Climate change is clear and present danger, says landmark US report

Climate change has moved from distant threat to present-day danger and no American will be left unscathed, according to a landmark report due to be unveiled on Tuesday.

The National Climate Assessment, a 1,300-page report compiled by 300 leading scientists and experts, is meant to be the definitive account of the effects of climate change on the US. It will be formally released at a White House event and is expected to drive the remaining two years of Barack Obama's environmental agenda.

The findings are expected to guide Obama as he rolls out the next and most ambitious phase of his climate change plan in June – a proposal to cut emissions from the current generation of power plants, America's largest single source of carbon pollution.

The White House is believed to be organising a number of events over the coming week to give the report greater exposure.

"Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present," a draft version of the report says. The evidence is visible everywhere from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean, it goes on.

"Americans are noticing changes all around them. Summers are longer and hotter, and periods of extreme heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours, though in many regions there are longer dry spells in between."

The final wording was under review by the White House but the basic gist remained unchanged, scientists who worked on the report said.

On Sunday the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, said the world needed to try harder to combat climate change. At a meeting of UN member states in Abu Dhabi before a climate change summit in New York on 23 September, Ban said: "I am asking them to announce bold commitments and actions that will catalyse the transformative change we need. If we do not take urgent action, all our plans for increased global prosperity and security will be undone."

Gary Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan University and vice-chair of the NCA advisory committee, said the US report would be unequivocal that the effects of climate change were occurring in real-time and were evident in every region of the country.

"One major take-home message is that just about every place in the country has observed that the climate has changed," he told the Guardian. "It is here and happening, and we are not cherrypicking or fearmongering."

The draft report notes that average temperature in the US has increased by about 1.5F (0.8C) since 1895, with more than 80% of that rise since 1980. The last decade was the hottest on record in the US.

Temperatures are projected to rise another 2F over the next few decades, the report says. In northern latitudes such as Alaska, temperatures are rising even faster.

"There is no question our climate is changing," said Don Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois and a lead author of the assessment. "It is changing at a factor of 10 times more than naturally."

Record-breaking heat – even at night – is expected to produce more drought and fuel larger and more frequent wildfires in the south-west, the report says. The north-east, midwest and Great Plains states will see an increase in heavy downpours and a greater risk of flooding.

"Parts of the country are getting wetter, parts are getting drier. All areas are getting hotter," said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change at the US Geological Survey. "The changes are not the same everywhere."

Those living on the Atlantic seaboard, Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska who have weathered the effects of sea level rise and storm surges can expect to see more. Residents of coastal cities, especially in Florida where there is already frequent flooding during rainstorms, can expect to see more. So can people living in inland cities sited on rivers.

Some changes are already having a measurable effect on food production and public health, the report will say.

John Balbus, senior adviser at the National Institute of Environmenal Health Science and a lead author of the NCA report, said rising temperatures increased the risk of heat stroke and heat-related deaths.

Eugene Takle, convening lead author of the agriculture chapter of the NCA report, and director of the Climate Science programme at Iowa State University, said heatwaves and changes in rainfall had resulted in a levelling off in wheat and corn production and would eventually cause declines.

In California, warmer winters have made it difficult to grow cherries. In the midwest, wetter springs have delayed planting. Invasive vines such as kudzu have spread northward, from the south to the Canadian border.

Some of the effects on agriculture, such as a longer growing season, are positive. But Takle said: "By mid-century and beyond the overall impacts will be increasingly negative on most crops and livestock."

The assessments are the American equivalent of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. This year's report for the first time looks at what America has done to fight climate change or protect people from its consequences in the future.

Under an act of Congress the reports were supposed to be produced every four years, but no report was produced during George W Bush's presidency. More

 

© 2014

Volcanism, Climate and Food Security

Most have heard of the Battle of Waterloo, but who has heard of the volcano called Tambora? No school textbook I’ve seen mentions that only two months before Napoleon’s final defeat in Belgium on June 18, 1815, the faraway Indonesian island of Sumbawa was the site of the most devastating volcanic eruption on Earth in thousands of years.

Mt. Tambora

The death toll claimed around 100,000 people, from the thick pyroclastic flows of lava, from the tsunami that struck nearby coasts, and from the thick ash that blanketed South-East Asia’s farmlands, destroyed crops and plunged it into darkness for a week. Both events – Napoleon’s defeat and the eruption – had monumental impacts on human history. But while a library of scholarship has been devoted to Napoleon’s undoing at Waterloo, the scattered writings on Tambora would scarcely fill your in-tray.

This extraordinary geological event took place 199 years ago this week, and on the cusp of its bicentenary Tambora is finally getting its due. With the help of modern scientific instruments and old-fashioned archival detective work, the Tambora 1815 eruption can be conclusively placed among the greatest environmental disasters ever to befall mankind. The floods, droughts, starvation, and disease in the three years following the eruption stem from the volcano’s effects on weather systems, so Tambora stands today as a harrowing case study of what the human costs and global reach might be from runaway climate change.

Tambora’s greatest claim to infamy lies not in the impact it had on what was then the Dutch East Indies (which were terrible enough), but its indirect effects on the disease ecology of the Bay of Bengal. The enormous cloud of sulfate gases Tambora ejected into the atmosphere slowed the development of the Indian monsoon, the world’s largest weather system, for the following two years.

Tambora's eruption was heard 2,oookm
away in Sumatra, and ash fell metres deep

Drought brought on by the eruption devastated crop yields across the Indian sub-continent, but more disastrously gave rise to a new and deadly strain of cholera. Cholera had always been endemic to Bengal, but the bizarre weather of 1816-17 triggered by Tambora’s eruption – first drought, then late, unseasonal flooding – altered the microbial ecology of the Bay of Bengal. The cholera bacterium, which has an unusually adaptive genetic structure highly sensitive to changes in its aquatic environment, mutated into a new strain. This met with no resistance among the local population, and it spread across Asia and eventually the globe. By century’s end, the death toll from Bengal cholera stood in the tens of millions.

Just as the biological disaster known as the Black Death defined the 14th century in Europe and the Near East, so cholera shaped the nineteenth century like no other calamity. Much of our medical science, and our modern public health institutions, originate in the Victorian-era battle against cholera. But only now, thanks to renewed scientific interest in the relation between cholera and climate change, can we make the connection between the worldwide cholera epidemic originating in 1817 and Tambora’s eruption thousands of miles away.

Tambora’s ripple effects were felt across the globe. In southwest China, the outlying mountainous province of Yunnan suffered terribly from the cold volcanic weather, losing crop after crop of rice to bitter winds and flooding rains. The situation was so extreme that desperate Yunnanese resorted to eating white clay, while parents sold their children in the town markets, or killed them out of mercy.

In the aftermath of this three-year famine, Yunnan farmers turned to a more reliable cash crop – opium – to ensure their families’ survival against future disasters. Within a few decades, opium was being grown all across Yunnan, while opium processing technology and expertise drifted south into the remote mountains of modern-day Burma and Laos. The “golden triangle” of international opium production was born.

If the Tambora disaster persists in cultural memory at all, it is as the “Year Without a Summer,” 1816, the most notorious and best chronicled extreme weather event of that century. Snowstorms swept the east coast in June, ensuring the shortest growing season on record. Crowds of desperate and hungry rural folk from Maine and Vermont fled snowfalls of up to 18 inches to the western frontier, which had been spared the worst of Tambora’s weather.

Here grain harvests were fetching sky-high prices on the famine-struck Atlantic market, but after the boom came a shattering bust – the so-called Panic of 1819 – which triggered the first sustained economic depression in US history. East coast speculators had invested hugely in western agriculture post-1816, only to lose their shirts when the similarly-affected European grain markets returned to normal in 1819, and commodity prices plummeted. “Never were such hard times,” wrote Thomas Jefferson of ordinary Americans who, across the country, found themselves “in a condition of unparalleled distress,” persisting well into the 1820s.

As it turns out, however, the indirect ripple effects of Tambora – what climate scientists call “teleconnections” – were even more historically significant. Cholera, opium, and the Panic of 1819 are three examples; another is Arctic exploration.

One of the paradoxical effects of a major tropical eruption is that while the planet in general is cooled by the blanket of volcanic dust that drifts from the equator to the poles, the Arctic itself is drastically warmed owing to changes in wind circulation and north Atlantic ocean currents. This anomaly was only discovered after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the tropical Philippines, the first observed with the benefit of modern climatological instruments.

In 1817 and 1818, the British Admiralty began to receive exciting reports from whaling captains of a remarkable loss of sea ice in around Greenland. Huge icebergs from a broken icepack were spotted floating as far south as Ireland and New York. The prospect of a northwest passage for shipping to the East – a holy grail England had sought since Elizabethan times – beckoned once more. With a generation’s naval captains still hungry for glory but now languishing onshore after the defeat of Napoleon, the Admiralty launched an expensive and ultimately disastrous 50-year-long campaign to chart the elusive northwest passage.

The British could not have known then, of course, that Tambora had caused the Arctic to melt, and that the climatic impacts of a tropical eruption persist for no longer than three years. The Arctic refroze just in time for the arrival of Britain’s first polar expedition under Captain John Ross in 1818. Years of fruitless, icebound sallies into the polar seas culminated in the tragic Franklin expedition of the 1840s, when all hands were lost, and the heroic age of British Arctic exploration came to an end.

It is time to recognise Tambora as the Napoleon of eruptions. The implications – for historians – of a revised, volcanic nineteenth century are immense. As with the global cholera epidemic, and the growth of a Chinese opium empire, Victorian-era polar exploration might not have happened at all, or would have evolved in an entirely different direction, had it not been for Tambora’s climate-wrecking detonation in 1815.

For two long centuries, the connections between this major volcanic disaster and human history have been obscured by two factors: the limitations of scientific knowledge, and by our narrow, anthropocentric vision that seeks out only human causes for human events, neglecting the influence of environmental change. Now, in the 21st century, as we begin to appreciate more profoundly the interdependence of human and natural systems, the lesson of a 200-year-old climate emergency may finally be learned: a changing climate changes everything. More

How would the modern world survive an eruption of this magnitude? Given the relativly low global grain reserves how would we feed affected populations? Editor

 

© 2014

Planet Earth - The Next Thirty Years

What These Climate Scientists Said About Earth's Future Will Terrify You

I spoke with apocalyptic climate scientists about what our next generation faces, and their answers were bleak.

—By Dahr Jamail

| Tue Dec. 17, 2013 12:11 PM GMT

Consider this timeline:

• Late 2007: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announces that the planet will see a one degree Celsius temperature increase due to climate change by 2100.
• Late 2008: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research predicts a 2C increase by 2100.
• Mid-2009: The U.N. Environment Programme predicts a 3.5C increase by 2100. Such an increase would remove habitat for human beings on this planet, as nearly all the plankton in the oceans would be destroyed, and associated temperature swings would kill off many land plants. Humans have never lived on a planet at 3.5C above baseline.
• October 2009: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research releases an updated prediction, suggesting a 4C temperature increase by 2060.
• November 2009: The Global Carbon Project, which monitors the global carbon cycle, and the Copenhagen Diagnosis, a climate science report, predict 6C and 7C temperature increases, respectively, by 2100.
• December 2010: The U.N. Environment Programme predicts up to a 5C increase by 2050.
• 2012: The conservative International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook report for that year states that we are on track to reach a 2C increase by 2017.
• November 2013: The International Energy Agency predicts a 3.5C increase by 2035.

A briefing provided to the failed U.N. Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen in 2009 provided this summary: "The long-term sea level that corresponds to current CO2 concentration is about 23 meters above today's levels, and the temperatures will be 6 degrees C or more higher. These estimates are based on real long-term climate records, not on models."

On December 3rd, a study by 18 eminent scientists, including the former head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, showed that the long-held, internationally agreed upon target to limit rises in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius was in error and far above the 1C threshold that would need to be maintained in order to avoid the effects of catastrophic climate change.

And keep in mind that the various major assessments of future global temperatures seldom assume the worst about possible self-reinforcing climate feedback loops like the methane one.

"Things Are Looking Really Dire"

Climate-change-related deaths are already estimated at five million annually, and the process seems to be accelerating more rapidly than most climate models have suggested. Even without taking into account the release of frozen methane in the Arctic, some scientists are already painting a truly bleak picture of the human future. Take Canadian Wildlife Service biologist Neil Dawe, who in August told a reporter that he wouldn't be surprised if the generation after him witnessed the extinction of humanity. All around the estuary near his office on Vancouver Island, he has been witnessing the unraveling of "the web of life," and "it's happening very quickly."

"Economic growth is the biggest destroyer of the ecology," Dawe says. "Those people who think you can have a growing economy and a healthy environment are wrong. If we don't reduce our numbers, nature will do it for us." And he isn't hopeful humans will be able to save themselves. "Everything is worse and we're still doing the same things. Because ecosystems are so resilient, they don't exact immediate punishment on the stupid."

The University of Arizona's Guy McPherson has similar fears. "We will have very few humans on the planet because of lack of habitat," he says. Of recent studies showing the toll temperature increases will take on that habitat, he adds, "They are only looking at CO2 in the atmosphere."

Here's the question: Could some version of extinction or near-extinction overcome humanity, thanks to climate change—and possibly incredibly fast? Similar things have happened in the past. Fifty-five million years ago, a five degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures seems to have occurred in just 13 years, according to a study published in the October 2013 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A report in the August 2013 issue of Science revealed that in the near-term Earth's climate will change 10 times faster than at any other moment in the last 65 million years.

"The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet," climate scientist James Hansen has said. "There are potential irreversible effects of melting the Arctic sea ice. If it begins to allow the Arctic Ocean to warm up, and warm the ocean floor, then we'll begin to release methane hydrates. And if we let that happen, that is a potential tipping point that we don't want to happen. If we burn all the fossil fuels then we certainly will cause the methane hydrates, eventually, to come out and cause several degrees more warming, and it's not clear that civilization could survive that extreme climate change."

Yet, long before humanity has burned all fossil fuel reserves on the planet, massive amounts of methane will be released. While the human body is potentially capable of handling a six to nine degree Celsius rise in the planetary temperature, the crops and habitat we use for food production are not. As McPherson put it, "If we see a 3.5 to 4C baseline increase, I see no way to have habitat. We are at .85C above baseline and we've already triggered all these self-reinforcing feedback loops."

He adds: "All the evidence points to a locked-in 3.5 to 5 degree C global temperature rise above the 1850 ‘norm' by mid-century, possibly much sooner. This guarantees a positive feedback, already underway, leading to 4.5 to 6 or more degrees above ‘norm' and that is a level lethal to life. This is partly due to the fact that humans have to eat and plants can't adapt fast enough to make that possible for the seven to nine billion of us—so we'll die."

If you think McPherson's comment about lack of adaptability goes over the edge, consider that the rate of evolution trails the rate of climate change by a factor of 10,000, according to apaper in the August 2013 issue of Ecology Letters. Furthermore, David Wasdel, director of the Apollo-Gaia Project and an expert on multiple feedback dynamics, says, "We are experiencing change 200 to 300 times faster than any of the previous major extinction events."

Wasdel cites with particular alarm scientific reports showing that the oceans have already lost 40 percent of their phytoplankton, the base of the global oceanic food chain, because of climate-change-induced acidification and atmospheric temperature variations. (According to the Center for Ocean Solutions: "The oceans have absorbed almost one-half of human-released CO2 emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Although this has moderated the effect of greenhouse gas emissions, it is chemically altering marine ecosystems 100 times more rapidly than it has changed in at least the last 650,000 years.")

"This is already a mass extinction event," Wasdel adds. "The question is, how far is it going to go? How serious does it become? If we are not able to stop the rate of increase of temperature itself, and get that back under control, then a high temperature event, perhaps another 5-6 degrees [C], would obliterate at least 60 percent to 80 percent of the populations and species of life on Earth."

What Comes Next?

In November 2012, even Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group (an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries), warned that "a 4C warmer world can, and must be, avoided. Lack of action on climate change threatens to make the world our children inherit a completely different world than we are living in today."

A World Bank-commissioned report warned that we are indeed on track to a "4C world" marked by extreme heat waves and life-threatening sea-level rise.

The three living diplomats who have led U.N. climate change talks claim there is little chance the next climate treaty, if it is ever approved, will prevent the world from overheating. "There is nothing that can be agreed in 2015 that would be consistent with the 2 degrees," says Yvo de Boer, who was executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2009, when attempts to reach a deal at a summit in Copenhagen crumbled. "The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."

Atmospheric and marine scientist Ira Leifer is particularly concerned about the changing rainfall patterns a recently leaked IPCC draft report suggested for our future: "When I look at what the models predicted for a 4C world, I see very little rain over vast swaths of populations. If Spain becomes like Algeria, where do all the Spaniards get the water to survive? We have parts of the world which have high populations which have high rainfall and crops that exist there, and when that rainfall and those crops go away and the country starts looking more like some of North Africa, what keeps the people alive?"

The IPCC report suggests that we can expect a generalized shifting of global rain patterns further north, robbing areas that now get plentiful rain of future water supplies. History shows us that when food supplies collapse, wars begin, while famine and disease spread. All of these things, scientists now fear, could happen on an unprecedented scale, especially given the interconnected nature of the global economy.

"Some scientists are indicating we should make plans to adapt to a 4C world," Leifer comments. "While prudent, one wonders what portion of the living population now could adapt to such a world, and my view is that it's just a few thousand people [seeking refuge] in the Arctic or Antarctica."

Not surprisingly, scientists with such views are often not the most popular guys in the global room. McPherson, for instance, has often been labeled "Guy McStinction"—to which he responds, "I'm just reporting the results from other scientists. Nearly all of these results are published in established, esteemed literature. I don't think anybody is taking issue with NASA, or Nature, or Science, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Those] and the others I report are reasonably well known and come from legitimate sources, like NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], for example. I'm not making this information up, I'm just connecting a couple of dots, and it's something many people have difficulty with."

McPherson does not hold out much hope for the future, nor for a governmental willingness to make anything close to the radical changes that would be necessary to quickly ease the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; nor does he expect the mainstream media to put much effort into reporting on all of this because, as he says, "There's not much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human extinction." The destruction of the planet, on the other hand, is a good bet, he believes, "because there is money in this, and as long as that's the case, it is going to continue."

Leifer, however, is convinced that there is a moral obligation never to give up and that the path to global destruction could be altered. "In the short term, if you can make it in the economic interests of people to do the right thing, it'll happen very fast." He offers an analogy when it comes to whether humanity will be willing to act to mitigate the effects of climate change: "People do all sorts of things to lower their risk of cancer, not because you are guaranteed not to get it, but because you do what you can and take out the health protections and insurance you need in order to try to lower your risk of getting it."

The signs of a worsening climate crisis are all around us, whether we allow ourselves to see them or not. Certainly, the scientific community gets it. As do countless communities across the globe where the effects of climate change are already being experienced in striking ways and local preparations for climatic disasters, including increasingly powerful floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and storms are underway. Evacuations from low-lying South Pacific islands have already begun. People in such areas, out of necessity, are starting to try to teach their children how to adapt to, and live in, what we are causing our world to become.

My niece and nephews are doing something similar. They are growing vegetables in a backyard garden and their eight chickens provide more than enough eggs for the family. Their parents are intent on teaching them how to be ever more self-sustaining. But none of these heartfelt actions can mitigate what is already underway when it comes to the global climate.

I am 45 years old, and I often wonder how my generation will survive the impending climate crisis. What will happen to our world if the summer Arctic waters are indeed ice-free only a few years from now? What will my life look like if I live to experience a 3.5 Celsius global temperature increase?

Above all, I wonder how coming generations will survive.

Dahr Jamail has written extensively about climate change as well as the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. He is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. He is the author of two books:Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied IraqandThe Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. He currently works for al-Jazeera English in Doha, Qatar. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

Top 10 cities most at risk of natural disaster

Earthquakes, Floods, Storms, Tsunamis, Etc...

All the natural disasters in the news lately made us wonder what parts of the world were most threatened by things like floods & earthquakes. Massive reinsurer Swiss Re (a reinsurance company sells insurance to insurance companies, allowing them to offload some risks...) has a new report titled "Mind the risk: A global ranking of cities under threat from natural disasters" (pdf) that sheds some light on exactly that. Using their sophisticated modelling software and huge database of past events, they came up with a probabilistic ranking.

There are all kinds of ways to look at the data, but here are some of the most interesting variations.

Swiss Re/Screen capture

There are all kinds of ways to look at the data, but here are some of the most interesting variations.

 

Swiss Re/Screen capture

The list changes a bit if we look at it by "working days lost". More European and US cities appear on the top 10.

If we look at just earthquake risk, this is what the top 10 looks like for both people affected and working days lost: More

 

Disasters Affect The Poor And Vulnerable The Most

 

Al Gore explains why he’s optimistic about stopping global warming

Al Gore was vice president of the United States from 1993-2001. Since leaving politics, he’s been heavily involved in the campaign to fight global warming, even winning a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. And he says he’s more optimistic than ever that the issue has reached “a tipping point.” In this lightly edited interview transcript, he explains why.

Ezra Klein: In 2005, when “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, I remember that the hope was we could keep the carbon load in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, and the fear was we would hit 400ppm. Now we’ve hit 400ppm and people are hoping to avoid 450ppm. This seems to be getting out of hand, and fast.

Al Gore: We have already crossed the 400 parts per million mark. We crossed it earlier this year. The question now is how high it will go before we begin bending the curve. But in spite of the continued released of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it’s an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point.

The appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world. You mentioned my movie back in the day. The single most common criticism from skeptics when the film came out focused on the animation showing ocean water flowing into the World Trade Center memorial site. Skeptics called that demagogic and absurd and irresponsible. It happened last October 29th, years ahead of schedule, and the impact of that and many, many other similar events here and around the world has really begun to create a profound shift.

A second factor is the sharp and unexpectedly steep decrease in prices for electricity produced from wind and solar and the demand destruction for fossil fuel energy from new efficiency improvements. The difference between 32 degrees fahrenheit and 33 degrees fahrenheit seems larger than just one degree. It’s the difference between water and ice. And by analogy there’s a similar difference between renewable electricity that’s more expensive than electricity from coal and renewable electricity that’s less expensive. And in quite a few countries in the world and some parts of the United States we’ve crossed that threshold and in the next few years we’re going to see that crossed in nations and regions containing most of the world’s population.

Another way to think about this is that back when mobile telephones first appeared, the market projections for how quickly they would increase market share turned out to be not just wrong but way wrong. This is a point made by Dave Roberts at Grist, but the projections made 5-10 years ago for the installation of solar and wind technologies were, similarly, not just wrong but way wrong. We’ve seen a dramatic increase that’s far more rapid than anybody projected and it’s accelerating — not just in the United States but even more rapidly in developing countries.

EK: Do the policy failures of the last decade put more pressure on technological advances to be the source of the solution?

AG: No, I seem them as intertwined. To some extent, the failure of policy at Copenhagen and before that in Washington has put more emphasis on the hopeful developments in technology, but as the conversation is won on global warming — and it’s not won yet but it’s very nearly won — the possibilities for policy changes once again open up.

We are seeing dramatic progress towards new policies in China, Korea, Ireland. We’ve seen a coal tax in India. We’ve seen changes in Australia, the largest coal producing nation. We’ve seen Mexico take a leadership position. We’ve seen action in California and other states. And some 17 other countries are in various stages of adopting either a cap and trade or carbon tax or both. If China follows through in its stated intention to move its cap-and-trade pilot program into a nationwide program in two years, then we’ll see a new center of gravity in the global energy marketplace that will accelerate the shift towards a market-based set of policies that will speed up the phase-out of coal-based electricity.

EK: Let me push back on your optimism here. To again use “An Inconvenient Truth” as a time marker, when that came out, Republicans in the Senate were still introducing bills to fight climate change through policies like cap-and-trade or cap-and-dividend. In 2008, there was a cap-and-trade plan in the McCain/Palin platform. In 2009, Waxman-Markey passed the House. But since then, Republican opposition has solidified, and cap-and-trade and carbon tax ideas seem completely off-the-table in American politics.

AG: Well, it’s not unusual to find big political shifts that take place beneath the surface before they’re visible above the surface. A lot of Republicans have shared with me privately their growing discomfort with the statements of some of the deniers in their ranks. Even though they’re not yet willing to come back to advocate constructive policies, there is definitely movement. You have now the formation of the first organized caucus in the Senate, with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse joining with others in a hard-hitting effort.

But you see it at the local level a bit more than at the national level. You see these state initiatives and laws. And you see maybe the biggest shift of all in the business community. I think that in order to be competitive internationally we’ll have to make the shift towards a price on carbon. People are increasingly aware that we’re already paying the costs of carbon and so it makes sense to put a price on it.

EK: But to play the pessimist again, wouldn’t carbon prices in other countries give us a competitive advantage the longer we resist them at home? It seems that if India is taxing fossil fuels and we’re not, that’s a slight edge for us. It’s easy to imagine it becoming a kind of protectionist, save-our-manufacturing-sector issue.

AG: It’s certainly something that can’t be dismissed out of hand. But remember the World Trade Organization rules explicitly allow the recapture of carbon taxes at the border, much in the manner of a value-added tax. The U.S. is in danger if it did not change of being subjected to those recapture provisions. And as the cost curve for renewable electricity continues plunging, the low-cost electricity in the future will be renewables. At Apple, for example, 100 percent of its server farms and headquarters are on renewables, and they’re on the way to 100 percent for the company. Google is going down the same road. The pressure is only going to build as the price of renewable electricity continues to fall.

That’s even more true as the consequences to society and to the future of human civilization become ever more apparent to people. Once questions are resolved into a choice between right and wrong, then the laws change. It happened with civil rights. It’s happening now with gay rights. It happened with apartheid and, in an earlier era, with abolition. And this is now being resolved into a question of right and wrong.

EK: What do you think of the Obama administration’s intentions to push regulatory approaches to limiting carbon emissions?

AG: I’m very encouraged. I thought the president’s speech on climate was terrific and it followed the inspiring comments in his inaugural address and his post-election State of the Union. And remember the impact of policy direction on business calculations is forward-looking. When business begins to understand the direction of policy, they have to start adjusting to where the policy is going. When you look at the EPA process, it’s undeniably clear that there will be a price on carbon one way or the other. Then when you look at the movement in other countries and the states and local measures being enacted, the direction is now quite clear and businesses are making plans to adjust to it.

EK: You’ve moved from the world of politics to the world of technology. How has that changed your view of how much technology can do to solve this problem, and in particular, has it changed your view on various geoengineering schemes?

AG: Let me deal with the geoengineering part of your question first. That’s complex because there are some benign geoengineering proposals like white roofs or efforts to figure out a way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere , though no one has figured out how to do that yet. But the geoengineering options most often discussed, like putting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere or orbiting tinfoil strips — these are simply nuts. We shouldn’t waste a lot of time talking about them. Some people will anyway, but they’re just crazy.

To the broader part of your question, innovation is already playing a major role in bringing about new potential solutions to the climate crisis. The tech world had a bitter experience after the burst of enthusiasm in 2005 and 2006 because of a perfect storm made up of four elements: First, the great recession, which had a huge, destructive impact on business generally. Number two, the Chinese juggernaut, which subsidized the production of several prominent renewable energy technologies to the point where their sales price fell below the price of production in the West. Third, the shale gas boom dropped the retail price of electricity to levels below what many renewable energy plans needed to be viable. And fourth there was the policy failure I mentioned earlier in the U.S. Senate and Copenhagen. And all the while there was this massively funded climate denier campaign by the Koch Brothers and Exxon-Mobile and others that hired tobacco industry veterans to work with them on consumer advertising and lobbying activities.

But that setback was only temporary because reality has a way of reasserting itself. There has been a 100-fold increase in the number of extreme, high-temperature events around the world in the distribution curve. And people have noticed for themselves — the rain storms are bigger, the droughts are deeper and the fires are more destructive. All of these things have not escaped notice and people are connecting the dots. The cumulative amount of energy trapped by manmade global warming pollution each day in the earth’s atmosphere is now equal to the energy that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima bombs going off every 24 hours. It’s a big planet, but that’s a lot of energy.

The consequences are now hard to escape. Every night on the news, it’s like a nature hike through the book of revelations. Eleven states today are fighting 35 major fires! People are noticing this. And simultaneously they’re noticing the sharp drop in the cost of carbon-free, greenhouse gas-free energy, and the combination is pushing us over this political tipping point and the trend is unstoppable.

EK: What’s your response to people who say those events simply can’t be confidently connected to global warming?

AG: The leading scientists have in the last two years changed the way they discuss that particular connection. It’s true that it used to be common for them to say you can’t blame any single extreme weather event on global warming. What you had to say is the odds have shifted and those events are becoming more common and extreme. They’ve now changed their description of that connection. The temperature has increased globally and there’s now 4 percent more water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere than 30 years ago. As a result, every extreme weather event now has a component of global warming in it.

If you look at superstorm Sandy on October 29th, the ocean water east of New Jersey was nine degrees fahrenheit above average. That’s what put so much more energy into that storm. That’s what put so much more water vapor into that storm. Would there be a storm anyway? Maybe so. Would there be hurricanes and floods and droughts without man-made global warming? Of course. But they’re stronger now. The extreme events are more extreme. The hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they’re adding a 6. The fingerprint of man-made global warming is all over these storms and extreme weather events.

EK: Give me the optimistic scenario on what happens next. If all goes well, what do the next few years look like on this issue?

AG: Well, I think the most important part of it is winning the conversation. I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, hey man, we don’t go for that anymore. The same thing happened on apartheid. The same thing happened on the nuclear arms race with the freeze movement. The same thing happened in an earlier era with abolition. A few months ago, I saw an article about two gay men standing in line for pizza and some homophobe made an ugly comment about them holding hands and everyone else in line told them to shut up. We’re winning that conversation.

The conversation on global warming has been stalled because a shrinking group of denialists fly into a rage when it’s mentioned. It’s like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage every time a subject is mentioned and so everybody avoids the elephant in the room to keep the peace. But the political climate is changing. Something like Chris Hayes’s excellent documentary on climate change wouldn’t have made it on TV a few years ago. And as I said, many Republicans who’re still timid on the issue are now openly embarrassed about the extreme deniers. The deniers are being hit politically. They’re being subjected to ridicule, which stings. The polling is going back up in favor of doing something on this issue. The ability of the raging deniers to stop progress is waning every single day.

When that conversation is won, you’ll see more measures at the local and state level and less resistance to what the EPA is doing. And slowly it will become popular to propose steps that go further and politicians that take the bit in their teeth get rewarded. I remember when the tide turned on smoking in public places. People thought the late Frank Lautenburg was crazy for proposing a ban on smoking in airplanes, but he was rewarded politically and then politicians began falling all over themselves to do the same. That’s the optimistic scenario. And it’s not just a scenario! It’s happening now! More

 

Weather-related losses take their toll

August 19th 2013 8:00 AM Extreme weather events are taking their toll on the insurance industry even though midway through August the North Atlantic has yet to see its first hurricane of the year.

So far there have been five tropical storms including the currently active system Tropical Storm Erin, which is expected to dissipate in the mid-Atlantic.

But while there have been no hurricanes to wreak economic losses, there have been plenty of weather-related events elsewhere to keep risk managers and (re)insurance executives on their toes.

Zurich Insurance Group reported on Thursday a sharp decline in its second-quarter profits, mainly due to weather-related losses in Europe. The company’s net income fell 27 percent to $789 million.

Other insurers and reinsurers are counting the cost of this year’s severe weather-related events.

The major economies of the US, China and Canada have all suffered billions of dollars of losses as a result of severe weather, flooding and — in the case of China — earthquakes.

Strong thunderstorms and rain across the greater Toronto metropolitan region last month caused significant flooding and power outages, which affected businesses, vehicles and infrastructure. Economic losses from that single event have been estimated by AON Benfield at $1.45 billion, with around half of that cost covered by insurance. There was further severe weather in Ontario and Quebec provinces during July, with winds gusting up to 100mph during intense thunderstorms, which caused millions of dollars in insured losses.

Even before July, Canada had already suffered severe weather and flooding. Floods that occurred between June 19 and 24 claimed four lives and caused economic losses of $5.3 billion.

The insurance arm of Canada’s TD Bank Group expected claims costs from the severe weather in Alberta and Toronto to have a pre-tax impact of approximately $170 million after reinsurance.

Group president Ed Clark, in a statement to investors last month, said: “While banks and insurance companies can incur losses from severe weather events, our greatest concern is with the communities and individuals who experienced the devastation in Alberta and the GTA (Greater Toronto Area). We also thank our employees for their efforts to support our customers through these events, when many employees themselves were dealing with the impact.”

In the US weather-related losses have also been significant since the start of the year, with the Plains, Midwest and Northeast suffering economic losses of $6.5 billion in two bouts of severe weather in May and June.

For China it has been worse. During July torrential rainfall across many parts of the country brought floods that claimed the lives of almost 200 people and caused economic losses of more than $7 billion. A magnitude 5.9 earthquake on July 22 in the Gansu Province killed at least 95, damaged 80,000 homes and caused economic losses of $3.25 billion. Since the start of the year China has suffered economic losses due to a number of smaller earthquakes and weather-related events, by far the most significant is the $6 billion loss attributed to drought conditions in parts of the country since January 1.

Europe, Asia, Africa and South America have all suffered weather-related economic losses. A drought in Brazil between January and June caused losses estimated at $8.5 billion, while flooding in central Europe in May and June caused economic losses of $22 billion.

In the aftermath of the devastating floods in Europe, Peter Höppe, head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research unit, said: “It is evident that days with weather conditions that lead to such flooding are becoming more frequent and that such weather systems tend to remain stationary for longer. With this higher persistence of weather patterns, the potential for heavy and long-lasting precipitation within a trough situation, for example, increases. The counterpart to this are stationary high-pressure systems which in summer increase the risk of heatwaves and periods of drought.

“Debate in climate research is currently focusing on what the causes of such changes in weather patterns could be and what role climate change might play in this. But it is naturally not possible to explain single events on this basis.”

Even places as remote as the Azores archipelago have not escaped the wrath of the weather. In March the North Atlantic island group took a $45 million economic hit, with more than 500 properties damaged and three lives lost after days of heavy rain lashed the island of Terceira causing severe flooding.

Significant economic losses during July:

US (Severe weather) $175m+

Canada (Severe weather) $1.45b+

China (Flooding) $7b+

Significant economic loss events (January to June 2013):

US (Severe weather May 18-22) $4.5b+

Canada (Flooding June 19-24) $5.3b+

Brazil (Drought Jan 1-May 31) $8.3b+

Europe (Flooding May 30-June 15) $22b+

China (Drought Jan 1-July 31) $6b+

* Economic loss figures from AON Benfield’s Global Catastrophe Recap.