Climate Feedback

Cross posted from Heliophage

Interest in biochar has been building up in the UK recently. There was a cover story by Fiona Harvey in the FT a month ago with a familiar headline, Jim Lovelock and James Hansen have been extolling its virtues, it's been on the Today Programme (text here on BBC News), there are new technologies being talked up and there's an interesting looking workshop at the newly established UK Biochar Research Centre in Edinburgh on April 1st. And so of course there is also a backlash: last Monday George Monbiot, whose written on such subjects before, delivered a stirring oppositional salvo in the Guardian (and here's the link to the version on his own site, same text but with references -- a good habit more newspaper columnists should take up):

This miracle solution has suckered people who ought to know better, including the earth systems scientist James Lovelock(3), the eminent climate scientist Jim Hansen(4), the author Chris Goodall and the climate campaigner Tim Flannery(5). At the UN climate negotiations beginning in Bonn on Sunday, several national governments will demand that biochar is eligible for carbon credits, providing the financial stimulus required to turn this into a global industry(6). Their proposal boils down to this: we must destroy the biosphere in order to save it.

In his otherwise excellent book, Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, Chris Goodall abandons his usual scepticism and proposes that we turn 200 million hectares of “forests, savannah and croplands” into biochar plantations. Thus we would increase carbon uptake, by grubbing up “wooded areas containing slow-growing trees” (that is, natural forest) and planting “faster-growing species”(7). This is environmentalism?
...

Read the rest of the post -- more Monbiot and responses to his criticism -- at Heliophage -->

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 30, 2009
Categories: Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A sobering presentation by Marshall Burke of Stanford on future agriculture. He and colleagues looked at historical climate and yield data for various crops in various parts of the world and projected the relationship they found into various future climates as found in the IPCC. As the IPCC itself reported, much of the tropics did badly in this analysis, and the worst performer was maize in southern Africa which was down in yield by about 30% by 2030.

More granular data run out to 2050 showed similar or worse trends, and the rest of Africa did pretty badly too. So did other crops in the same countries, such as millet and sorghum, though as Andy Jarvis of Biodiversity International pointed out from the floor, this may be somewhat worst case. You don't just go on growing the same thing as the situation gets worse and worse. As climates change so will the crops farmers grow, which should help a bit.

While the IPCC has already predicted that tropical agriculture will have its productivity hit by any climate change, it said it expected that in temperate zones modest warming might help productivity. In at least one case Burke went into -- maize in the US -- there are studies suggesting things start going wrong much sooner than that, with yield losses of 30% or so by 2030. Modest rises have been seen: sharp downturns are to come. Burke says that an economic model fed with these and other gloomier-than-common yield assumptions suggests that prices are set to rise more steeply than the IPCC has foreseen: a 1ºC rise in temperature looks like a 25% increase in prices, hurting some poor farmers and a lot of poor consumers.

As Burke pointed out, we care about these food security issues because we care about people. A World Bank study suggests that the food crisis of 2007-2008 pushed 100m people into poverty. Reduced yields are normally bad for poor farmers, for whom consequent price increases rarely make up for lost production. They are also bad for the urban poor, who just see the price increases. That 25% increase in prices will some poor farmers and a lot of poor consumers. And on current trends that's just the beginning.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 12, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a look this morning at a breakdown of the press registration at this conference by country. Clear winners are Denmark and the UK, with 40 or so people each. Both of those are inflated figures, because some third-country and international organisations are covering the meeting out of Copenhagen and London (Japanese TV stations are listed as UK, for example, as is Al Jazeera English). But still there is a lot of genuine UK interest: national papers and the BBC. And the locals are out in force.

US representation, on the other hand, seems distinctly on the modest side. As far as I can see from the press room and by searching the papers' web sites there's no-one here from national papers (the Paris-based International Herald Tribune is a sort-of-exception) and not much broadcast. Time is listed as a media partner, but I haven't seen Bryan Walsh here. The rest of the world is represented at a pretty low level, but still here -- I was struck by a biggish contingent from Bangladesh.

Does it matter? Hard to say. The conference is hitting headlines, there are a lot of journalists for specialised outlets here, and the press room people say they are very happy with the level of coverage: Stefan Rahmstorf's sea-level talk on Tuesday, which I didn't see but which people here are talking about a lot, is getting a lot of pick up, to judge by Google News. But in the plenaries this morning John Schellnhuber and Nick Stern were reminding the thousand or so people in the room that this is one of the biggest stories in the world, and they were doing so pretty effectively. And part of the point of this meeting, as I understand it, is to take that same sort of approach and use it to set a scientific stage for the COP 15 "son of Kyoto" meeting, which will take place in the same large shed-like structure this December. By that standard, the coverage that I have seen (and I've been busy, to be fair, just talking to people at sessions, and may have missed lots of good stuff) seems a little thin.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 12, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It appears that the action on Wednesday afternoon was where I was not: in the session on tipping points. Chris Jones of the Met Office's Hadley Centre presented some studies of the Amazon (abstract in pdf) that have caused a big media stir. The studies suggest that a) there is a threshold level of warming beyond which much of the Amazon forest is committed to die back (probably being replaced by savanna) and b) that for significant parts of the forest that threshold is alarmingly low. Indeed it is quite possibly either unavoidable in the near future or already dwindling in the rear-view mirror. As I understand it from people who saw the presentation, models in which all the warming already in the pipeline (ie with no further emissions) is realised leave the forests pretty much committed to some dieback, and modest further warming seals the deal. I wasn't able to check that with Jones himself, but it seems to fit with what he and his colleagues write:

We present results to show a possible climate threshold beyond which some dieback is committed and this commitment rises dramatically for global temperature rise above 2 degrees C, a threshold often used by policy makers in their definition of dangerous climate change. Any subsequent recovery is on such a long timescale as to make the dieback effectively irreversible on any pragmatic level.

I'll see if I can find Chris Jones, or some Brazilians, or both to talk about this with on Thursday.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 12, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Heliophage

For those not eager to trawl through the aforementioned geoengineering tweetstream here's the most interesting thing I took from the geoengineering session -- a point on which, interestingly, David Keith and Ken Caldeira, who are keen to see and do more research on the topic, are close to agreeing with David Santillo of Greenpeace, who isn't.

The problem is in some ways pretty obvious: No one knows whether geoengineering can really be made to work. As Keith pointed out, even for the best characterised putative intervention -- a stratospheric aerosol like those produced by volcanoes -- the comparatively cursory research to date has turned up a wealth of complexities that have not yet been addressed by proponents, and more research will turn up even more of them. To Keith and Caldeira, this raises a nightmare scenario: that the world will have in the back of its mind that geoengineering is there as a fallback, will find that it needs a fallback, and will then find out that the fallback is not there in any practical sense. On this basis the sooner it is clear that there is no way out the better: time to do some serious research.

That is similar to Santillo's position, except he doesn't want to do the research needed to find out for sure. I took it from his talk that he wants instead to create a climate of opinion where the nagging hope that geoengineering might save us was firmly shut down more or less a priori, with commitment to emission cuts the sole and reaffirmed goal of all.

In making this argument, he came up with a nice pithy account of what he sees as the 5 drivers for geoengineering research: desperation, aspiration, fascination, delegation, remuneration. The first two he sees as essentially reasonable, the third -- "it is just such fun to play with these ideas!" -- troubling, the fourth -- "O good, someone else can solve the climate I don't have to" -- dangerous and morally defective (my term not his), and the fifth beyond the pale. (Actually in the presentation he didn't call the fifth driver "remuneration" he just called it "money" -- but he told me later he'd thought about listing it as remuneration, and I think it's slicker that way...)

What all these people agree on is that the lopsided way in which geoengineering is discussed, with a level of prominence in the media (and the unpublished musings of researchers, in my experience) and the imagination disproportionate to the actual level of knowledge among experts, needs to be seen as a real problem. Geoengineering is widely enough discussed that the thought it might be there as a last resort is widespread and quite possibly spreading wider, even though it still may be an illusion. Keith laid out the argument for reducing this disproportionality in a more formal way, looking at scenarios comparing the value of "Early Learning" v. late learning. I didn't note down all the details, but Early Learning seemed, by the economic metric he was using, to be a big, big winner.

PS: Those interested in the twittering per se may possibly want to check out this further post at Heliophage

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 11, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a technical session on geoengineering at the meeting today, and I thought I'd try twittering from it. Since this is a personal experiment and may not pan out, I'll be using my personal twitterfeed, http://twitter.com/eaterofsun, not the naturenews feed.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 11, 2009
Categories: Conferences and Meetings, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Like Olive, I'm at the Climate Change Congress in Copenhagen. My first impression is that it's like a scaled up version of the Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change meeting that took place in Exeter in 2004: a venue for up-to-date (ie more recent than the most recent IPCC) science to be presented in a polciy relevant atmosphere. And by odd coincidence the first paper I heard presented was on a topic that in my mind is quite strongly linked to that Exeter meeting.

Jonathan Bamber of Bristol University was talking about the stability of the Greenland ice sheet at a session on tipping points. There was a widely cited Brief Communication in Nature that came out just after the Exeter meeting and was discussed there which suggested that if global temperatures rose above 3 degrees the ice sheet was effectively doomed. Bamber and his colleagues have looked at the issue again, treating the point at which the surface mass balance goes negative as the defintive oops-we-lost-Greenland point. Surface mass balance is snowfall minus the run offs. Even with a positive surface mass balance it's possible for the ice sheet to shrink, because ice is lost through the calving of icebergs as well as runoff; once the surface mass balance goes negative, though, shrinkage is taken to be certain and to feed on itself.

Bamber says he and his colleagues looked at the future of the ice sheet in a warming world using two different types of mass balance model: a positive-degree-day model, which counts days over freezing, as was used in the earlier work, and a more complex energy balance model. Their positive-degree-day model showed the mass balance going negative with four degrees of warming locally, which because warming in the arctic is amplified beyond the global mean fits with the earlier figure of 3 degrees warming worldwide. The energy balance model, though, doesn't see the mass balance go negative until there's 8 degrees of warming. Bamber's clear that there's a lot of uncertainty in that -- but it fits with the palaeoclimate finding that in the previous interglacial period, when temperatures were higher than they are now, significant chunks of the Greenland ice sheet remained un-melted.

On the face of it that's a bit of a reprieve: it would seem to suggest that there's more time to act before the world gets committed to a big, big sea level rise than had been thought. But there are lots of caveats. Ice dynamics or some other factor could mean that there's a point of no return before the point at which the mass balance goes negative. And though this model may be better than the previous one (and there may well be people who would doubt that) that doesn't make it definitive. You can look at the best science around -- but there's always going to be doubt as to whether its good enough.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 10, 2009
Categories: Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross posted from Heliophage

I wrote a little piece for Nature today today about a paper by Andy Ridgwell at Bristol and some of his colleagues on changing the albedo of crops. The gist as published:

Manipulating the waxiness of crops through traditional breeding techniques or genetic modification should raise their albedo by about 20%, from 0.2 to 0.24. On the basis of climate modelling they calculate that the planet would cool by a modest 0.11 ºC. "It's very small on the global average," says Ridgwell. But "what is more important is the summertime effect in specific regions". The mid-latitudes of North America and Eurasia could cool by as much as 1 °C in June, July and August, according to the models. Ridgwell and his colleagues report their results in Current Biology.

The models also show pronounced cooling in the North Atlantic Ocean and the Barents Sea in the wintertime — which might have a positive effect on sea ice — but a drying out of the soil in some parts of the subtropics. Ridgwell points out that climate models do not predict future precipitation well on a regional basis and treats the latter results more as evidence that there might be effects far from the fields being changed than as a clear indication that there would be damaging consequences.

Making the plants more reflective, if it proved a good idea at all, might well necessitate genetic engineering, which in some places is distrusted. That engineering might be more acceptable in energy crops than it is in food crops. It might make sense, if people are going to engineer energy crops for other purposes, to make them a little lighter too, all other things being equal.

Continue reading "Leaf albedo engineering" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on January 15, 2009
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Heliophage

I’ve just been reading some advice for Obama (pdf) from the Institute for 21^st century energy, an organism of the US Chamber of Commerce. It's pretty standard (and depressing) stuff of the “must be win-win, mustn’t hurt business, do nothing until there’s an international agreement” sort, sometimes spot on in its prescriptions but overall tainted by a failure to really engage with the climate issues. So far so standard, but it takes new salience from the fact that the person whose signature is at the top is General James L. Jones. Jones, it was announced yesterday and widely leaked before that, will be the new National Security Adviser. The shocker here – and it really is quite shocking – is that the executive summary of this document makes no mention of climate as a factor in energy policy and planning at all.

In the body there is climate stuff, but it's mostly not good; Brad Johnson at the Wonk Room gets into the details

The institute deserves credit for having its first strategic priority be energy efficiency, but its other priorities and specific policy suggestions are wrongheaded and reflect the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s typical anti-regulatory, pro-pollution industry agenda. Jones’ Transition Plan calls for billions of dollars in subsidies for the nuclear and coal industry, a dramatic expansion in domestic oil and natural gas drilling into protected areas, and massive new energy industry tax breaks and loopholes.

Continue reading "James Jones's poor energy policy" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on December 02, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Heliophage

Prodded by Andy Revkin at the Times, Joe Romm offers a list of "Pearl Harbors" that might lead to the second-world-war scale of effort against climate change that he (and to an extent I) see as necessary. Here it is:

1) Arctic goes ice free before 2020. I have bets out on this. It would be a big, visible global shock.
2) Rapid warming over next decade, as recent Nature and Science article suggests is quite possible
3) Continued (unexpected) surge in methane
4) A megadrought hitting the SW comparable to what has hit southern Australia.
5) More superstorms, like Katrina
6) A heatwave as bad as Europe’s 2003 one.
7) Something unpredicted but clearly linked to climate, like the bark beetle devastation
8) Accelerated mass loss in Greenland and/or Antarctica, perhaps with another huge ice shelf breaking off, but in any case coupled with another measurable rise in the rate of sea level rise,
9) The Fifth Assessment Report (2012-2013) really spelling out what we face with no punches pulled.

Continue reading "Is it a Pearl Harbor if it has to happen twice?" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on November 26, 2008
Categories: Climate Policy, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Heliophage

Mark Lynas, whose Six Degrees (Amazon UK | US) has been a great success, had a piece in the New Statesman last week about nuclear power. It was a pretty standard, pretty well executed I'm-a-green-who's-much-more-freaked-out-about-climate-than-about-nukes piece, much in the long travelled Lovelock vein, not that unlike some things George Monbiot has recently been writing. As such it obviously got up the noses of some greens. I thought it was pretty sensible, myself; but there's a depressing kicker.

Continue reading "The difficulties of going pro-nuclear" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on September 26, 2008
Categories: Energy, Oliver Morton, Politics | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Heliophage

Commuting in this morning on the boat, I was struck by a Guardian article on a new McKinsey report (pdf) about carbon capture and storage:

The study shows that such plants could be economically viable by 2030 at the latest. But it would require substantial public subsidies to get 10-12 plants running by the EU target date of 2015...McKinsey said that, with coal still likely to make up 60% of EU power generation by 2030, CCS could be a vital solution to ensuring security of energy supply and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It could reduce emissions by 400m tonnes a year by 2030, or a fifth of planned European savings. The consultants' report, published yesterday, showed that with an aggressive commercial push from the middle of the next decade, CCS costs could come down from as much as €90 for a tonne of CO2 initially, to about €30-45 in 2030 - or in line with expected carbon prices then.

But of course we can't; not now. Spending $700 billion + on bailing out banks is going to make the US, at least, less able to spend comparatively small amounts on other things. As my old boss Bill Emmott but it, also in the Guardian:

The true impact of this expansion of public spending lies in politics, and in what this rescue will now make more difficult or perhaps impossible: the expansion of other areas of public spending, such as healthcare or public programmes for alternative energy. If Barack Obama is elected president in November, he will find his fiscal hands tied a lot tighter than he may have hoped, even with a Democratic Congress alongside him - unless, of course, he wants to raise taxes.

Continue reading "Damn, a trillion dollars would have come in handy" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on September 24, 2008
Categories: Business, Climate Policy, Energy, Oliver Morton, Politics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was lucky enough to spend last weekend at this year's SciFoo, and took in a number of sessions on climate and energy. There was a lot of sometimes quite heated debate, but what was struck me most forcefully was the common ground that the optimists and pessimists share -- specifically, a belief that the challenge in front of us is utterly huge. I almost said mind-numbingly huge, but people like Dan Schrag and Saul Griffith and Chris Uhlik have minds too active and well-exercised to numb easily...

In Nature this week we had a look at that hugeness with a big feature on ways of generating electricity that involve no intrinsic fossil-fuel emissions. Though I say so myself, it's a pretty good look at the options, from those that are already significant (hydropower and nuclear) to those that people like Chris and Saul are trying to make significant (solar and wind). Here's what we came up with as take home verdicts:

Continue reading "Get your terawatts here" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on August 15, 2008
Categories: Energy, Mitigation, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from The Great Beyond

Over at Canada's Financial Post, Lawrence Solomon is excited about the increase in biomass over the past two decades.

Planet Earth is on a roll! GPP is way up. NPP is way up. To the surprise of those who have been bearish on the planet, the data shows global production has been steadily climbing to record levels, ones not seen since these measurements began.

GPP is Gross Primary Production, a measure of the daily output of the global biosphere --the amount of new plant matter on land. NPP is Net Primary Production, an annual tally of the globe's production. Biomass is booming. The planet is the greenest it's been in decades, perhaps in centuries.

Judging by his record Mr Solomon likes to find new, surprising stories that over turn the evil IPCC-led consensus on climate science. Not clear, though, that he's very successful: this is neither new nor surprising. The work cited seems to be a 2004 paper by Steve Running and colleagues on monitoring NPP using the MODIS satellite data set (BioScience 54, 547-560 (2004) -- pdf), so it's hardly news. What's more, everyone studying carbon dioxide levels agrees that there are "biological sinks" -- places where more carbon-dioxide means more biomass, either because of the direct carbon-dioxide-fertilisation effect (it is, after all, plant food) or because the climatic effects are to the benefit of plants. Growth in sinks = growth in biomass. And a billion tonnes of carbon or so flowing into sinks every year will add up, over time. No denying that.

Continue reading "Biomass boosting" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on June 09, 2008
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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
Categories: Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)

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
Categories: Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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
Categories: Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (1)

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)