Tag Archives: climate change

Feelin’ Hot, Hot, Hot

Environment, Law

The data are in. 2019 was the second-hottest year in modern history. (2016 was the hottest.) The last five years have been the five hottest years on record. According to Petteri Taalas, the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, “On the current path of carbon dioxide emissions, we are heading towards a temperature increase of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.” That’s of course presuming that human beings are still around in 2100.

Here is a chart from NASA showing the average global temperature from 1880 to the present. The baseline, represented by zero on the chart, is the average temperature between 1950 and 1980. (“GISTEMP” stands for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Global Surface Temperature Analysis.)

The second figure shows that the temperature increase is not evenly distributed around the Earth, but it concentrated at the poles, particularly the Arctic.

The next chart shows the steep decline of Arctic sea ice from 1880 to the present, this time compared to a baseline of the 1981-2010 average.

Finally, this illustration shows the distribution of the 2019 temperature increase (or decrease) within the continental United States, this time compared to the 20th century average. Obviously, the problem is concentrated in the Southeastern states. (I don’t know why NASA keeps changing the baseline. Maybe they just want to keep us on our toes.)

As if to put an exclamation point on these data, last Friday the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, dismissed the five year long lawsuit (Juliana v. United States) by 21 American young people intended to force the government to do something about climate change on the grounds that climate inaction was putting their constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness at risk. The Court ruled that it lacked jurisdiction over the climate, and that “the plaintiff’s case must be made to the political branches or to the electorate at large.” Good luck, kids.

The dissenter, District Judge Josephine Stanton, stated: “It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward the Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses. Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation.”

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Climate Spirals

The Cost of Climate Inaction

Making a Difference

Environment, , ,

Over the course of the 25 years or so that I taught Environmental Psychology, the section of the course about actions students could personally take to help preserve the environment gradually grew shorter and eventually faded away. It was just too embarrassing. There was plenty of research on how to encourage behaviors such as recycling and energy conservation, but the payoff from these actions was so small that emphasizing them seemed to trivialize the problem of climate change. The authors of the current study have broken free of the trap of emphasizing only trivial behavior changes and have included in their research some actions that will really make a difference.

Seth Wynes, a geographer from the University of British Columbia in Canada, and Kimberley Nicholas of the Centre for Sustainability at Lund University in Sweden, analyzed 148 scenarios from 39 sources—peer-reviewed papers, government reports, and carbon footprint calculators—which estimated the effectiveness of a dozen actions that individuals could take to reduce their carbon footprint. A carbon footprint is a measure of the total greenhouse gas emissions caused directly or indirectly by a person over the course of his or her lifetime.

They confined their analysis to studies done in developed countries, since their carbon consumption is a greater danger to the climate. They assumed that the individual showed total compliance with the behavior change, even though partial compliance was possible for some actions, i.e., switching to a plant based diet. For purposes of analysis, all estimates were converted to a common metric, tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) per year per individual. They then calculated the mean estimate of all available studies of each behavior.

The authors identified four recommended actions that would have high impact, defined as saving more than .8 tCO2e per individual per year. In order of importance, they are:

  • having one fewer child
  • living car free
  • avoiding air travel (one transatlantic flight)
  • eating a plant-based diet

(For a better look at the chart, click here.)

A fifth behavior, switching to green energy, was not recommended due to the authors’ lack of confidence in estimates of its effect. However, the mean savings met their criterion for high impact and they included it on their chart. The remaining behaviors they analyzed were found to have either moderate or low impact.

In a second analysis, the authors tabulated the individual actions recommended in ten high school textbooks widely used in Canada, and in the official government publications of Australia, Canada, the European Union and the United States. Having fewer children and eating a plant-based diet were not mentioned in any textbook; avoiding air travel was mentioned twice and living car free five times. Textbooks emphasized behavior with moderate impact, i.e., conserve energy, or low impact, i.e., plant a tree, or behaviors whose impact could not be estimated, i.e., “raise awareness,” a textbook favorite.

The analysis of government publications produced similar results. Having fewer children and eating a plant-based diet were also not mentioned in any government publications; avoiding air travel was mentioned twice and living car free once. Most of the recommended actions were of moderate impact, such as using public transportation and buying energy-efficient products. Both the textbook publishers and the four governments avoided recommending politically unpopular actions that might cut into corporate profits.

This study is obviously not the last word on reducing carbon usage. The authors admittedly did not attempt to measure rebound effects, in which reduced consumption in one area leads to increased consumption in the same or another area, i.e., knowing you have a more fuel-efficient car, you decide to drive more. Estimates of the impact of some of these actions varied quite a bit, indicating that they may not be completely reliable. The result of the most important behavior, having one fewer child, was based on a single analysis, albeit a solid, peer-reviewed study which assigned one half of a child’s emissions to each parent, one-quarter of each grandchild, and so forth.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons to take this analysis seriously. The differences between the impacts of these behavior changes are considerable. For example, the impact of a couple’s decision to have one fewer child was the equivalent of a lifetime of conscientious recycling by 684 individuals. This suggests that the authors have probably listed them in about the correct order, and that the distinction between low, moderate and high impact choices is real and important.

Researchers have estimated that, if we are to keep warming of the planet below 2° C, per capita emissions must be reduced to an average of 2.1 tCO2e per year by 2050. Wynes and Nicholas report that a person who eats meat and takes one transatlantic flight has used up 2.4 tCO2e, overshooting his or her personal carbon budget by these two actions alone. The current generation of teenagers are not being adequately prepared for the drastic behavioral changes that will be required of them.

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The Cost of Climate Inaction

Cheaper Solar Changes Everything

Norway: On the Right Track

Climate Spirals

Environment, ,

Here’s one of those animated charts that helps us to see things that might otherwise be difficult to visualize. It’s an animated version of the “hockey stick” graph, showing the increase in global temperature since 1850. This animation is under copyright by British climate scientist Dr. Ed Hawkins, and he grants permission to reproduce it provided he is given proper credit.

The year 1850 is chosen as the starting point since it was the approximate beginning of the Industrial Revolution. A change of 1.5 degrees Celsius equals 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Notice how the 2016 line stands apart from recent years, particularly during the first half of the year, when the temperature reached 1.5 degrees Celsius above baseline for the first time. In less than a week, 2016 will officially become the hottest year on record. Here’s how it compares to recent years.

When the lines in this spiral stop overlapping one another and begin to diverge noticeably, that is an indication that global temperature is increasing exponentially, rather than at a linear rate, as had previously been assumed. Exponential growth can lead to rapid change in a short period of time.

The primary reason for these temperature increases is the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere. The most important greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, and this second Hawkins animation shows its accumulation is parts per million.

This March, carbon dioxide reached 400 ppm for the first time, and it will continue to increase. 350 ppm is considered a “safe” level of carbon dioxide.

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced . . . to at most 350 ppm.

Dr. James Hansen

Although the world’s CO2 emissions have stabilized in recent years, that’s not the same as dropping to zero. CO2 continues to pile up in the atmosphere. The only way CO2 can be reduced is to stop using fossil fuels.

The Trump administration has threatened to elimate NASA’s $2 million per year budget for Earth science, which is the world’s major source of data on climate change, including the information in these charts. Maybe the theory is that what we don’t know can’t hurt us.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Cost of Climate Inaction

What Happened? What Will Happen Next?

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, , ,

This post is not completely thought out and is inadequately sourced.  I decided to write it quickly in order to compare my initial impressions of a Trump presidency to what happens weeks, months, or years from now.

What happened? And what will happen next? The first question must be approached with caution. I hope social scientists have collected good data on the demographic and ideological characteristics that are associated with support for Donald Trump. My guess is that the two leading contenders will be economic deprivation and racial or ethnic prejudice.

The corporate media have attempted to “normalize” Trump’s candidacy by suggesting that his support comes mainly from less educated Whites who have seen their standard of living decline in recent years. A couple of early studies cast doubt on this explanation and suggested that “racial anxiety” was the stronger motivator of Trump supporters. (See also this previous post.) A study by Rothwell and Diego-Rosell of the Gallup organization—the best I’ve found so far—finds only limited support for the economic explanation. Trump supporters are less educated and more likely to be blue-collar workers, but they are wealthier than either Clinton supporters or the population generally, and are no more likely to be unemployed. In other words, Trump is supported by the traditional Republican base of relatively affluent people hoping to increase their wealth. These authors also found that Trump supporters tend to live in racially isolated communities. However, their study lacked a measure of prejudice. Let’s hope some political scientists have included measures of racial attitudes in their research.

Why were the polls so wrong? The most likely explanation is the so-called Bradley effect, named for LA Mayor Tom Bradley, in which pre-election polls overestimate support for Black candidates. The flip side of this is that polls underestimate support for candidates who appeal to voters’ prejudices. The best indication of a Bradley effect so far has been the finding that Trump did better in online polls than telephone polls, possibly because respondents were embarrassed to admit they support Trump to a live person. (Of course, there are other explanations for this finding.)

To determine what will happen next, we need to divide Trump’s campaign promises into those that he can easily fulfill on his own, those that will require the cooperation of Congress, and therefore can be disrupted either by lack of unanimity among Republicans or a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, and those that will be difficult or impossible to carry out under any circumstances.

The easiest thing for Trump to do is abandon efforts to control climate change. Both the Obama Clean Power Plan and the United States’ ratification of COP 21, the Paris climate change agreement, are essentially executive orders by President Obama. They can be undone with the stroke of a pen, and most likely they will be. The latest studies of climate change are extremely alarming, suggesting that previous climate models have dramatically underestimated the problem. Any international climate agreement will collapse without U. S. cooperation. This suggests that by electing Trump, Americans may have inadvertantly brought about the end of human life on Earth within a couple of decades.

All the rest is merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Since Republicans control the Senate, it is likely that Trump will be able to ensure conservative domination of the Supreme Court for at least the next three decades. If so, Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned, and the few remaining barriers to racial discrimination will be eliminated. But the best descriptor of the Roberts court is “pro-corporate.” This is important due to corporations’ tendency to sue any time a law is passed which they find inconvenient. Needless to say, they will find a sympathetic audience in a Trump-appointed court.

I also believe that Trump will have little difficulty getting approval for elimination of the minimal protections against Wall Street risk taking and outright fraud provided by the Dodd-Frank Act. This will likely include elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. However, this may not make much difference since Dodd-Frank is so weak. In other words, it’s likely that we will have another Great Recession fairly soon, regardless of what Trump does.

At an intermediate level of difficulty for Trump are actions that require Congressional approval, and which all Senate Democrats and some Republicans may be reluctant to go along with. I put the repeal of the Affordable Care Act in this category, since it is essentially a massive giveaway of public funds to the insurance, medical and pharmaceutical industries, all important Republican donors. More likely to happen are modifications to Obamacare that increase corporate profits and make it more difficult and expensive for less affluent Americans to obtain medical care.

Another change requiring Congressional approval that will elicit Congressional resistance is Trump’s promise to cancel and/or renegotiate so-called “free trade” agreements such as NAFTA, or to withdraw from the World Trade Organization. These treaties, the primary goal of which is to increase corporate dominance of the international economy, have always had greater support from Republicans than Democrats.

On the impossible side is Trump’s immigration policy. In the final months of the campaign, he began to back off from his promise to build a wall on the Mexican border. More importantly, it is difficult to imagine the kind of chaos that would result from any attempt to deport the approximately 11 million undocumented people living in this country. More likely, he will cooperate with Congress in passing laws that make it more difficult or impossible for people of certain religious or ethnic groups to enter to the country in the future.

Now for two wild cards.

Will Trump be more or less likely than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to involve us in any more than the five foreign military interventions in which we are currently involved? My guess is that he will escalate the war against ISIS, with totally unpredictable consequences, but be reluctant to deploy American troops in new wars. But given Trump’s childlike temperament, this prediction could be way off base.

Finally, it is important to remember that George W. Bush and Barack Obama have created a massive national security apparatus, including the capability of spying on virtually any electronic communication between American citizens, and the militarization of the police, who can bring overwhelming force to bear against protesters and demonstrators. This is important because if Trump is able to fulfill his campaign promises, there will be widespread dissent on the left, and if he blunders badly, there will be buyers’ remorse among his current followers. Some of us were dismayed by FBI Director Comey’s recent intervention in the presidential election, but we should be prepared for the possibility that Trump will not hesitate to use the national security state for political purposes, including attempts to influence future elections.

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Trump’s Trump Card

The World According to the Donald

Framing the Debates

The Cost of Climate Inaction

Economics, Environment, , ,

A recent headline says that climate change will cost the millennial generation $8.8 trillion. But from where does this number come? The trail leads to a 2015 study by Marshall Burke of Stanford University and two colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley in which they attempted to measure the relationship between temperature and economic productivity.

We know that global temperatures are increasing, and we can estimate how much they will increase if nothing is done to mitigate climate change (the “business-as-usual” scenario). How can you measure the relationship between temperature and economic productivity? You can’t do it simply by comparing the economies of warmer and cooler countries, since there are many cultural and environmental differences between, for example, Sweden and Nigeria. But if you compare the productivity of each country during warmer- and cooler-than-usual years, each country serves as its own control group.

However, other variables that influence the economy may take on different values during warmer and cooler years. For example, a global trade agreement may have increased productivity in certain countries in certain years, and those years may also have happened to be warmer (or cooler). These confounding variables have to be measured and statistically removed from the data.

Burke and his colleagues gathered data from 166 countries over the 50-year span between 1960 and 2010. They used multiple regression to calculate the relationship between temperature and productivity, while eliminating the effects of “common contemporaneous shocks,” such as global price changes or technological innovations, “country-specific . . . trends in growth rates,” such as those produced by changing political institutions or economic policies, and the lagged effects of previous years’ temperature and rainfall. Their final curve is an average of the impact of temperature on productivity in the 166 countries, weighted by the countries’ population size.

They found that the relationship between temperature and productivity is a curve which peaks at 55 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius). That is, countries are most productive when their average annual temperature is 55 degrees, and their productivity declines the more the average deviates from that temperature in either direction. The curve is shown below, along with the average yearly temperatures of selected countries. The blue shaded area represents the 90% confidence interval around their best estimate. At right are separate breakdowns for rich and poor countries, years of measurement, and agricultural and non-agricultural productivity.

figure2

Next, they used this relationship to calculate the effects of expected future climate change, assuming business-as-usual, on future global income and the incomes of each country. The model predicts that global productivity will decline approximately 23% by 2100, as compared to the same future without global warming. While some cooler-than-average countries, such as Canada and Russia, will see their economies improve, the majority (77%) will see declines in income, especially those countries near the Equator. Since the countries that can anticipate the worst effects are already poorer than average, the result will be an increase in global inequality. Here is a brief presentation of their findings by Dr. Burke.

How can these results be explained? The authors found that agricultural productivity peaks at around the same temperature (see the chart above). They also mention increased energy costs and declines in health at warm and cool temperatures. Finally, they cite research showing that human cognitive errors and interpersonal conflicts increase at warmer temperatures.

Can we trust these predictions? An optimist might note that there is a danger of overestimating the damage climate change will cause if the peak in productivity at 55 degrees is actually due to confounding variables unrelated to temperature that are not controlled in their analysis. However, it’s difficult to think of phenomena not caused by temperature that would still produce a productivity curve peaking at 55 degrees.

The authors also point out that between 1960 and 2010 annual temperatures fluctuated fairly randomly. This provided little incentive for people to adapt to warmer or cooler temperatures. However, future temperatures are expected to increase consistently, which may instigate successful efforts to adapt to these warmer temperatures.

Optimists might also argue that the assumption of no climate action at all between now and 2100 is unrealistic. To the extent that effective action is taken to mitigate climate change, the loss of productivity will not be as great.

On the other hand, a pessimist could think of reasons why their analysis might underestimate climate change’s damage to the economy. The authors note that their model focuses only on the effects of temperature and those other phenomena that are directly influenced by temperature. But climate change will affect other things besides temperature, such as sea level rise and extreme weather events. If these other effects reduce productivity, the harm due to climate change will be greater than they predict.

They also note that their model predicts the effects of annual temperatures only within the range that they have been observed between 1960 and 2010. But if global temperatures increase substantially, the future may not be predictable from the past. For example, if temperature increases cause sustained droughts over large areas, the cumulative effects on agricultural productivity may be much greater than the effects of any known previous droughts. In reality, we probably have little idea of what future catastrophes await us.

We can now return to the effect of climate change on the incomes of millennials. Two nonprofits, Demos and NextGen Climate, have published an analysis of the lifetime cost of climate change to American millennials, using the data from Burke and his colleagues. The Burke analysis predicts that, in the absence of climate action, the United States economy will shrink 5% by 2050 and 36% by 2100—slightly more than the global average of 23%.

Millennials are typically defined as people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. The Demos/NGC paper calculated the lifetime earnings lost by Americans who turned 21 in 2015 (born in 1994) and those born in 2015. This is simply a matter of arithmetic, and the formulas are given in their appendix. Using these formulas, you can calculate the cost of climate change to any birth cohort. Obviously, the later the birth year, the greater the cost. The $8.8 trillion figure is the aggregated cost to all millenials.

The chart below illustrates the average cost of climate change to Americans turning 21 in 2015, calculated separately for college graduates and non-graduates.

nextgen-figure-3

The second chart compares wealth lost by 2015 college graduates due to climate change to two other drains on the income of their generation—college debt and the lingering effects of the Great Recession.

lifetime-lost-wealth

Of course, the accuracy of these figures depends entirely on the validity of the analysis by Burke and his colleagues.

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Snow Job

Deep Background

Deep Background

Foreign policy, Social psychology, , ,

Theories of causal attribution in social psychology distinguish between proximal and distal causes of events. Proximal causes are close to the event in time and space while distal causes are further removed from it. Proximal causes usually include the intentional acts of persons as well as immediate situational influences on them. Distal causes include the institutions, social structure and physical environment within which behavior is embedded. Distal and proximal causes combine to form a causal chain in which the more distal causes lead to the more proximal ones.

Distal causes are sometimes called ultimate causes. This reflects more than simply a judgment that they are important. It implies that distal causes are more permanent, while proximal causes are to some extent substitutable for one another. For example, a person who is under chronic economic stress due to poverty (a distal cause) may respond aggressively to a variety of frustrating situations (proximal causes). Eliminating some of these frustrations may do little to reduce overall aggression.

Research on causal attribution suggests than proximal causes are more easily recognized and rated by participants as more important than distal causes, and that voluntary acts of individuals are regarded as the most causally significant. This preference for intentional acts follows from the fundamental attribution error—the tendency to give greater weight to personal causes of behavior and to minimize the importance of situational or environmental causes.

Given this research, it is not surprising that the public blames terrorist acts primarily on their perpetrators and places a high priority on detecting and eliminating potential terrorists. However, if distal causes of terrorism are not addressed, we face the possibility of an inexhaustible supply of terrorists, as new recruits volunteer to take the places of those who are captured or killed. Fortunately, researchers are exploring some of the more distal causes of terrorism.

Politics, or Why They Hate Us

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism studied all of the 4600 suicidal terrorist attacks that have occurred in the world since 1980. His information comes from interviews with relatives and colleagues of the perpetrators, news reports, and the data bases of other groups that study terrorism. He reports that almost all terrorist attacks are part of a campaign directed by a militant secular organization whose goal is to compel other countries to withdraw their military forces from territory they regard as their homeland.

What 95% of all suicide attacks have in common . . . is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.

Pape rules out religion as the ultimate cause since many suicide terrorists, such as those from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, were not religious. The leadership of ISIS consists of former Iraqi military leaders under Sadam Hussein. However, Islam is not irrelevant. Terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS use Islam as a recruitment tool and as a way to get recruits to overcome their fear of death.

The arguments that terrorist attacks such as the Paris massacre are intended to prompt France to increase its bombing of Syria, or to persuade the French people to persecute Muslims in France (thereby recruiting more local terrorists), are not inconsistent with Pape’s thesis. He refers to these as short-term goals which are intended to increase the costs of French intervention in the Middle East, and ultimately to persuade foreign governments to withdraw from the Persian Gulf.

Global Warming

Some climate scientists have suggested that there is a causal chain that runs from climate change, through drought, to migration from rural or urban areas, to political instability in the Middle East, particularly in Syria. A study published in March by Colin Kelley of the University of California at Santa Barbara and his colleagues addresses the first link in this causal chain. The authors argue that, although droughts are common in the Middle East, the drought that occurred in 2007-2010 was unprecedented in its severity in recent history. This drought matched computer simulations of the effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions on the region. The simulations predicted both hotter temperatures and a weakening of westerly winds bringing moisture from the Mediterranean, both of which occurred.

The method used in the study was to generate computer simulations of climate in the region both with and without climate change, and compare them to what actually happened. They conclude that climate change made the drought “two to three times more likely” than natural variability alone. While I can follow their argument, I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate it.

This thesis is similar to the arguments of some U. S. military analysts that climate change acts as a “threat multiplier” that increases instability in various regions of the world. However, Kelley sees climate change as an ultimate cause of the Syrian War, rather than just a catalyst. His paper is part of a larger scholarly literature linking global warming to interpersonal and political conflict.

Inequality

Frenchman Thomas Piketty, author of the best selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in a blog post published by Le Monde, proposed that income inequality is a major cause of Middle East terrorism. Since the interview is in French, I am relying on an article by Jim Tankersly of the Washington Post. He describes Piketty’s theory as “controversial,” since it explicitly blames the U. S. and Europe for their victimization by terrorists.

By Middle East, Piketty means the area between Egypt and Iran, which of couse includes Syria. This region contains six corrupt oil monarchies—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates—all of which survive due to militarily support from the U. S. and Europe. Within those countries, a small minority controls most of the wealth, while the majority are kept in “semi-slavery.” Collectively, they control almost 60% of the wealth of the region, but only 16% of its population. The remaining Arab countries—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen—are much poorer. These countries, described by Piketty as a “powder keg” of terrorism, have a history of political instability.

In an 2014 paper, Alvaredo and Piketty attempted to estimate income inequality in the Middle East, a task made more difficult by the poor quality of their economic statistics. They estimated (“under reasonable assumptions”) that the top 10% controls over 60% of income in the region and the top 1% controls over 25%. This estimate is compared below to the income shares of the top 1% in five other countries for which more accurate statistics are available:

  • Sweden                                                          8.67%
  • France                                                            8.94%
  • Great Britain                                                12.4%
  • Germany                                                      13.13%
  • United States                                              22.83%
  • Middle East                                                  26.2%

Yes, folks, income inequality in the Middle East is even greater than in the United States! (Who would have thought, 35 years ago, that we would become the comparison group against which a dysfunctional level of inequality is measured?)

As you’ve no doubt noticed, all three of these analyses ultimately blame Middle Eastern terrorism and the war in Syria primarily on the United States and Europe. Removing or mitigating these three distal causes requires that we decide to leave the fossil fuels of the Middle East in the ground, withdraw our military forces from the region, and promote education and social development for the majority of the people in the Middle East.

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The Muslim Clock Strikes