Climate – May 13

May 13, 2007

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage


Warming Triggers ‘Alarming’ Retreat of Himalayan Glaciers

Tim Johnson, McClatchy Newspapers
KAROLA PASS, Tibet – The glaciers of the Himalayas store more ice than anywhere on Earth except for the polar regions and Alaska, and the steady flow of water from their melting icepacks fills seven of the mightiest rivers of Asia.

Now, due to global warming and related changes in the monsoons and trade winds, the glaciers are retreating at a startling rate, and scientists say the ancient icepacks could nearly disappear within one or two generations.

Curiously, there’s little sense of crisis in some of the mountainous areas. Indeed, global warming is making the lives of some high-altitude dwellers a little less severe.

Here at the foot of the towering Nojin Gangsang mountain, an ice-covered 23,700-foot peak, herders notice the retreat of the glaciers but say they feel grateful for the milder winters and increasing vegetation on mountain slopes in summers.

But for people living in the watershed of the Himalayas and other nearby mountain ranges along the Tibetan Plateau, glacial melt could have catastrophic consequences.

Himalayan glaciers release water steadily throughout the year, most critically during the hot, dry, sunny periods when water is most needed. Once they vanish, major lifeline rivers such as the Ganges and Indus could become more seasonal, and large tributaries may dry up completely during non-monsoon periods.
(12 May 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.


James Lovelock’s strange bedfellows

Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Scientist James Lovelock stunned the scientific community last year with his assertion that it is too late to do anything about global warming. Even if we have not yet reached the tipping point, he said, the vast momentum of industrial society will soon carry us crashing through it and dash any hope of arresting a deadly planetary heat wave that will wreck civilization as we know it. Lovelock detailed his assessment in a new book entitled The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity.

Lovelock is no ordinary researcher. He is a world renown independent scientist and inventor. One of his inventions helped to uncover the role of chlorofluorocarbons in the destruction of the ozone layer. He is probably most famous for his thesis that the Earth is a living organism that regulates its temperature and conditions to make the biosphere amenable to life. He explained his theory in a book published almost 30 years ago entitled Gaia: A New Look at Life On Earth.

At the other end of the spectrum of the global warming debate are the so-called climate change skeptics. They have been known to employ something akin to a modified dog-bite defense. In a classic joke a man whose dog has bitten a passerby defends himself in court by saying: “My dog doesn’t bite, it wasn’t my dog, and furthermore, I don’t have a dog.” And, so it is with the so-called climate skeptics. They claim variously that global warming is good for you or at least not so bad that we need to do anything about it; that global warming is not caused by human activity; and that furthermore, there’s no global warming.

Most of the skeptics, which comprise a small and dwindling group of scientists and a much larger contingent of professional propagandists, have strong financial ties to the fossil fuel industry.
(13 May 2007)


A clear direction (the IPCC and geoengineering)

Ediorial, Nature
…The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is far from a perfect institution, but it is a necessary and a heartening one. To see the governments of the world almost unanimously acknowledge that they share a problem, and set up a process for identifying its scope that is rooted in the impartial norms of science, is in itself a reason for hope about the century ahead.

The final contribution to the IPCC’s fourth assessment report is, as we report on page 120, a rather upbeat one. Shifts in the way the world generates and uses energy can, the panel says, reduce the risks of climate change in exchange for only a fairly small slowing in the rate of growth of GDP. Various ways of bringing about such shifts are discussed. But perhaps because the IPCC is devoted to consensus, the relative merits of those schemes are not explored.

… scientists and their managers also have a duty to explore all the options – and to put aside their personal preferences in offering advice to governments. In this, the community has not always been beyond reproach.

One research area that has been ignored, in part because of prior ideological commitments, is geoengineering, which explores in what circumstances aspects of the climate system might be deliberately modified to limit the worst eventualities of climate change (see page 132). It is true that some bizarre projects fall under that name – notably, various ill-conceived schemes for fertilizing the oceans. But the idea that more active management of soil carbon could offset future emissions is sound (see page 143).

It would be far better for such ideas to be examined scientifically – and their failings thus held up to scrutiny – than not.
(9 May 2007)
Another article in Nature reports more on geoengineering (see next item).

The publication Nature itself avoids discussion of the most cost-effective strategies — efficiency and conservation. The bulk of its energy-related articles focus on high tech strategies, typically involving energy sources. -BA

The full article is behind a paywall.

UPDATE (May 14) from Carl Etnier:
Thank you for your excerpts of the editorial in Nature about the recent IPCC report on mitigation of climate change. I spent quite some time searching for the report itself, and I thought I could save your readers some time and frustration.

This web page has a summary for policymakers of the report: www.mnp.nl/ipcc/pages_media/ar4.html

It also says, “The Chapters of the report and the Technical Summary in a pre-copy edit version will be available on this website around the middle of May 2007.” As of this writing, they are not up yet. I don’t know where Nature found the copy they reviewed in their editorial.


Climate change: Is this what it takes to save the world? (geoengineering)

Oliver Morton, Nature
…Much of the climate community still views the idea with deep suspicion or outright hostility. Geoengineering, many say, is a way to feed society’s addiction to fossil fuels.

The most recent IPCC report, released last week, scoffs at such notions – but underlines the need for drastic approaches to stave off the effects of rising planetary temperatures.

This new interest in geoengineering was set off by an article by … Paul Crutzen, published in the journal Climatic Change in August 2006.

Crutzen looked at the idea of introducing one or two million tonnes of sulphur into the stratosphere every year, where it could produce a long-lived aerosol, as a way to keep the protective effects while getting rid of the short-lived aerosols in the lower atmosphere.

At both the beginning and end of his article, Crutzen stressed that he would rather see global warming controlled by a reduction in emissions. But he admitted that, so far, he saw little cause for optimism. He also pointed out that sulphate aerosols can act to cool the climate immediately; reducing emissions, on the other hand, takes decades or generations. If something really bad starts to happen, aerosols could provide a prompt cooling response in a way that emissions control simply could not.

If a burst of sulphates might allow the world to postpone the effects of emissions control for a few decades, would a consistent effort allow the world to do without control altogether? Wigley points to at least one reason why not. Carbon dioxide does more than just warm – it also acidifies the ocean. Even if the warming effects of ever-increasing carbon dioxide could be cancelled out, the effects on corals, shellfish and eventually the entire marine food web would still be disastrous.

The very thing that motivates people like Crutzen to study geoengineering – the risk of large surprises that require immediate action – leads others to see the whole idea as fundamentally unworkable. Although models agree that the world will warm and climatic patterns will change as carbon dioxide rises, they don’t agree on the amount of warming or the patterns of change. Indeed, that uncertainty is one of the reasons that climate change is such a difficult issue. “How can you engineer a system whose behaviour you don’t understand?”

Once in orbit, the gossamer-thin fliers would peel off these stacks and arrange themselves in orbits that keep them between the Earth and the Sun at almost all times. The shadow of this cloud of spacecraft 1.85 million kilometres away, Angel calculated, would be a little larger than the Earth, and would cut down sunlight by about 1.8%. The details of Angel’s proposal are meticulously worked out, and their cost is suitably astronomical – about $5 trillion, or a decade’s worth of US defence spending.

The really mind-boggling bit is the sheer number of fliers required to do the job: 16 trillion. The US military gets through 1.5 billion bullets a year.
(11 May 2007)
At the moment, the article seems to be viewable by the public.

Contributor SP writes:
Hmmm, only a decades worth of defence spending… and that’s a lot of bullets!


Tags: Culture & Behavior, Energy Policy