by Eric Roston
The Climate Post is a weekly roundup of climate news, produced by the The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.
First Things First: Research continues
apace to find definitions of “clean tech” and “green jobs” that sound
more meaningful than campaign rhetoric. In a new report [pdf],
the Pew Charitable Trusts pinned down its working description of “clean
energy economy” and analyzed 10 years of jobs data, through the 50
states, looking for trends. Analysts found that clean-economy jobs grew
at an annual rate of 9.1 percent, compared with 3.7 percent job growth
economy-wide. Growth came in both the white- and blue-collar sectors,
including professionals “from scientists and engineers to electricians,
machinists and teachers.”
Major legislation, such as a climate bill or the current health care
initiative, motivates groups who believe they have the most to gain or
lose. Here, that means the extractive industries. About 3,500 people converged on a major Houston theater to rally against anticipated Senate climate
change legislation. Many attendees work in the energy industry, and
major energy firms and business groups backed the event. Similar
rallies are expected in 19 states in the next few weeks. An NGO sneaked around the grounds, concluding the event was a large “company picnic.”
The conversation moves to Washington next month. A career-long
interest in environmental issues and climate change, coupled with his
mien as a senior statesman in the Senate, make Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) likely to play a
consensus-building role in this fall’s climate debate. Bloomberg files
an overview of the state of play, leading with former Sen. Tim Wirth’s
(D-Colo.) objections to the recent House bill. A new National Academies report takes a close look at what the Capitol, literally, can do about its own internal energy policy.
Negotiators left Bonn, where they held pre-COP-15 talks, without much progress toward a new global agreement. Says Anders Turesson, Sweden’s lead climate negotiator: “What we’re talking about is a profound change of industrial civilization. It would be surprising if there weren’t stumbling blocks.”
Seeking Non-Fox to Guard Henhouse: U.K. officials arrested nine people and charged them with conducting fraudulent international carbon-market trades to evade taxation.
Among the many issues that legislators must confront as they draw up
climate policy is the carbon market itself, its rules and oversight.
The Economist weighs in on this question, and how insubstantial “activist complaints” are
steering the conversation awry. Debate is yielding to pre-legislation
positioning. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is a strong
contender to oversee the carbon market and laid another preliminary
stake to this claim by looking at activity in a voluntary carbon market, the Chicago Climate Exchange.
(Nicholas Institute colleagues several months ago prepared a
backgrounder [pdf] on the topic.)
Whatever
course legislation and markets do or do not take, certain things are
true: Meeting emissions targets are likely to become only more difficult as greenhouse gases accumulate. And what it might take to meet the
challenge is rarely talked about, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and
philanthropist Steve Kirsch writes. His back-of-the-envelope analysis is prompted by this Atlantic piece, in which CalTech’s Nathan Lewis suggests the world needs 13,000
gigawatts of clean energy to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide levels
below 450 parts per million. That’s one gigawatt a day for the next 25
years, or “if we were to build a large nuclear plant every single day for
the next 30 years, that would still not be enough to avert the 450ppm
limit,” Kirsch writes. CNET weighs in on how to finance a green tech transformation.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong: Scientists
are carefully tracking the illness and death of some ocean ecosystems.
Global warming’s “evil twin” is ocean acidification, a subject lately
seeing a steady uptick both publicly and academically. Environmental Science and Technology demonstrates this resurgence with an anecdote from a quadrennial scientific
conference about coral reefs. In 2004, acidification was ranked 38th
out of 39 threats to reefs. In 2008, “Acidification was mentioned
almost everywhere.” DailyClimate.org reports that it’s becoming a problem more rapidly in the Arctic.
Ocean acidification’s “evil twin,” global warming, is sometimes
called “global heating” to convey the potential seriousness of the
matter. Climate Central analyzed model projections of heat waves under
a “conservative warming scenario”
and concluded that by 2050, Augusts could become much hotter, with
three times the number of days above 95 degrees and double the number
above 100 degrees in many U.S. cities. (For some background on modeling
see this, this, or this pdf.)
Oliver Morton notes a report that sulfur pollution from shipping should decrease soon. The
International Maritime Organization is reducing its cap on sulfur
dioxide from 4.5 percent today, to 0.5 percent in 2020. If successful,
the rule could reduce premature deaths from pollution from 87,000 to
46,000 a year, with a downside: Atmospheric sulfur dioxide scatters
sunlight and helps “cool” the planet. Removing it has the unintended
consequence of incrementally worsening global warming, which is why
adding even more sulfur to the atmosphere is an idea taken increasingly
seriously as a way to mitigate future warming.
When Unbiased Is Biased: Robert S. Boyd of McClatchy Newspapers turns in a surpassing example of how moneyed-interest groups, in this case the Heartland Institute,
can earn much-sought-after column-inches by casting doubt on firm, but
complicated science and, even more importantly, on climate risk
analysis. The Heartland Institute poo-poos much of climate science and
this summer even ran newspaper ads saying that “High levels of carbon
dioxide actually benefit wildlife and human health.” (Presumably far
below concentrations that cause suffocation.) The article looks at the
question, confusing enough to lay people, of how we know the globe is
warming if the hottest year to date was 1998.
The highest recorded global temperature average indeed occurred in 1998. The top 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1997. A recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration report explains how it is possible to have a decade of
sub-record breaking temperatures within a warming trend [see pp 23-24 here]. The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media takes a whack at the issue, too.
The McClatchy piece is not obtuse or even “biased” as far as
misguided he-said, she-said reporting goes. But it does allow the
Heartland Institute to create debate on grotesque and silly premises.
The scientists interviewed by Boyd state the case well enough, but they
speak technically and in a way that might lose readers. Which are you
likelier to remember:
“It’s entirely possible to have a period as long as a
decade or two of cooling superimposed on the long-term warming trend,”
said David Easterling, chief of scientific services at NOAA’s National
Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
Or:
[MIT’s Richard Lindzen] calls the case for action against global warming “silly” and “grotesque.”
Climate change is ultimately a story of risk, and how we confront it
or don’t. Demonstrating that a problem is occurring can never tell us
what, if anything, we should do about it. But a newspaper (company)
that won’t directly acknowledge that an entire discussion is false, is
not helping a complex nation cope with a complex problem. The story’s
headline, “Drop in world temperatures fuels global warming debate,”
would be accurate if the word “debate” were changed to “confusion” or
“disinformation.”
As the NYU media analyst Jay Rosen wrote in a Twitter post today,
“When reality is the wedge issue, journalists have to take sides.”
Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist.
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