. Using the same rhetoric one hears from many energy experts these days, she says the US needs an investment on the scale of the Apollo moon project to improve energy efficiency. This may be true -- but given the level of wrangling going on in Congress this week over proposed energy legislation, it’s pretty clear that we would have never gotten to the moon at all had politicians been in charge.

Meanwhile, trailing far behind Clinton, Obama, and former senator John Edwards in the Democratic field is a man who really knows his energy: Bill Richardson, currently governor of New Mexico and former US Secretary of Energy. As he points out in a critically-acclaimed YouTube campaign ad, the man is perhaps too qualified to be president. This is the man to listen to for true energy wonkery.

On the Republican side, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani has criticized the Bush administration for a lack of action on climate issues; Giuliani supports a range of approaches, including popular ones like ethanol and unpopular ones like nuclear power. John McCain, the senator from Arizona, is of course a leading proponent of legislation to cut carbon emissions; the bill he co-sponsored years ago with Joe Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent from Connecticut, is the early gold standard for climate-change legislation, proposing a 65 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. And the third leading Republican candidate, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, has said relatively little so far, other than the standard lines about reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil.

Potential late entries into the race could also shake up energy and climate issues. Rumors continue to swirl that former vice-president and climate lecturer Al Gore may jump in. And Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire current mayor of New York, this week withdrew from the Republican party in what is widely seen as a move towards a potential presidential candidacy as an independent. He’s been very active on energy issues – for instance, ordering the entire New York taxi fleet to convert to hybrid vehicles within five years. And his closeness with California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger makes for a powerful partnership of regional leaders who want to pave the way for federal action on climate.

Stay tuned – it’ll be a long and interesting 17 months.

Alex Witze
Senior News and Features Editor
Nature

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 21, 2007
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Posted by Olive Heffernan on behalf of Alex Witze

June 1 is almost here, and for residents of the eastern US, Caribbean and Central America that means just one thing: stock up on the plywood and batten down the hatches, for the Atlantic hurricane season is upon us.

This week’s Nature features a minor rush of hurricane-related items. First off, in a technical manuscript, Ryan Sriver and Matthew Huber of Purdue University spell out how tropical cyclones could play a significant role in mixing the ocean’s topmost layers. They find that about 15 percent of the peak ocean heat transport can be linked to the ocean mixing caused by cyclones. Kerry Emanuel of MIT has had much the same idea before, but the Purdue work extends and better quantifies the role of hurricanes. It’s an interesting study that turns some conventional wisdom on its head: instead of worrying about how climate change affects hurricanes, maybe we should be worrying instead about how hurricanes affect climate change. Quirin Schiermeier, our correspondent in Munich, has a longer news feature on this, plus more on ocean mixing in general. (See also Martin Visbeck’s essay on ocean mixing from last week).

I've got a short news story previewing the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season. The National Hurricane Center in Miami has put out almost exactly the same forecast as last year, calling for an above-average number of storms. The 2006 predictions didn’t pan out so well – blame a late summer El Nino that surged unexpectedly, quashing the number of expected hurricanes. This year, forecasters don’t expect that to happen – and in fact anticipate a weak La Nina, the opposite weather pattern that should permit more hurricanes to form. In other words, buckle up.

One of the interesting things about this year’s season is that there is a new director for the hurricane center. This is a very big and high-profile job in the US; the center director serves as a public face for warning of dangerous storms, including trying to get people to evacuate when necessary. The previous director, Max Mayfield, was well liked by nearly everyone (even if New Orleans officials didn’t listen to his warnings as much as perhaps they should have as Hurricane Katrina approached the city in August 2005). Now the hot seat belongs to Bill Proenza, a former director of the southern region of the National Weather Service. He’s a frequent and outspoken critic of his bosses, and this month has been complaining that his center doesn’t get enough money for forecasting. He may be right, but the Atlantic is by far the best-funded and best-studied of all the world’s hurricane regions. Let us not forget the Pacific or the Indian oceans, which get hammered regularly without the benefit of a highly regarded, highly publicized hurricane center to spread warnings.

The other thing to pay attention to is the relative merits of the different ways of studying wind directons above the sea surface. The US currently has two satellites that measure this factor, but in two very different ways. The QuikSCAT satellite is a scatterometer, bouncing microwaves off the surface and measuring them when they return. The Coriolis satellite uses a radiometer, which measures microwave emissions from the ocean surface itself. Which is the better approach? Each has its merits for detecting wind vectors and each has its disadvantages. Members of Congress, though, are upset that no plans are in the works to replace the QuikSCAT scatterometer, which is far past its intended lifetime. One thing that didn’t make it into the story is the fact that Europe operates its own scatterometer, ASCAT.

If you want to stay up to date as the hurricane season progresses, I recommend checking out the Florida newspapers. The Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times are particularly good sources of local information. For more of an overview, check out this week’s New York Times science section , which has a pair of lead stories devoted to hurricanes; John Schwartz, a technology reporter who covered much of the Katrina failure, has a piece on how engineers try to outwit the storms through construction. And Cornelia Dean, who has long covered coastal development issues, has a good overview on the ongoing debates over the potential links between climate change and hurricanes.

Here at Nature, we too will do our part to keep you involved and informed. Complementing our existing coverage online and in print, Nature Reports Climate Change, NPG's dedicated climate change website will be launching next week - check in with us for updated coverage as the season gets underway.

Alex Witze
Senior News and Features Editor
Nature

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 30, 2007
Categories: Recent contributors, Alex Witze, Climate Science, Hurricanes, In the News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)