Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group News

Climate Science (and the IGBP) has been emphasizing the importance of focusing on the more inclusive study of vulnerability, rather than just replying on downscaling to local and regional scales from multi-decadal global climate models, such as presented in the 2007 IPCC WG1 report.  The IGBP perspective can be read in detail Chapter E in

Kabat, P., Claussen, M., Dirmeyer, P.A., J.H.C. Gash, L. Bravo de Guenni, M. Meybeck, R.A. Pielke Sr., C.J. Vorosmarty, R.W.A. Hutjes, and S. Lutkemeier, Editors, 2004: Vegetation, water, humans and the climate: A new perspective on an interactive system. Springer, Berlin, Global Change - The IGBP Series, 566 pp.

 Thanks to a reader of Climate Science, who prefers to remain anonymous, we have been alerted to the news article by Richard Black of the BBC entitled 2007 floods ‘no link to climate’

The summary of the article succinctly reports on the conclusions;

“The UK’s summer floods of 2007 were a freak event unrelated to global climate change, according to a report from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH).”

The text further states,

“The key cause was that extended rains early in summer soaked soils that would normally have been dry at that time.

When heavy storms came later, water could not soak away into the ground.

The report said data does not support the notion that UK summer rainfall is increasing or rivers are showing faster flow rates than in previous years.”

Clearly, we need broader assessments of environmental risk than was provided by the narrowly focused 2007 IPCC reports.

Climate Science has reported that the narrow focus on carbon emissions as the dominate threat to society and the environment has unleashed unanticipated consequences (e.g., see Has The IPCC Produced A Hydra?). A recent (February 8, 2008) New York Time article by Elisabeth Rosenthal  “Biofuels Deemed A Greenhouse Threat” provide yet another example of the inappropriate and inaccurate focus on just one human influence on the climate system.

An excerpt from the article summarizes the issue,

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded.

“This land use problem is not just a secondary effect — it was often just a footnote in prior papers,”. “It is major. The comparison with fossil fuels is going to be adverse for virtually all biofuels on cropland.”

Indeed, land use is not a secondary effect! This has been summarized in

Pielke Sr., R.A., 2005: Land use and climate change. Science, 310, 1625-1626

and reported in detail in the book

Kabat, P., Claussen, M., Dirmeyer, P.A., J.H.C. Gash, L. Bravo de Guenni, M. Meybeck, R.A. Pielke Sr., C.J. Vorosmarty, R.W.A. Hutjes, and S. Lutkemeier, Editors, 2004: Vegetation, water, humans and the climate: A new perspective on an interactive system. Springer, Berlin, Global Change - The IGBP Series, 566 pp.

It is time for the policy community to be more thorough in their study of the role of inadvertent human forcings and of deliberate mitigation policies on the climate system, and more generally on the environment.

There was a CIRES Distinguished Lecture with Professor Mark Jacobson of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University on February 8 2008 entitled “Air Pollution Effects of and a Renewable-Energy Solution to Global Warming”.

The abstract reads,
 

“In order to stabilize climate while accounting for future economic growth, it is necessary to reduce current emissions of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and particulate black carbon by 80% during the next 20 years. Because outdoor air pollution is a major cause of death, cardiovascular disease, and asthma, any solution to climate change should also improve air quality, particularly since air pollution-related mortality is calculated to increase as the climate warms further. Here, I compare potential vehicular solutions to global warming and air quality, including ethanol-fueled (corn or cellulosic) vehicles, wind- or solar-powered battery electric vehicles, and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Ethanol-fueled vehicles were found not to improve and possibly worsen air quality relative to gasoline, which is already a significant health hazard. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles were found to improve air quality significantly compared with gasoline, regardless of the production method of hydrogen, but with production by wind electrolysis being the cleanest. Wind powered battery-electric vehicles were as clean as wind-powered hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, but about three times more efficient. Wind-powered battery vehicles required 30 times less land area than corn ethanol and 20 times less land area than cellulosic ethanol for powering the same vehicle fleet. In the best scenario, corn ethanol cannot reduce U.S. carbon by more than 0.2% and cellulosic ethanol cannot reduce U.S. carbon by more than 4% due to their carbon emissions and landuse constraints. Evaluation of the world’s wind
resources suggest that sufficient wind exists worldwide over land for climate and air pollution problems from vehicles and power plants to be addressed by wind power many times over. It is shown that the combination of wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal power together can be used to supply baseload or load-matching electric power, particularly in combination with electric vehicles in a smart electric grid.”

This presentation reinforces a conclusion on Climate Science that we need to assess each environmental “solution” with respect to all of its environmental and social consequences (e.g. see). Indeed the conclusion in  Mark Jacobson’s talk that

“In the best scenario, corn ethanol cannot reduce U.S. carbon by more than 0.2% and cellulosic ethanol cannot reduce U.S. carbon by more than 4% due to their carbon emissions and landuse constraints”

should raise red flags to this approach to environmental mitigation, since while only small reductions to greenhouse gas emissions would occur, the effect on the climate through landscape change could be quite significant, as summarized, for example, in

 Pielke Sr., R.A., 2005: Land use and climate change. Science, 310, 1625-1626

and

Marland, G., R.A. Pielke, Sr., M. Apps, R. Avissar, R.A. Betts, K.J. Davis, P.C. Frumhoff, S.T. Jackson, L. Joyce, P. Kauppi, J. Katzenberger, K.G. MacDicken, R. Neilson, J.O. Niles, D. dutta S. Niyogi, R.J. Norby, N. Pena, N. Sampson, and Y. Xue, 2003: The climatic impacts of land surface change and carbon management, and the implications for climate-change mitigation policy. Climate Policy, 3, 149-157.

There is a new paper on the relative role of society and climate change with respect to future damages from tropical cyclones. This study fits within the concept of the need to quantify the vulnerability of social and environmental threats to important resources that is one of the major themes on Climate Science.

The paper is

Pielke, R.A. Jr., 2007; Future economic damage from tropical cyclones: sensitivities to societal and climate changes, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A doi:10.1098/rsta.2007.2086 Published online

The abstract reads,

“This paper examines future economic damages from tropical cyclones under a range of assumptions about societal change, climate change and the relationship of climate change to damage in 2050. It finds in all cases that efforts to reduce vulnerability to losses, often called climate adaptation, have far greater potential effectiveness to reduce damage related to tropical cyclones than efforts to modulate the behaviour of storms through greenhouse gas emissions reduction policies, typically called climate mitigation and achieved through energy policies. The paper urges caution in using economic losses of tropical cyclones as justification for action on energy policies when far more potentially effective options are available.”

A very positive review in Science has also just appeared by Nathan E. Hultman entitled To Arbitrate or to Advocate? on Roger’s book

The Honest Broker Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics

by Roger A. Pielke Jr. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007 198 pp.

The paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is an excellent example of applying the perspective presented in the Cambridge University Press book.

There are two books (with one a two volume set) that provide an excellent summary of the threat of drought that we face even in the absence of human intervention in the climate system. Indeed, it is unlikely that mitigation of CO2 emissions alone would have much of an effect on our risk, since we are i) only effecting one aspect of the climate system by CO2 increases, and ii) the increased levels of atmospheric CO2 could be just as easily be moving us away from drought conditions, since there is no skill in year or longer time scales in predicting this climate regime.

The books are:

Wunder, J.R., F.W. Kaye and V. Carstensen (Editors), 2001:Americans View Their Dust Bowl Experience. University of Colorado Press.

Wilhite, D. A. (Editor), 1998: Dought A Global Assessment Volumes I and II. Routledge Hazards and Disasters Series. [this is, unfortunately, an expensive book so borrowing from the library is a good way to read it].

These books provide a sobering report on what has happened in the past in terms of drought effects.

For example, in Wunder et al on page 83 the text reads,

“A cloud of dust thousands of feet high, which came from drought-ridden states as far west as Montana 1500 miles away, filtered the rays of the sun for five hours yesterday, and New York was obscured to a half-light similar to the light cast by thr sun in partial eclipse.”

In the Wilhite book, in an excellent article starting on page 234 by Lisa Graumlich and Mrill Ingram entitled “Drought in the context of the last 1000+ years: Some surprising implications”, they write

“Our findings are sobering in that we see two droughts during medieval times lasting more than fifty years in which runoff was 40 per cent of twentieth century values”.

Such a drought, if it started today would last beyond 2057! Moreover, this drought occurred without a significant human role in altering the climate system.

Today, we also seem to be more vulnerable to even a very short term drought, as summarized in our paper

Pielke Sr., R.A., N. Doesken, O. Bliss, T. Green, C. Chaffin, J.D. Salas, C. Woodhouse, J.L. Lukas, and K. Wolter, 2005: Drought 2002 in Colorado - An unprecedented drought or a routine drought? Pure Appl. Geophys., Special Issue in honor of Prof. Singh, 162, 1455-1479, doi:10.1007/200024-005-2679-6.

For longer droughts, our planning is almost nonexistent. Seeking to prevent droughts by CO2 reductions is obviously not an effective way to approach our real risk to this climate regime.

Jon Foley presented an excellent talk at the NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change Meeting April 4-6, 2007 in College Park, MD [hosted by Garik Gutman and Chris Justice] entitled “Planet Against the Grain” where he reports that about 40% of Earth’s land has been converted to agriculture. He thus states that today about 40% of the global photosynthesis is now in human hands. He concludes that agriculture has already altered the biosphere as much as projections of future climate change, but now they are happening together.

The slides of his talk are now on-line and are worth viewing!

He reports, for example, that global change is much more than CO2 and global warming and asked the question should we “reframe global change from a human/land-based perspective?”.

Among his other conclusions are that

“agriculture & land use release more greenhouse gases than any other single human activity” and that this “extends far beyond CO2″.

He also states that the

“effects on physical climate are also large” and that these are “regional in scale, but still important” and “often get ‘washed out’ in outdated climate metrics of radiative forcing and global mean temperature”.

He has concluded his talk with “4 Things to Remember” which are:

1. “Agriculture is a major planetary force”

2. “Land use practices are changing much faster than land cover”.

3. [The] “Current focus on CO2/climate connection is very short sighted”

4. [We] “need [a] more comprehensive framework to exploring the Earth system”

His talk complements the perspective given on Climate Science where we have concluded that climate change is much more than “global warming” and global change is much more than climate change. The vulnerability viewpoint that has been emphasized on Climate Science; i.e. see

Pielke, R.A. Sr., 2004: Discussion Forum: A broader perspective on climate change is needed. IGBP Newsletter, 59, 16-19,

fits directly into the scientific framework that Jon Foley is advocating.

At the recent June 2007 meetng in Bonn on Landforms, an outstanding presentation was given by Felix Mueller on the complexity of ecosystem dynamics. The powerpoint talk

Ecosystem Resilience and Ecosystem Dynamics (Key Note Symposium “Landforms”, Bonn in June 2007 -24.8 megabytes)

provides a very thoughtful summary of the nonlinear dynamics involved with ecosystems. This same perspective, with respect to climate science, is emphasized in the paper

Rial, J., R.A. Pielke Sr., M. Beniston, M. Claussen, J. Canadell, P. Cox, H. Held, N. de Noblet-Ducoudre, R. Prinn, J. Reynolds, and J.D. Salas, 2004: Nonlinearities, feedbacks and critical thresholds within the Earth’s climate system. Climatic Change, 65, 11-38.

Indeed, since as shown in Figure 1-1 in

National Research Council, 2005: Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties. Committee on Radiative Forcing Effects on Climate Change, Climate Research Committee, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 208 pp,

ecosystem processes are part of the climate system, Professor Mueller’s views on ecology apply directly to climate science.

I have decided to post the responses to several comments as a weblog since they succinctly capture The Climate Science’s perspective on the climate science issue [thanks to Tom, Logically Speaking, Allan J. and Frank K. for your constructive comments and contribution to the discussion on Climate Science!]:

1. Regarding the issue of the “butterfly effect”, all of the information can dissipate into heat without upscaling if it is a small enough perturbation. This was clearly explained by Professor Richard Ekyholt who is an international recognized expert on chaos and nonlinear dynamics. [see].

2. Climate prediction includes all aspects of weather prediction plus all other components of the climate system. On weather prediction time scales, many aspects of the climate system can be prescribed as constant in that time period; e.g. sea surface temperatures. On longer time scales, these components of the climate system must be predicted.

Thus nonlinearities in medium and long term feedbacks become important. We have discussed this issue in the multi-authored paper

Rial, J., R.A. Pielke Sr., M. Beniston, M. Claussen, J. Canadell, P. Cox, H. Held, N. de Noblet-Ducoudre, R. Prinn, J. Reynolds, and J.D. Salas, 2004: Nonlinearities, feedbacks and critical thresholds within the Earth’s climate system. Climatic Change, 65, 11-38.

The observations show nonlinear behavior on all time scales, with the IPCC models demonstrating absolutely no skill at predicting any of them.

What this means for predicting climate decades from now in response to the human input of CO2, or other human climate forcing, is that we do not know what the effect will be. It could move the climate system towards or away from important climate regime shifts.

The prudent path is to reduce the human forcing of the climate system since we do not know its consequences. However, what the IPCC has failed to do is to adequately assess the relative role of all climate forcings. As we have discussed on Climate Science and have published on (e.g. see and see), the heterogeneous climate forcings due to aerosols and land use/land cover change appear to be more significant in terms of our future climate then the radiative effect of CO2.

3. The approach, to assess vulnerabilities of important societal and economic resources, was recommended in the multi-authored book

Kabat, P., Claussen, M., Dirmeyer, P.A., J.H.C. Gash, L. Bravo de Guenni, M. Meybeck, R.A. Pielke Sr., C.J. Vorosmarty, R.W.A. Hutjes, and S. Lutkemeier, Editors, 2004: Vegetation, water, humans and the climate: A new perspective on an interactive system. Springer, Berlin, Global Change - The IGBP Series, 566 pp. {see Chapter E Section 3, Section 5, and Section 7, for example]

An important, much-needed perspective on this subject was recently published

Pielke, Jr., R.A., Prins, G., Rayner, S. and Sarewitz, D., 2007. Lifting the taboo on adaptation. Nature, Vol. 445, pp. 597-598.

The IPCC should have started their assessment by first assessing what are the important vulnerabilities to essential social and environmental resources. Instead, they chose to cloak energy policy in terms of an inappropriately narrow view of the climate system.

Climate Science has repeatedly written on the the need to focus on the assessment of the vulnerability of important social and environmental resources to threats of all types, including human climate forcings. See, for example,

Will Climate Effects Trump Health Effects In Air Quality Regulations?

Wood Burning As A CO2 Emission Reduction Concept! Is This A Serious Proposal?

A Win-Win Solution to Environmental Problems

This theme is also emphasized in our new book

Cotton, W.R. and R.A. Pielke, 2007: Human impacts on weather and climate, Cambridge University Press, 330 pp.

The narrow focus of the IPCC on CO2 as the dominate environmental threat and the use of multi-decadal global climate model predictions for policymakers, is, therefore, an inappropriately too narrow perspective. Indeed, the unintended consequences of the narrowly focused IPCC reports, and the naive acceptance of the reports by many policymakers, has unleashed a mulitifaceted risk to society and the environment.

Now, even environmental groups who have bought into the IPCC conclusions are beginning to recognize the threat that such a narrow view creates (and thanks to Benny Peiser for alerting us to the news release below).

The news release (reproduced below without its footnotes) from the News Center of CommonDreams.org is entitled

“IPCC Assessment report: Environmental Groups Condemn IPCC Call For Large Scale Biofuels as a Climate Disaster In The Making”

reads

“The IPCC Assessment Report Four has made a compelling case on what global warming means to the planet this century. It is the IPCC´s strongest warning yet that drastic cuts in carbon emissions are vital if we are to avoid a catastrophic acceleration of climate change. Environmental groups are, however, deeply concerned that the IPCC’s Summary for Policy Makers on climate mitigation, released earlier today, includes a recommendation for large- scale expansion of biofuels from monocultures, including from GM crops, even though monoculture expansion is a driving force behind the destruction of rainforests and other carbon sinks and reservoirs, thus accelerating climate change. The IPCC also recommend the expansion of large-scale agroforestry monoculture plantations. These plantations, which will include GM trees, are similarly linked to ecosystem destruction. Monoculture expansion is a major threat to the livelihoods and food sovereignty of communities many of which are already bearing the brunt of climate change disasters caused largely by the fossil fuel emissions of industrialised countries.

Almuth Ernsting of Biofuelwatch stated: “It is already clear that the burgeoning demand for biofuels that has been created to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is actually increasing them by deforestation in the tropics and accelerating climate change. So far, only 1% of global transport fuel comes from biofuels, yet already biofuels cause steep rises in grain and vegetable oil prices, threatening the food security of poor people and spurring agricultural expansion into forests and grasslands, on which we depend for a stable climate”.

The IPCC recommend second generation GM biofuels, which are widely believed to be at least 10-15 years away from commercialisation. There are serious concerns about the risks involved in technologies which will rely heavily on GM microbes and fungi for the refining process, as well as GM crops and trees.

Mayer Hillman, senior fellow emeritus at Policy Studies Institute said: “There is an inherent and acutely serious problem within the report. On the one hand, it leaves us in no doubt to how vital conservation of the planet´s ecosystems and carbon sinks are to averting the worst predictions made in the previous sections of the report. On the other, it proposes the large scale use of the biosphere to satisfy demand in the transport and energy sectors.” Simone Lovera, managing coordinator of the Global Forest Coalition, a worldwide coalition of NGOs and Indigenous Peoples Organizations added: “It is difficult to see how an emphasis on protecting rainforests and curbing deforestation is compatible with using biofuels as a solution to climate change when there are no policy instruments that guarantee biofuel expansion without accelerating deforestation.”

The IPCC report would appear to suggest that the climate can be stabilised at a safe level without reducing growth. The signatories to the press release believe that only large-scale reductions in energy use in the industrial nations, together with investment in sustainable forms of renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, can avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”

This press release by several environmental groups emphasizes why we need to reconsider the consequences of accepting the human input of CO2 as the most significant threat we face. The IPCC, as a result of its very limited approach of not even adequately considering the diversity of other human climate forcings, as well as the consequences for its recommendations, has itself created threats to society and to the environmental.

Climate Science has reported on the very important role of nitrogen deposition within the climate system (e.g. see). There is now a new program which identifies environmental risks associated with nitrogen pollution. With much of the attention on carbon dioxide as the dominate climate forcing, this intent to include nitrogen pollution is a much needed broadening of environmental concerns.

The announcement that was sent to me, with a request to post of Climate Science, follows,

“The David and Lucile Packard Foundation invites you to be part of an online collaboration to create strategies for reducing nitrogen pollution. Please join at The David and Lucile Packard Foundation invites you to be part of an online collaboration to create strategies for reducing nitrogen pollution. Please join at http://nitrogen.packard.org.

We would also like to ask if you would post this site on your blog so that your readers and other bloggers interested in the nitrogen pollution problem can participate.

An increasingly dangerous threat to our environment and human health, nitrogen pollution is degrading water quality and coastal ecosystems, contributing to climate change and posing a variety of health risks. Despite its rapid growth and harmful consequences, the problem of nitrogen pollution has received relatively little attention, except in areas suffering the consequences. In response to this gap, the Packard Foundation is exploring opportunities for philanthropic investments to make a significant contribution to solutions. The Foundation has not yet decided whether or not to establish a grant making program in this area; this decision will depend in large part on whether promising investment strategies and opportunities can be identified.

Since the most robust strategies for addressing a problem as complex as nitrogen pollution can not be developed by Packard alone, the Foundation has launched a public forum for collaboration. Everyone with an interest in reducing nitrogen pollution is invited to join and work together to create effective strategies for addressing this pressing problem.

The forum will be live and open to public participation through May 10th.

Packard will make the full product of this forum available to the Foundation’s Trustees at its June Board meeting and the Foundation staff will use the product of the site in developing a recommended strategy for the Trustees to consider. Once the forum closes, the outcomes of this work will be available to the public, archived online and protected under a Creative Commons License.

Thank you in advance for participating in this important collaboration.

Here are a couple tips for getting registered and contributing to Nitrogen.packard.org:

To register or sign in for Nitrogen.packard.org, click the “Sign In” link in the upper right corner of the screen. From the registration screen, enter your username and password or click register to register a new username

Before you begin participating, introduce yourself to the community by clicking on the “Introduce Yourself” link on the left hand column of the home page. Once on the introductions page, click on the edit button in the upper right hand corner, and then add your introduction to the list.

Now you’re ready to participate! The items in the left-hand column of the home page are the different ways you can participate on the site. For instance, you can choose to edit the nitrogen/agriculture strategy by clicking on the wiki link, or you can discuss the strategies by clicking on the discussion link

We recommend you start by going to the wiki and reading through the strategies. Then go to the strategy that aligns with your own work, go to the bottom of that strategy, and add a paragraph describing the work that you already have underway under “Projects, Programs, and Organizations.”

Even more valuable, of course, would be for you to start revising the possible outcomes or strategies or for you to add an entirely new strategy that you think would be effective.

Finally, please contribute your thoughts to the discussion section, rate the impact and cost effectiveness of each strategy by taking the survey, and help expand and refine the stakeholder map.

If you experience any technical difficulties registering or using the site, please be sure to email or call Tech Support: Nitrogen@packard.org; tel:1-650-917-7288.”

Congratulations to the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for taking on this very important and much needed effort!