Climate Wars

Climate change is real. Now what?

This site is a supplement to Gwynne Dyer's new book. It contains links to sources, to related news reports, to reviews, and to updated materials. Your comments are welcome.

Krugman rebukes Hansen

Via the New York Times: Unhelpful Hansen - Paul Krugman Blog. Excerpt:

James Hansen is a great climate scientist. He was the first to warn about the climate crisis; I take what he says about coal, in particular, very seriously. 

Unfortunately, while I defer to him on all matters climate, today’s op-ed article suggests that he really hasn’t made any effort to understand the economics of emissions control. 

And that’s not a small matter, because he’s now engaged in a misguided crusade against cap and trade, which is — let’s face it — the only form of action against greenhouse gas emissions we have any chance of taking before catastrophe becomes inevitable.

James Hansen: Cap and Fade

Via the New York Times, an op-ed from a major climate scientist: Cap and Fade. Excerpt:

At the international climate talks in Copenhagen, President Obama is expected to announce that the United States wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to about 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. 

But at the heart of his plan is cap and trade, a market-based approach that has been widely praised but does little to slow global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It merely allows polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars. 

Supporters of cap and trade point to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that capped sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from coal-burning power plants — the main pollutants in acid rain — at levels below what they were in 1980. 

This legislation allowed power plants that reduced emissions to levels below the cap to sell the credit for these excess reductions to other utilities whose emissions were too high, thus giving plant owners a financial incentive to cut back their pollution. Sulfur emissions have been reduced by 43 percent in the two decades since. 

Great success? Hardly. Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate. 

If every polluter’s emissions fell below the incrementally lowered cap, then the price of pollution credits would collapse and the economic rationale to keep reducing pollution would disappear. 

Worse yet, polluters’ lobbyists ensured that the clean air amendments allowed existing power plants to be “grandfathered,” avoiding many pollution regulations. These old plants would soon be retired anyway, the utilities claimed. That’s hardly been the case: Two-thirds of today’s coal-fired power plants were constructed before 1975. 

Cap and trade also did little to improve public health. Coal emissions are still significant contributing factors in four of the five leading causes of mortality in the United States — and mercury, arsenic and various coal pollutants also cause birth defects, asthma and other ailments.

James Hansen: Copenhagen climate talks must collapse

Via the New Scientist: James Hansen: Copenhagen climate talks must collapse. Excerpt:

Outspoken US climate scientist James Hansen has announced that climate talks next week in Copenhagen must collapse if the world is to tackle global warming effectively, reports the UK's Guardian newspaper. 

A leading climatologist and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen's testimony to US Congress in 1988 played a critical role in raising public awareness of global warming. 

Now Hansen's back in the spotlight. He has raised eyebrows by saying that any agreement that emerges from Copenhagen will be counter-productive if it plumps for a "cap and trade" system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

"I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track, because it's a disaster track," Hansen told the Guardian's US environment correspondent, Suzanne Goldenberg.

Ad campaign takes aim at climate change

Via the Globe and Mail: Ad campaign takes aim at climate change. Excerpt:

Friends of Science, a Calgary-based non-profit group, is running a national radio advertising campaign mocking the whole idea of climate change that has mainstream environmental groups miffed. 

The groups are claiming that funding for the anti-global warming effort is coming from the oil and gas industry. 

James Hoggan, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, lashed out Tuesday at Friends of Science in a speech in Toronto, calling it one of several “industry front groups” in North America that are trying to create uncertainty about the existence of climate change to undermine next month's United Nations climate change talks in Copenhagen. 

The ads, which claim the planet has actually been becoming cooler in the past 10 years, have been running this month in 15 cities, including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary, according to the Friends of Science group. 

A national campaign of this kind, if it featured 25 to 30 spots per day in each of the cities for its 30-second ads, would cost about $60,000 to $65,000 per week, according to an executive of an advertising agency, who did not want to be identified. 

Mr. Hoggan said he tried to find out from the Friends of Science website where the money for the ads was coming from, but the group doesn't divulge its backers.

Climate change seen as threat to US security

What a shock from the New York Times: Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security. Excerpt:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say. 

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change. 

Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response. 

An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. 

“It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.

A negative opinion of Climate Wars

Via the blog Climate and Capitalism: A not-so-hot book on global warming. Excerpt:

Dyer’s view of history is that the agrarian revolution itself led us inevitably to this disaster. “The crisis we face was foreordained from the moment that that first woman planted a seed, but it wasn’t obvious to us.” 

Here is the implicit human nature argument, that it is in our nature to keep expanding our population until we spoiled our own environment. So nobody is “to blame” because we are all to blame. 

And because conscious human agency—a mass movement to save our planet—is not in Dyer’s crystal ball, he puts what little hope he has in fanciful “geo-engineering” ideas which would likely do more harm than good. 

It is this ahistorical, human nature approach that is the fatal flaw in Dyer’s book. 

The climate crisis we face is rooted in the particular logic of capitalism, which demands growth and accumulation for its own sake and which puts the pursuit of profit ahead of human interests. 

The damage to our climate has been done in a remarkably short period of time, over the past 200 years or so—the time where capitalism has spread over the whole globe and broken the direct connection between the vast majority of the population and the environment it is part of. 

Because Dyer doesn’t recognize the particular role capitalism plays in creating this environmental crisis, he can’t see another of its features: it inevitably creates a global army opposed to all its pernicious characteristics.

The collapse of civilization?

Via The Independent: The planet's future: Climate change 'will cause civilisation to collapse'. Excerpt:

An effort on the scale of the Apollo mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to have a fighting chance of surviving the ravages of climate change. 

The stakes are high, as, without sustainable growth, "billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse". 

This is the stark warning from the biggest single report to look at the future of the planet – obtained by The Independent on Sunday ahead of its official publication next month. 

Backed by a diverse range of leading organisations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation, the 2009 State of the Future report runs to 6,700 pages and draws on contributions from 2,700 experts around the globe. 

Its findings are described by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, as providing "invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society". 

The impact of the global recession is a key theme, with researchers warning that global clean energy, food availability, poverty and the growth of democracy around the world are at "risk of getting worse due to the recession". 

The report adds: "Too many greedy and deceitful decisions led to a world recession and demonstrated the international interdependence of economics and ethics."  

Although the future has been looking better for most of the world over the past 20 years, the global recession has lowered the State of the Future Index for the next 10 years. 

Half the world could face violence and unrest due to severe unemployment combined with scarce water, food and energy supplies and the cumulative effects of climate change.

UK: Heatwave forecast triggers alert

Via the Guardian: Heatwave forecast triggers the first UK alert over health fears. Excerpt:

Hospitals were put on high alert today as the Met Office issued its first ever heatwave warning, designed to signal impending extreme weather events. 

Temperatures are forecast to reach 33C this week and it is thought that the UK could be placed on the highest level of the government's Heatwave Plan by midweek, a category that denotes a state of "emergency". 

As temperatures peaked at 28C in London today the Health Protection Agency began monitoring for cases of "heat-related illness", particularly among the elderly, and the NHS prepared for increased admissions.

The country was placed on amber level 2, the "alert and readiness" category in the Heatwave Plan, meaning there is a 60% risk of high temperatures being reached in at least one region on consecutive days and the intervening night. 

Met Office experts expect level 3 to be reached early on Monday and level 4 possibly by midweek. Level 4 is the highest rung and in effect denotes a state of emergency. The government defines this as when a "heatwave is so severe and/or prolonged that its effects extend outside health and social care, such as power or water shortages, and/or where the integrity of health and social care systems is threatened". 

Met Office forecaster Tim Thorne said: "This is the first time we have released a heat warning since we introduced the system a couple of years ago. It is designed to allow the NHS to plan for increased admissions and ensure it does not buckle under the strain. They can get their plans in place and ensure they have the space and manning to deal with an increase and notify other organisations such as the military." 

Heatstroke, exhaustion and dizziness are among the risks associated with the heatwave, which will bring the hottest spell of the summer so far, say health experts.

World faces daunting refugee crisis

Via the Globe and Mail: World faces daunting refugee crisis because of climate change. Excerpt: 

The world should brace itself for millions of climate refugees in coming decades, a mass migration that will be larger than any in human history, says a new report. 

Although it's too early to estimate exactly how many people might be on the move, the report, compiled by researchers at Columbia University, developmental aid agency Care International and the United Nations University, cites other studies that suggest the number could be as high as 700 million by 2050. 

“In coming decades, climate change will motivate or force millions of people to leave their homes… Although the precise number of migrants and displaced people may elude science for some time, the mass of people on the move will likely be staggering and surpass any historical antecedent,” says the report, which is being released Wednesday. 

The new warning adds to those by many scientists and environmentalists who say the impacts of global warming are starting to occur earlier, and are much larger than estimates made only a few years ago. 

Chief among the worries is that sea-level rise, due to melting ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, is speeding up, putting coastal communities at risk of flooding. 

Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 that sea levels would likely increase by a manageable quarter to half a metre in the coming century, more recent research on the two ice sheets has suggested that range may be too conservative.

The report is available as a PDF.

Two new reviews of Climate Wars

After a few quiet weeks, more people are paying attention to Climate Wars. One review is from The Disaffected Lib: Are We On the Road to War?

The other comes from an Australian site, Green Left Online, via Climate and Capitalism: Climate change you can believe in.

Meanwhile, the deniers continue denying.