Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

David Kurtz: Ante Up or Leave The Table

Ante Up or Leave The Table: If you want to pander to your corporate constituencies by going around calling global warming a hoax, you're within your right to do so. But shouldn't those who deride the science of climate change and the manmade contributions to it be made to put more than just their own reputations on the line?

This isn't a hoax like the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot. At some point 50 or 100 years down the road -- maybe much sooner, I'm afraid -- the science and mechanics of climate change and human-generated carbon's role in it are going to be proved or disproved, demonstrated or not. And what are those folks who have been in denial the whole time going to do? Shrug their shoulders and say oops? My bad?

Is it going to be like the opposition to civil rights was, where the same people who opposed it to begin with were the first to declare, without any irony, that racism is abated and then raise the cry of reverse racism? Are we facing, as we did with civil rights, a decades long running battle of constant resistance where the enemies of progress work to undermine every step forward -- even as they enjoy the benefits of the very thing they are fighting?

We hear a lot from global warming deniers about the "high cost" of carbon emission regulation. Of course, in absolute terms they are right. It will be expensive. But what price are the deniers willing to pay personally for the high cost of being on the wrong side of science and history? Many of today's deniers will be long dead by the time the worst effects of inaction are realized. Those who do live long enough will more than likely be insulated from the most extreme effects by their relative wealth and prosperity, compared to Bangladeshis, for instance. And in any event, there is no justice -- no democratic justice -- in punishing fools for being fools.

In spite of conservatives' copious self-regard for standing athwart this "monstrous liberal hoax," their denial is in fact easy, pain-free, and cheap.

John Scalzi: My Drug of Choice

My Drug of Choice « Whatever: This morning the local convenience store manager looked at me, and asked with neighborly concern if everything was all right. I told her everything was fine, except that the entire plant kingdom was trying to mate in my nose.

(via Megan McArdle)

Michael O'Hare: The California Low Carbon Fuel Standard

The Reality-Based Community: The California Low Carbon Fuel Standard: Jon scooped me on this last night because I got home so late from the all-day meeting of the Air Resources Board that adopted the LCFS. I was there because my team at Berkeley (with another group at Davis and a subcontract to Purdue) did a large part of the supporting research for this innovative program, so I got to give a five-minute talk about our work at the beginning and then sit up front with the ARB staff in case of questions from the board, through ninety commenters during the public hearing part and an hour or so of board discussion. A nine-hour day of democracy in action.

As a piece of climate policy, the LCFS is far from perfect and especially far from "the solution": if the whole world implemented the 10% reduction in transportation fuel greenhouse gas intensity it requires, it would be less than 3% of the way to climate stabilization. But it's a good piece of political work, likely to be quite influential on governments in the US and elsewhere, and overall something to celebrate.

The LCFS in simplest form requires transportation fuel to release 10% less greenhouse gas per unit of energy provided from 2012 to 2022. This initially looked like an enormous gift to the biofuels industry, especially the corn ethanol industry; two years ago it was widely believed that the main compliance path for this program would be blending more and more corn ethanol into gasoline. Biofuels are essentially a solar collector system that captures carbon dioxide from the air, peels off the oxygen using the sun's energy, and releases the carbon when the fuel is burned, so the only global warming expected from them was from production processes like driving a diesel tractor across the cornfield, hauling the corn to a biorefinery, and distilling ethanol from the beer yeast makes from corn mush. For comparison (these values vary a little with production processes), these "direct" emissions from corn ethanol are 50-70 grams of CO2 equivalent per megajoule and gasoline emissions are 95.

A little more than a year ago, the first estimate of so called "indirect land use change" (LUC) emissions was published. By far the most interesting angle on biofuels policy, that has taken us a year to understand properly and measure, this effect occurs when biofuels are grown on land that would otherwise grow food. To divert corn, for example, from cattle feed and corn flakes, biofuels producers have to outbid the food industry for it, and the resulting increase in price starts a series of dominoes falling through the world food markets. One effect is a reduction of food consumption - for example eating less meat, which frees up a lot of corn - another is conversion of soybean land to corn. By the time these dominoes stop falling, someone is cutting down a patch of rain forest in northern Brazil to put cattle on it, because his ranch was planted with soybeans.

Converting forest and pasture to cultivation releases a very large puff of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from fire and decay of the plants on them, large enough to make biofuels that compete with food for land look much less attractive on a global warming basis that they looked without LUC. For example, using our economic modeling, the ARB will add about 28 grams for LUC to the direct emissions from corn ethanol under its current regulatory scheme (this is much less than the original LUC estimate, from Tim Searchinger and his colleagues; it's going to be a lively few years in the land use modeling community).

I need to note that biofuel is not the same as ethanol or corn ethanol especially with respect to LUC effects. Biofuels made from algae growing in the ocean or in a tank in the desert, or from wastes like forest thinnings or solid waste diverted from a landfill, do not cause LUC discharges; biofuels made from crops with very high yields, like so-called "cellulosic ethanol" where the whole plant is converted to fuel by technologies currently approaching economic practicality, will have much lower LUC than biofuels from seeds.

ARB's LUC numbers for different biofuels (such as sugar cane ethanol from Brazil and soybean biodiesel) have been by far the most controversial aspect of the LCFS, variously attacked by the biofuels industry as being (i) too uncertain to use at all (ii) too high. I think the most important element in the board's vote yesterday was to accept a rule that incorporated indirect land use change discharge as a consequential element of the regulatory process, and it's to the board's credit (and Governor Schwarzenegger's) that it stood up to a very vigorous lobbying campaign to turn the LCFS into an ethanol subsidy by using a value of zero for LUC. ARB staff (a very earnest, professional, and competent bunch, by the way: your tax dollars are well spent on this crowd) was instructed to pursue further research on the LUC phenomenon, and the numbers will probably change as the science progresses. My own view is that the LUC numbers in the current rule are too low by about half for some fairly technical reasons having to do with the fact that LUC occurs at the beginning of the fuel production period, the number of years corn ethanol will be used as vehicle fuel, and the effects on food prices and consumption of crop-based biofuel expansion; watch this space for further details.

Two reflections on the larger politics of this event. First, I was dismayed by the willingness of LCFS advocates to slough over its economic costs, a powerful seduction for well-meaning people trying to save the planet and not scare people over what it will take. If low-carbon transportation fuels were really cheaper than petroleum, we would be using them already, and the same principle applies to all the things we are going to have to do to get the other 97%. Good environmental policy is not free or cheap; it's expensive and worth it and should be presented that way. We will pay more for gasoline, but we will make out like bandits when we avoid putting Florida and Bangla Desh under water; if we learn to drive less, we will enjoy a lot of other non-climate benefits as well.

Second, we (the global warming science and policy community) tripped on the LUC phenomenon in the context of biofuels, but I think it will be seen as something larger and more interesting. Recall that it's caused when something competes with food for land, and biofuels are not the only thing that does this. Bulding suburban housing on farmland, for example, has the same LUC discharge on a per-acre basis, and land use policy generally should start to recognize this climate effect along with the other costs of our bad housing habits.

Fiona Harvey: Ice loss sparks new climate change fears

Evidence of ice loss from both poles this week has sparked fresh fears that global warming is progressing faster than scientists had predicted.

Arctic ice has thinned dramatically, as well as shrinking in area, according to US research. Thin seasonal ice, which melts and refreezes each year, now makes up about 70 per cent of the Arctic winter ice, up from about 40 to 50 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s, leaving far less of the older, thicker ice that is harder to melt.

In the Antarctic, an ice bridge connecting an island to the Wilkins ice shelf – a sheet of ice about the size of Northern Ireland – shattered as scientists monitored it through satellite observations.

“What we’re seeing is very dramatic,” said Andrew Fleming, remote sensing manager at the British Antarctic Survey. “It’s very worrying.”

Scientists believed the effects were linked to the “very strong warming” at the poles, he said. The Antarctic peninsula has warmed by more than 3ºC in the past 50 years. “That’s a staggering rate of warming, and it’s still going up,” said Mr Fleming.

Ice shelves take centuries to form, but when they start to break up it can be sudden. The bridge at the Wilkins ice shelf was a 40km strand of ice, at its narrowest point a few hundred metres wide, connecting the shelf to Charcot and Latady islands.

Last year, scientists from the BAS landed on it in an aircraft to examine the ice. They had known for some time it was under strain, but it remained intact until at the end of last week satellite images showed new cracks appearing.

The next day, the ice sheet had “exploded from the centre outwards”, said Mr Fleming, who was monitoring the break-up through satellite images from the European Space Agency.

“It was very fast, very dramatic,” he said. “It’s now completely shattered.”

The break-up of the ice bridge alarms scientists because it could accelerate the break-up of the rest of the Wilkins shelf. This was at least the 10th shelf to start disintegrating quickly in recent years, said Mr Fleming, and several more were in danger.

Rapid melting of polar sea ice is of particular concern for two reasons: disappearing ice leaves areas of open sea that are dark, and – unlike the reflective ice – absorb the sun’s heat, accelerating the warming process; the break-up of ice shelves exposes glaciers that then begin to move faster to the sea.

The Arctic and some of the Antarctic float on the sea. Ice takes up more space than water, and when this floating ice melts, it does not directly raise sea levels, in the same way that the melting of ice cubes in a full glass of water would not cause the glass to overflow.

However, the glaciers of the Antarctic peninsula are on land, so when they tumble into the sea, they contribute directly to rising sea levels. In the north, the Greenland ice sheet is also on land, and its glaciers are flowing faster to the sea.

If Greenland’s ice sheet melted, it would raise sea levels by seven metres, and if both the east and west Antarctic ice sheets went, the figure would be 10 times higher. That would take hundreds of years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Long before the land ice disappeared, however, sea levels would rise significantly – a 1 per cent loss of the Antarctic land ice would probably raise levels by 65cm, estimates the Norwegian Polar Institute.

Two conferences this week were addressing the problems of the poles and climate change. At a joint meeting of the Antarctic Treaty and the Arctic Council in the US, Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, said the news of the Wilkins ice shelf showed “global warming has already had enormous effects on our planet, and we have no time to lose in tackling this crisis”.

In Bonn, governments met for the first meeting to thrash out the details of a successor to the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

One factor that could help to slow the melting of the Arctic, but which has not yet received serious consideration internationally, would be to cut the amount of “black carbon” – soot – that we spew into the air. Black carbon darkens ice when it falls, causing it to absorb more heat, and may be responsible for half of the warming effect in the Arctic, according to research. Cutting soot would not only remove large amounts of air pollution, but, say some scientists, could be quicker and easier than cutting carbon dioxide emissions.