Climate Feedback

Following on from Jeff's post on Supercallifragalistic Tuesday, Chris Mooney has a post on his blog and a column elsewhere on the differences between McCain on one side and Obama/Clinton on the other on matters climatic.

Writing before Romney dropped out of the race but after it was fairly clear he had little reason to stay in, Chris's point is that while it's true that all three of the people who might be the next President support real action on climate change, which is an undeniably good thing, they don't all support quite the same sort of action. Specifically, while the Deomocrats are talking about cap and trade measures that would lead to 80% reductions in emissions by 2050,

There are many reasons to think [McCain would] settle for a policy that is more lenient and compromise-oriented. Notably, McCain worked closely with Senator Joseph Lieberman on climate legislation in the past, and the current bipartisan Lieberman-Warner bill sets a lower target for emission reductions – a 70 percent reduction in capped emissions by 2050 (and not all emissions would be capped).

Continue reading "And then there were three" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on February 08, 2008
Categories: Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There's an interesting commenary in Nature this week (currently free to access) by Steve Rayner of the James Martin Institute in Oxford and Gwyn Prins of the LSE, arguing that while emissions abatement is a global priority, the Kyoto Protocol is the wrong tool for the job -- a one-size-fits-all approach that, among other failings, doesn't actually look likely to deliver the reductions that it has promised. Unfortunately, as they argue, this sub-optimal approach has developed an iconic status of its own, so that in many minds to be against Kyoto is tantamount to being against any form of action on climate. They're worried that this means people will uncritically attempt to follow up the Kyoto protocol (which expires in 2012) with a son-of-Kyoto that contains many or all of the same flaws, when they should be having a much more radical rethink.

In their words:

The Kyoto Protocol is a symbolically important expression of governments' concern about climate change. But as an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, it has failed. It has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth. And it pays no more than token attention to the needs of societies to adapt to existing climate change. The impending United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Bali in December — to decide international policy after 2012 — needs to radically rethink climate policy...Already, in the post-Kyoto discussions, we are witnessing that well-documented human response to failure, especially where political or emotional capital is involved, which is to insist on more of what is not working: in this case more stringent targets and timetables, involving more countries. The next round of negotiations needs to open up new approaches, not to close them down as Kyoto did.

Continue reading "The wrong trousers" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on October 24, 2007
Categories: Adaptation, Carbon markets, Climate Policy, Mitigation, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (35) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross posted from The Great Beyond

On Friday, the US Geological Survey put out a press release about its new findings on polar bears and their future, and the press responded en masse: Google offers hundreds of stories filed over the weekend. The reports’ conclusion (AP | New York Times) is that diminishing sea ice is a serious problem for the bears, with two thirds of them at risk over the next fifty years – maybe more if, as the report recognises, current estimates of ice loss are too conservative. Most quoted quote: "As the sea ice goes, so goes the polar bear" -- Steven Amstrup, the lead author of the new studies.

Some bear populations, such as those of Alaska, are expected to die out completely, which is naturally enough the lead in the Anchorage Daily News. If you’re a polar bear, the place you want to be is what the USGS calls the “convergent ice ecoregion” (a term that doesn’t seem to turn up in the news); this is where the currents pile up ice that can persist for years on the northern shores of the Canadian islands and down the eastern side of Greenland. You don’t want to be west of Greenland or in Baffin Bay, where the ice is seasonal ice and likely to vanish, or on the north shores of Russia and Alaska, where the currents move what ice there is away from the shore (the “divergent ice ecoregion”).

The reports are part of the process by which the US government will decide whether to put polar bears on the endangered species list (earlier Nature story). Geoffrey Lean, at the Independent, pulls the USGS report together with his paper’s investigation into polar bear hunting, which is apparently on the increase. Lean and others also bring up a meeting of religious, scientific and political leaders that’s been going on in Ilulissat , where “leaders of Christian, Shia, Sunni, Hindu, Shinto, Buddhist and Jewish religions took a boat to the tongue of the glacier for a silent prayer for the planet” while Robert Correll, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, warned of “a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea,” according to Paul Brown in the Guardian.

Meanwhile, almost all of the stories also mention the current reduced area of Arctic sea ice, which this year has already reached a record low and is expected to keep shrinking for a week or so more. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center is keeping a close eye on the situation with regular updates and a lot of interesting data, not to mention a really nice animation that shows how the ice cover evolves over many years (found via and easily seen at Steinn Sigurdsson's Dynamics of Cats) which explains more about the convergent and divergent ecoregions than a static map ever could.

Images: Grzegorz Polak, distributed under Creative Commons license; Wikimedia

Posted by Oliver Morton on September 10, 2007
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Just when everyone was getting sick of explaining that climate models are producing projections not predictions per se, it seems that some of them are indeed producing predictions. There's a paper (pdf) in Science from a team at the Hadley Center that shows how using real initial conditions improves the accuracy of ten year climate forecasts. They do a bit for hindcasting first, looking at historical data and comparing model runs with real initial conditions with run-of-the-mill runs. Then they do some prediction. This prediction is being treated as saying that we're at the end of a little plateau, and that at the end of this decade things will warm up further, giving a run of years in the early 2010s where the chances for new global records are good. Quirin Schiermeier wrote a story on this for news@nature, reporting that the modelling community seems pretty impressed. Here's a bunch more coverage (88 pieces at the time of googling), and for those with a subscription to Science here's the estimable Dick Kerr, who had longer to write the story than the rest of us...

Posted by Oliver Morton on August 10, 2007
Categories: Climate Science, Climate variability, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Over at News@nature, Mike Hopkin reports from the Ecological Society of America's meeting in San Jose on research into tropical forest growth rates. Looking at plots in Panama and Malaysia, the researchers found that increases in mean daily minimum temperature over a couple of decades correlated with decreases in growth rates. They associate this with lower net photosynthetic activity.

The team, led by Harvard's Ken Feeley, suggests that if this sort of effect were repeated in bigger rainforests (most of which have only experienced marginal warming to date, as I understand it) then what are now stable stores of carbon would become net sources as theworld heats up. This is obviously a considerably less optimistic scenario than the possibility that carbon-dioxide fertilisation would make them sinks. It would presumably make the net effect of the increase in soil respiration that Peter Cox and others always stress (Nature paper from 2000) an even worse problem.

It's not a dead cert that the change is due to temperature -- the paper (published in Ecology Letters) seems to suggest that increased cloudiness could be playing a role. And there could be internal botanical changes too -- maybe the lianas are doing more damage? But all in all it doesn't sound good.

Mike is blogging the conference on the newsblog.

Posted by Oliver Morton on August 10, 2007
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Climate Science, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Further to the post and subsequent discussion on Sunshades, which grew out of this article on geoengineering, I thought I'd point to the new paper by Damon Matthews and Ken Caldeira in PNAS (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073/pnas.0700419104). It's an interesting paper that has some fascinating insights into the links between climate and the carbon cycle, and I think contains some pretty bad news for would-be geoengineers.

The paper uses a University of Victoria inermediate complexity GCM along with a land cover and carbon cycle model (the Hadley Centre MOSES2 and TRIFFID -- which is pretty much the best acronym in the business) to track climate from 1900 to 2100, using historical data up to the end of the twentieth century and the IPCC A2 carbon-dioxide emissions scenario from then on. Left to itself this gives a temperature increase of 3.5 centigrade over the 200 years. They then compared this baseline to alternative scenarios in which geoengineering strategies were turned on and off at various times. The geoengineering effect -- think of it as a layer of sulphates in the stratosphere, though the model wasn't that specific -- was calibrated to reduce the incoming sunlight in such a way as to counteract the radiative forcing of the carbon dioxide at any given time.

They found that the geoengineering could reduce the change in temperature in the model to something pretty negligible, though with some latitude-dependent effects; in the geoengineered world the poles warm a little compared to 1900 while the tropics cool a little. It also appeared that you could get back to 1900 temperatures even if you started the geoengineering well into the twentyfirst century, as long as you did enough of it.

Various reports of this work have highlighted a fairly obvious subsequent finding: if you stop the geoengineering while having done nothing about carbon emissions you can get some truly horrendously quick warming; your protection vanishes almost instantaneously and the potential warming you have stored up by allowing carbon-dioxide levels to rise suddenly all appears at once. Though it's nice to have some figures on this, it hardly comes as a surprise. Stephen Schneider has been going on about the fact that once you start you can't stop for decades, and in Tom Wigley's Science article (Science 314 pp. 452 - 454 (2006) DOI: 10.1126/science.1131728) last year, which explored the possibility of using a brief period of geoengineering to buy time in which to develop and field the technology needed for radical emissions reduction, there was a nasty looking blip in the warming rate at the point where the geoengineering was turned off. But it's still a sobering thought. While geoengineering through something like sulphate in the stratosphere is "reversible", in that if it starts having nasty effects you can just turn it off and the sulphate will fall out in a few years, that doesn't just leave you with the status quo ante -- it leaves you facing a far faster rate of warming that ypu have ever seen, and the adaptation challenges that go along with that.

There's an extra wrinkle in this paper, too; in the geoengineered world, you get increased carbon-dioxide uptake by the biosphere through the carbon-dioxide fertilisation effect on plants, but no offsetting increase in the carbon dioxide given off by soil respiration, which is taken to be temperature dependent. Turn the geoengineering off and the resultant warming drives up soil respiration in a positive feedback, releasing yet more carbon dioxide and pushing temperatures yet higher. It's a good example of the links between climate and the carbon cycle and the ways they can mess you up. Not as good an example, though, as that offered by the precipitation outlook, which seems to me the most startling result here.

Continue reading "More on geoengineering" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on June 10, 2007
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Climate Science, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As devotees of Nature's print edition know, one of its treasures is the Research HIghlights spread at the beginning of every issue, put together with great care and flair by my colleague Jenny Hogan. Most of the spread consists of little comptes rendus of papers elsewhere about which we find ourselves enthused, but there's also a little micro-column at the end called Journal Club. In this column Jenny invites a scientist of note to recommend a paper from the recent literature and explain why she or he is enthused about it.

A while back it struck us that these journal club pieces would be enhanced if they were easily discussable -- discussion being the point of a journal club, really. So we decided to load them up on a blog, one entry per post, and let them find their interactive audience. Voila. So far we have all 2007's offerings posted, and we'll be filling up the archives with 2006's entries over the next few weeks, as well of course as adding a brand new entry every Wednesday evening.

For climate relevant stuff, of which there's a nice amount, try the Earth and Environment category. It boasts Peter Liss on the links between phytopankton and clouds, Andrew Watson on the circulation of the southern ocean and its importance in ice ages, and Eric Wolff on phase-locking and Milankovitch cycles. And there's plenty more for the broad of interest -- try Axel Kleidon on the emergent properties of life and climate, David Wilkinson on what it means to be putrid or Daniel Pauly on pirates, bio-oceanography and short collective memories.

Go -- enrich their comment threads with your insight and speculation.

[Update 31/v/07: The journal club blog was asking visitors for passwords over the weekend. We've made it stop doing that now. Oliver.]

Posted by Oliver Morton on May 25, 2007
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I wrote a longish feature for Nature this week on geoengineering. It goes into various details perhaps a little deeper than some accounts have, and of course also leaves out stuff that in an ideal world it would have got in. The bottom line is that lowering the earth's average temperature by putting long-lived particles of some sort into the stratosphere is, as has long been known, technologically feasible, and would alter the course of, but not completely stop, climate change. Crucially, as yet we cannot predict with any confidence what the net changes under a warming+cooling regime would be, and though there are signs they might be a little smaller than was once thought they could easily be large enough to be complete showstoppers. The article gives, I think, full voice to the uncertainties and risks involved (though I suspect some will differ, especially since the article has served as a springboard for the AEI, which makes this comment peculiarly ironic).

There are some things it doesn't do: it doesn't go into the fact that we have no way of deciding, as a world, whether to do this, nor of setting up reliable systems for managing a century long geoengineering strategy. (I say century long because the people I was talking to all seemed to be thinking about geoengineering as either a time-limited stop-gap to buy time for mitigation to get into full swing or as a way to take the edge off the worst of the warming that would accompany an "overshoot" in greenhouse gas levels before they settled down to a stabilisation plateau. No one, as I understood it, was talking about an open ended commitment that would allow emissions to go unchecked forever.) Nor does the article explore the fact that it would be conceivable for a country to embark on such a scheme unilaterally. It certainly doesn't advocate doing anything along these lines, unilaterally or multilaterally. (It also doesn't know its history, and lamentably gave Ralph Cicerone a Nobel prize that he doesn't have. I am a fool.)

What I did try and do, at least a little, was explore the reasons why many researchers don't even want to look at this issue. There's a fairly widespread feeling that even studying it lends it a certain legitimacy, and that that legitimacy could be used as a rhetorical tool -- or even as a basis for real-world programs -- by people who have no interest in reducing CO2 emissions. I can understand this as a position; people obviously have a right to avoid doing research that they believe will be misappropriated. But that said I think that this view is at least somewhat on the wane. One reason is Paul Crutzen's intervention last year (see further discussion in the journal Climate Change). Another, I think, is increasing consciousness of ocean acidification, though this is speculation on my part, and didn't as I recall make it into the finished article. Ocean acidification provides a really strong argument for cutting carbon dioxide emissions that geoengineering can do nothing about. Its acknowledgement may thus, in a strange way, provide people with a license to speculate about such ideas, since it allows all such speculation to carry the firm proviso that even if you did try geoengineering, you'd have to cut emissions anyway -- that there's no either/or.

Continue reading "Sunshades" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on May 12, 2007
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Via Gary at Muck and Mystery, various reports on the conference on biochar/agrichar/terra preta nova/what-you-will that just ended down in Australia. If you're not up to speed on this, the general idea is that people could help solve a great many problems by enriching soils with reduced carbon in charcoal-like form. This gets rid of the carbon for a long time (charcoal is very refractory) and improves the soil in various not yet fully understood ways. My colleague Emma wrote a lovely feature on the subject last year. There's what seems to be a thriving discussion board on the subject at Hypography. And we have an article on the subject in Nature this week (see below).

The conference was opened by Tim "Weather Maker" Flannery, which is a pretty big name for a new field to manage to attract, I'd have thought. Here's an overview of the conference by Kelpie Wilson of the Energy Bulletin. One interesting aspect is the idea of tying this issue to the issue of crappy stoves that drive indoor air pollution and waste a lot of energy.

Transect points, a blog by soil scientist Philip Small who, like Gary, is tracking this issue, has more reports in a round-up. As one of the people quoted says, the great thing about this field is that it opens up in so many different directions. Its also low tech enough to be of real use globally. The flip side of that is that different techniques will be needed in different places -- this is unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all technology.

As I mentioned we've a look at the subject in Nature this week, too -- a commentary (pdf) from one of the field's main men, Johannes Lehmann of Cornell, which takes things forward nicely, I think. One of the advantages he points out for biochar sequestration -- as opposed, say, to sequestration of carbon in aquifers -- is that once the carbon is in the soil "it is difficult to imagine any incident or change in practise that would cause a sudden loss of stored carbon". And he also argues that this sort of practise could be carried out at a serious scale:

I have calculated emissions reductions for three separate biochar approaches that can each sequester about 10% of the annual US fossil-fuel emissions (1.6 billion tonnes of carbon in 2005). First, pyrolysis of forest residues (assuming 3.5 tonnes biomass per hectare per year) from 200 million hectares of US forests that are used for timber production; second, pyrolysis of fast-growing vegetation (20 tonnes biomass per hectare per year) grown on 30 million hectares of idle US cropland for this purpose; third, pyrolysis of crop residues (5.5 tonnes biomass per hectare per year) for 120 million hectares of harvested US cropland. In each case, the biochar generated by pyrolysis is returned to the soil and not burned to offset fossil-fuel use. Even greater emissions reductions are possible if pyrolysis gases are captured for bioenergy production.

Similar calculations for carbon sequestration by photosynthesis suggest that converting all US cropland to Conservation Reserve Programs — in which farmers are paid to plant their land with native grasses — or to no-tillage would sequester 3.6% of US emissions per year during the first few decades after conversion; that is, just a third of what one of the above biochar approaches can theoretically achieve.

Posted by Oliver Morton on May 11, 2007
Categories: Mitigation, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

This week in Nature we have a news story on an attempt to follow up Frank Keppler's work on methane produced aerobically by green plants which we published early last year (news story | paper). The Keppler piece, which suggested that methane emissions from green plants were a significant but previously unappreciated factor in global methane emissions, caused quit a lot of fuss, understandably, in the media -- since methane is a greenhouse gas which, over short time horizons, is about 75 times more powerful than carbon dioxide -- and quite a lot of befuddlement among plant scientists. If it were true, it would have significant implications for the way that people model methane production, and the levels of production that one might predict in a warming world. The debate rumbled on last year (another news report, this time by my colleague Quirin).

The new work that Tom Dueck and colleagues have published in New Phytologist (paper), though , finds no methane emissions from plants at all.

Obviously, not necessarily the last word. As Mike Hopkin reports:

Both groups have criticized the other's choice of experimental method. Dueck says that Keppler's group kept plants in sealed plastic containers instead of flow chambers, and exposed them to sources of stress such as bright sunlight and high temperature, which could have produced methane as an artefact. Keppler retorts that the use of ¹³C is an artificial piece of chemical trickery with unknown effects on plant metabolism, and also argues that methane production can vary by up to three orders of magnitude between species.

What Mike doesn't mention, because an evil news editor (me) wouldn't give him the space, is that various people in the community have pointed to an interesting contrast between the way plant scientists responded to the discovery of isoprene emissions and the Keppler work. With isoprene people said oh that's interesting, replicated, and got on with it. This work has had a far frostier welcome.

On isoprene, this is as good a place as any to mention an interesting perspective by Manuel Lerdau in Science a few weeks ago on a possible isoprene-ozone positive feedback (paper). Isoprene within leaves protects the plants that produce it against ozone. But when isoprene gets out into the air, as it will, it can react with nitrogen oxides to make ozone. Only some species produce isoprene, and so these isoprene-producing plants both protect themselves against ozone and, in Nox-rich environments, increase the ozone stress on their non-isoprene-producing neighbours.

If this effect is real, it might have significant effects on forest composition over the next century.

One last thing to note on the Keppler story: it led to Carl Zimmer saying something nice about us, and that is always a good thing. As of course is Carl.

Posted by Oliver Morton on May 04, 2007
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Oliver Morton is Chief News and Features Editor at Nature. Oliver joined Nature in late 2005 - a bit more than twenty years after he started of as a science writer doing an internship at The Economist. In the years in between he edited The Economist's science and technology pages, worked as editor of the UK/Europe edition of Wired, freelanced for everyone from The New Yorker to the Hollywood Reporter, wrote Mapping Mars, a book which the critics liked quite a lot, won a couple of awards, blogged a bit and found a number of other ways to use up half of his life so far.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 26, 2007
Categories: Recent contributors, Oliver Morton | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)