Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker: Scientists Are Scared of Trump: A Pocket Guide

by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, December 2016

Next week, the American Geophysical Union will hold its annual conference in San Francisco. The A.G.U. meeting is one of the world’s première scientific gatherings—last fall, some twenty-four thousand experts in fields ranging from astronomy to volcanology attended. This year, in addition to the usual papers and journals, a new publication will be available to participants. It’s called “Handling Political Harassment and Legal Intimidation: A Pocket Guide for Scientists.”

The guide is the creation of a group called the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. One of the group’s founders, Joshua Wolfe, and its executive director, Lauren Kurtz, made the decision to write it on the day after the election. “There is a lot of fear among scientists that they will become targets of people who are interested in science as politics, rather than progress,” Wolfe told me in an e-mail.

With each passing day, that fear appears to be more well founded. The one quality that all of Trump’s picks for his cabinet and his transition team seem to share is an expertise in the dark art of disinformation.
Consider, for example, Scott Pruitt, who is reportedly Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt, currently the attorney general of Oklahoma, is an outspoken critic of the agency that he would lead. This is not, in and of itself, disqualifying, but, as a 2014 investigative piece in the Times revealed, Pruitt’s criticisms have little basis in evidence. Instead, he has basically served as a mouthpiece for talking points dreamed up by the oil and gas industries. In one case, Pruitt signed a letter criticizing the E.P.A. for supposedly exaggerating the air pollution attributable to natural-gas drilling in Oklahoma. It turned out that the letter had been written for him by one of the state’s biggest drilling companies.

“Outstanding!” was the reaction that the company’s director of government relations sent to Pruitt’s office.

Or consider Chris Shank, the first person Trump has named to what’s being called the “landing team” for NASA. Shank has spent the last several years working for Representative Lamar Smith, of Texas, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Under Smith, the committee has held about a dozen hearings on climate change, all with the same objective: trying to prove that climate change isn’t happening. 

This is impossible to do if you are relying on actual information, as opposed to the made-up sort. (In 2015, when government scientists published a study refuting one of Smith’s favorite claims—that there had been a “pause” in global warming—the congressman responded by subpoenaing the scientists’ e-mails.) Shank has compared those who question the basics of climate science to Galileo, an analogy so absurd that Ted Cruz has also used it. To imagine that Ivanka Trump, who, according to Politico, wants to make climate change “one of her signature issues,” can counter the likes of Pruitt and Shank is to engage in the same sort of magical thinking that brought us Trump in the first place.

Much has been written lately about what Trump’s victory reveals about the electorate’s relationship with the truth. (In short, nothing good.) But to say that we are living in a “post-fact” era is perhaps too benign. The problem is not just that too many people do not seem to care about the truth (though this is certainly a huge problem); it’s that a lot of people—an increasing number of them in high government positions—insist that their ravings are true, and try to act on them. This naturally brings them into conflict with those whose job it is to distinguish fact from fiction; hence the subpoenas and attempts to intimidate.

For climate scientists, the dangers of hewing to reality have been apparent for years. This is why the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund was founded in the first place, in 2011. As Marshall Shepherd, the director of the University of Georgia’s atmospheric-sciences program, tweeted recently, “Lots of concern about Fake News. As a scientist that works in meteorology & climatology, welcome to our world, dealt with this for awhile.” But this doesn’t make the situation any easier to deal with. The pocket guide’s advice for scientists who think that they are being harassed? “When in doubt, call a lawyer.”

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-scientists-are-scared-of-trump-a-pocket-guideWhy

Joe Romm: Words Matter When Talking Global Warming: The ‘Good' Anthropocene Debate

by Joe Romm, Climate Progress, June 19, 2014

CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

We spend more of our waking hours communicating than perhaps any other single activity. And while the principles of effective writing and speaking have been understood for centuries if not millennia, they are largely ignored today — sometimes intentionally, as Orwell pointed out nearly seven decades ago.

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” George Orwell wrote in “Politics And The English Language” in 1946. “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

Nowhere is that clearer than in the arena of climate politics and journalism — which often seems driven by the unproductive extremes of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and “STAND BACK AND WATCH THE WORLD BURN.” Ultimately, they are both equally pessimistic, since they both push the premise that there is no chance the human race could actually embrace the kind of aggressive action needed to have a realistic chance of avoiding multiple catastrophes.

I am more optimistic, as I explained in my reply to Ezra Klein’s pessimism. I suppose if I had a motto, it might be: Do Worry, Take Action, THEN Be Happy.

I’ve been thinking about all this because I was on two recent science communications panels: a “Science & Policy Communications Workshop” this week for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a Communications Workshop at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Summer Policy Colloquium last week. Everything I know on the subject can be found in my 2012 book, “Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln and Lady Gaga.”

For those who want the pithy version, start with the great 20th Century essayist, Orwell, in his greatest essay, “Politics And The English Language” — and the great 20th Century orator, Winston Churchill, in his essay metaphorically titled, “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric.”

Orwell offers six simple rules for writing with clarity, “rules that one can rely on when instinct fails,” when you are “in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase”:

• (i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
What’s interesting is that in his essay, Churchill says some very similar things even though he is focused on oratory. “There is no more important element in the technique of rhetoric than the continual employment of the best possible word,” he argues. “Whatever part of speech it is it must in each case absolutely express the full meaning of the speaker. It will leave no room for alternatives.”
So clarity is king, just as it is for Orwell. Churchill then takes on a very common myth about rhetoric:

The unreflecting often imagine that the effects of oratory are produced by the use of long words…. The shorter words of a language are usually the more ancient. Their meaning is more ingrained in the national character and they appeal with greater force to simple understandings than words recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek. All the speeches of great English rhetoricians … display an uniform preference for short, homely words of common usage….

Short words win. Jargon loses.
In preparing for my AMS and AGU talks, I asked a senior legislative aide with over two decades of Hill experience for some advice. He told me that if scientists speak to a Legislative Assistant (L.A.) for a member on the climate issue, they “can’t assume the L.A. knows anything.” It would be a mistake, he said, to even use a phrase like “statistically significant”!
Susan Joy Hassol, an expert in climate communication, made the same point in a 2010 post here — avoid jargon: “Words that seem perfectly common to scientists are still jargon to the wider world and always have simpler substitutes. Rather than anthropogenic, you could say human caused.”
And this bring us to the latest dust-up over jargon and euphemism. The New York Times climate blog published a piece titled, “Exploring Academia’s Role in Charting Paths to a ‘Good’ Anthropocene.”
I think it’s safe to say that both Orwell and Churchill would have gagged at “Anthropocene,” which, as perhaps 1% (0.1%?) of the U.S. population knows, means “an informal geologic chronological term that marks the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.”
Inside the tiny community of people who actually understand the term, there was widespread objection to the entire phrase, “Good Anthropocene.” Australian author, climate expert and Professor of Public Ethics Clive Hamilton wrote, “those who argue for the ‘good Anthropocene’ are unscientific and live in a fantasy world of their own construction.”
I very much agree. Elizabeth Kolbert, one of the most thoughtful climate journalists, tweeted: 



The NY Times blogger (Andy Revkin) criticized Kolbert for having tweeted that without having watched the hour talk he gave, “Paths to a ‘Good’ Anthropocene” (video here).
After she watched it, Kolbert emailed me:

I don’t see the value in the “good Anthropocene” as a rhetorical construct, even if it’s well-intentioned. What we are doing to the planet, which is of course the reason geologists are considering renaming the epoch in which we live, is in no way good. A few years ago, Paul Crutzen told me that he hoped the word Anthropocene would serve as “a warning to the world.” I think part of the power of the term is that it resists modification.

I’ve watched the video. In its own way, it is just as much a pessimistic, self-fulfilling prophecy as Ezra Klein’s “7 reasons America will fail on climate change.” We know what we need to do to avoid catastrophic warming — quickly embrace a series of policies (at a national and global level) including a carbon price that drive emissions down sharply decade after decade. The good news is that the world’s leading governments and scientists and energy experts have explained that this strategy is cheap (far cheaper than inaction), and that we have the technology to start ASAP. Oh, and deployment-driven innovation will keep providing new and better and cheaper technology.
It is certainly a legitimate view to argue that the nation (and the world) aren’t up to that task, as Klein and Revkin do. But it is Orwellian to climate that making such an argument is optimistic and not self-fulfilling. That’s especially true if your recommended alternative is to basically give up (Klein) or to abandon quantitative targets and embrace personal growth and some R&D (Revkin).
As Hamilton writes:

The advocates of the “good Anthropocene” do not attempt to repudiate the mass of scientific evidence; instead they choose to reframe it. As you declare so disarmingly in your talk: “You can look at it and go ‘Oh my God’, or you can look at it and go ‘Wow, what an amazing time to be alive!’ I kind of choose the latter overall.”

Talking of a “good Anthropocene” while proposing strategies that can’t possibly achieve it — and while repeatedly attacking those (including the National Academy of Sciences) who propose strategies that could — is the road to a very, very bad Anthropocene. In jargon-free terms, it is the road to Hell and High Water.
The phrase “good Anthropocene” as some are using it, is a euphemism as Orwellian as “enhanced interrogation.” As Hamilton puts it:

… the “good Anthropocene” is a story about the world that could have been written by the powerful interests that have got us into this mess and who are fighting so effectively to prevent us from getting out of it. In the long term this kind of thinking will prove more insidious than climate science denial.

The eco-pragmatists, as Hamilton calls them, never offer any set of specific proposals that any credible group of independent experts has said could possibly keeps us far from 7 °F warming (the end of modern civilization as we know it) — let alone the unimaginable 10+°F. All they offer is the euphemism, hand-waving, and sheer cloudy vagueness Orwell warned about.
Revkin tweets: “I trust those bridling at vision of a “good” #Anthropocene aren’t hoping for bad one. http://nyti.ms/1qdcd0F @CliveCHamilton @ElizKolbert.”
Seriously. Hamilton and Kolbert have dedicated themselves to informing the public about the worst impacts — and how to avoid them. Kolbert’s terrific 2006 book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, famously ends, “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”
That kind of clarity is what we are missing from the current discussion. The climate debate isn’t about what people are “hoping for” — it is about the kind of future that we are choosing through our climate policy. So far we have chosen poorly.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/06/19/3450400/orwell-language-good-anthropocene/

Elizabeth Kolbert: THE WEST ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET MELT: DEFENDING THE DRAMA

by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, May 13, 2014

Photograph: Jefferson Beck/GSFC/NASA

If you hang around climate scientists, you often hear the saying “Uncertainty is not our friend.” It came to mind yesterday, when two teams of scientists released papers that reached the same terrifying conclusion. A significant chunk of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun to disintegrate and, owing to the ice sheet’s peculiar topography (much of it lies below sea level), this process, having begun, has now also become unstoppable. “Today we present observational evidence that a large section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has gone into irreversible retreat,” the lead author of one of the papers, Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at a news conference. “It has passed the point of no return.” Rignot said that melting in the section of West Antarctica that his team had studied could cause global sea levels to rise by four feet over the course of a couple of centuries. Since the disappearance of some of its major glaciers could quite possibly destabilize the entire ice sheet, the ultimate sea level rise from West Antarctica, he said, could be triple that.

“Scary,” Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of physics of the oceans at Potsdam University, who was not involved in either paper, tweeted. “One of the feared tipping points of the climate system appears to have been crossed.”

“This Is What a Holy Shit Moment for Global Warming Looks Like,” read a headline on the Web site of Mother Jones.

The vulnerability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, or WAIS, has been appreciated for a long time; all the way back in 1968, an eccentric Ohio State glaciologist named John Mercer observed that the WAIS was peculiarly unstable, and that it may have melted away in the geologically recent past. But Mercer (who, interestingly enough for a glaciologist, liked to do field work in the nude) published his observations in an obscure journal, and, according to the historian of science Spencer Weart, “did not push his views on colleagues.”

In more recent years, even as forecasts of global sea-level rise have been notched up, most projections have not taken into account the possibility of a significant, near-term ice loss from the West Antarctic. The most recent analysis by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts a global sea-level rise for this century of somewhere between one and three feet; the new findings, according to Rignot, will require these figures to be revised upward.

Of the many inane arguments that are made against taking action on climate change, perhaps the most fatuous is that the projections climate models offer about the future are too uncertain to justify taking steps that might inconvenience us in the present. The implicit assumption here is that the problem will turn out to be less serious than the models predict; thus, any carbon we have chosen to leave in the ground out of fear for the consequences of global warming will have gone uncombusted for nothing.

But the unfortunate fact about uncertainty is that the error bars always go in both directions. While it is possible that the problem could turn out to be less serious than the consensus forecast, it is equally likely to turn out to be more serious. In fact, it increasingly appears that, if there is any systemic bias in the climate models, it’s that they understate the gravity of the situation. In an interesting paper that appeared in the journal Global Environmental Change, a group of scholars, including Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard, and Michael Oppenheimer, a geoscientist at Princeton, note that so-called climate skeptics frequently accuse climate scientists of “alarmism” and “overreacting to evidence of human impacts on the climate system.” But, when you actually measure the predictions that climate scientists have made against observations of how the climate has already changed, you find the exact opposite: a pattern “of under- rather than over-prediction” emerges. The scholars attribute this bias to the norms of scientific discourse: “The scientific values of rationality, dispassion, and self-restraint tend to lead scientists to demand greater levels of evidence in support of surprising, dramatic, or alarming conclusions.” They call this tendency “erring on the side of least drama,” or E.S.L.D. for short.

Unfortunately, we live in dramatic times. Yesterday’s news about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is just the latest reminder of this; there will, almost certainly, be much more “surprising” and “alarming” news to follow. Which is why counting on uncertainty is such a dangerous idea.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/05/the-west-antarctica-ice-sheet-melt-defending-the-drama.html

Elizabeth Kolbert: Lost in the Denialosphere: Climate change and Obamacare

by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, October 3, 2013

Last week, in Stockholm, a group of scientists from around the world issued what should be, but of course will not be, the last word on climate change. Officially known as Working Group I’s contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the document offered a veritable flood of information—two thousand two hundred and sixteen pages’ worth. Many groups posted good summaries of the report’s central points, including Climate Central andRealClimate. But perhaps the best one I read came in an e-mail from a biologist who studies the effects of climate change in the Andes. “Spoiler alert,” he wrote. “Earth is getting warmer.”

For weeks leading up to the release of the report—several more will be issued in the next few months by other working groups of the I.P.C.C.—the denialosphere was working overtime. A group that calls itself, wittily enough, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, published its own report, twelve hundred pages long, explicitly modelled on the I.P.C.C.’s but reaching entirely opposite conclusions. The N.I.P.C.C., as it happens, is sponsored by the Heartland Institute, which, in turn, is funded by a coven of tobacco companies, fossil-fuel producers, and right-wing foundations.

The goal of organizations like the N.I.P.C.C., it seems, is not to convince anyone that the science of global warming is faulty—their tactics are way too amateurish for that—but, rather, to provide cover for those already predisposed to prefer fairy tales over facts. This group turns out to be not only numerous but, as recent events have demonstrated, also quite powerful.

It seems oddly appropriate that a report warning that the time to move on climate change is today (yesterday, really) should arrive in the nation’s capital just as the government was preparing to shut down. Nothing signals inaction quite so eloquently as barricades around the Jefferson Memorial. The proximate cause of the shutdown is the refusal of the Republican-led House to continue financing the government unless Democrats agree to delay (or gut) Obamacare. But the deeper cause might be said to be the same kind of fairy-tale thinking that animates the N.I.P.C.C. Shuttering the government is a dumb idea under pretty much any circumstances. Still, the objections that Republicans in Congress raise to the health-care law might be worth considering if they bore any relationship to the law in question. Rarely do they.

Some lawmakers’ comments have been so off the wall that they defy parody. A few months ago, for example, Representative Michele Bachmann announced on the House floor that Obamacare needed to be repealed “before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens.”

“Let’s not do that,” she added helpfully. “Let’s love people.”

“All of this would be funny,” President Obama noted the other day, after bringing up the Bachmann line, “if it weren’t so crazy.”

The crazy list goes on and on. As the economist Paul Krugman has repeatedly pointed out in his Times column, congressional Republicans these days seem to think that they can override not just the laws of physics but also the rules of arithmetic. They insist that the federal budget is so bloated it could easily be cut by hundreds of billions of dollars. But when a transportation bill was drafted this summer that would have actually reduced spending, they refused to vote for it. (The bill had to be pulled from the floor.) It’s hard to cut the federal budget if you’re not willing to reduce the amount of money the government spends. “What Republicans really want to do,” Krugman wrote recently, is “repeal reality.”

This brings us back to climate change, which is really an issue of how we generate and use energy. Tuesday, just as the “Closed” signs were being posted on the steps of the National Gallery, Ron Binz, President Obama’s nominee to lead the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, announced that he was withdrawing his name from consideration. Binz, who served on Colorado’s public-utilities commission for several years, is a strong advocate of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, which, as any schoolchild can tell you, is a critical part of any plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. As far as Senate Republicans and also some Democrats were concerned, holding such rational and forward-thinking views disqualified Binz from service. “Mr. Binz’s record shows he strongly favors renewable over other energy sources,” Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, said, and, remarkably enough, he meant this as an insult.

It’s been so long since reality has made much of a difference on Capitol Hill that it sometimes seems it genuinely has been repealed. But the thing you can always count on with reality is that it has staying power. At this point, it’s not clear whether there will be another assessment report from the I.P.C.C., because it’s hard to get more definitive than the one that was just released. But if there is a sixth assessment, four or five years from now, the summaries are, in a sense, already available. “Spoiler alert: Earth is getting warmer.”

Above: United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addresses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change via video link. Photograph by Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/10/lost-in-the-denialosphere-climate-change-and-obamacare.html

Elizabeth Kolbert: Lines in the Sand

by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, May 27, 2013

A lot of what’s known about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be traced back to a chemist named Charles David Keeling, who, in 1958, persuaded the U.S. Weather Bureau to install a set of monitoring devices at its Mauna Loa observatory, on the island of Hawaii. By the 1950s, it was well understood that, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, humans were adding vast amounts of carbon to the air. But the prevailing view was that this wouldn’t much matter, since the oceans would suck most of it out again. Keeling thought that it would be prudent to find out if that was, in fact, the case. The setup on Mauna Loa soon showed that it was not.

Carbon-dioxide levels have been monitored at the observatory ever since, and they’ve exhibited a pattern that started out as terrifying and may be now described as terrifyingly predictable. They have increased every year, and earlier this month they reached the milestone of 400 parts per million. No one knows exactly when CO2 levels were last this high; the best guess is the mid-Pliocene, about three million years ago. At that point, summertime temperatures in the Arctic were 14 degrees warmer than they are now and sea levels were some 75 feet higher.

When the milestone was passed, Keeling’s son Ralph, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, glossed the event as follows: “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds.” 

Maureen Raymo, a marine geologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, was more blunt. “It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” she told the Times.

President Obama will make a decision in the next few months—unless he puts it off again, as he did in 2011—about whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. The question before him is whether it’s in the “national interest” to grant the permits needed for constructing Keystone, which is supposed to dogleg from Alberta to Nebraska, and join a pipeline that will extend to Texas, connecting Canada’s tar-sands deposits with American refineries. The latest figures from Mauna Loa reveal what’s at stake.

Last week, as the President was otherwise engaged—with the uproar over the I.R.S., the Justice Department’s subpoena of phone records from the Associated Press, and the e-mails about the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi—lobbying for the pipeline reached a new level of intensity. At the start of the week, the Canadian government launched an ad campaign to build support for the pipeline in the U.S. One ad, featuring construction workers fitting sections of pipe, says, “America and Canada: Standing together for energy independence.” Although the Canadians have not released the cost of the campaign, the Globe and Mail reported that Canada’s natural-resources department has set aside more than US$16 million for advertising this year. (Canada’s natural-resources minister, Joe Oliver, recently travelled to France and England to push the tar sands; he ended up threatening the European Union, which is considering labelling tar-sands oil as “highly polluting,” with taking the case to the World Trade Organization.) Then, at the end of the week, Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, came to New York to make the pitch himself. “All the facts are overwhelmingly on the side of approval,” he said, at the Council on Foreign Relations. With a touch of menace, he added, “I know the Administration will do a thorough analysis before arriving at the right decision.”

The arguments in favor of Keystone run more or less like this: Americans use a lot of oil—more than 18 million barrels per day. It has to come from somewhere, and Canada is a more reliable trading partner than, say, Iraq. The U.S. already imports roughly a million barrels of Canadian tar-sands oil a day, and if it doesn’t import the rest, some other country will. “It’s overwhelmingly likely the oil would find another way to market,” USA Today observed in a recent editorial. For instance, a pipeline could be built to British Columbia, and the oil shipped from there to China, though there are many political and logistic barriers to such a plan—among them the Canadian Rockies.

If the arguments in favor of Keystone are persuasive, those against it are even stronger. 

Tar-sands oil is not really oil, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. It starts out as semi-solid and has to be either mined or literally melted out of the ground. In either case, the process requires energy, which is provided by burning fossil fuels. The result is that, for every barrel of tar-sands oil that’s extracted, significantly more carbon dioxide enters the air than for every barrel of ordinary crude—between 12% and 23% more.

Alberta’s tar sands contain an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of oil. Assuming that only a tenth of that is recoverable, it’s still enough to generate something like 22 billion metric tons of carbon. There are, it should be noted, plenty of other ways to produce 22 billion metric tons of carbon. Consuming about a seventh of the world’s remaining accessible reserves of conventional oil would do it, as would combusting even a small fraction of the world’s remaining coal deposits. Which is just the point.

Were we to burn through all known fossil-fuel reserves, the results would be unimaginably bleak: major cities would be flooded out, a large portion of the world’s arable land would be transformed into deserts, and the oceans would be turned into liquid dead zones. If we take the future at all seriously, which is to say as a time period that someone is going to have to live in, then we need to leave a big percentage of the planet’s coal and oil and natural gas in the ground. These basic facts have been established for decades, and every President since George Bush senior has vowed to do something to avert catastrophe. The numbers from Mauna Loa show that they have failed.

In rejecting Keystone, President Obama would not solve the underlying problem, which, as pipeline proponents correctly point out, is consumption. Nor would he halt exploitation of the tar sands. But he would put a brake on the process. After all, if getting tar-sands oil to China were easy, the Canadians wouldn’t be applying so much pressure on the White House. Once Keystone is built, there will be no putting the tar back in the sands. The pipeline isn’t inevitable, and it shouldn’t be treated as such. It’s just another step on the march to disaster.

http://newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/05/27/130527taco_talk_kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert: Watching Sandy, Ignoring Climate Change

by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, October 29, 2012 

A couple of weeks ago, Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance firms, issued a study titled “Severe Weather in North America.” According to the press release that accompanied the report, “Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” The number of what Munich Re refers to as “weather-related loss events,” and what the rest of us would probably call weather-related disasters, has quintupled over the last three decades. While many factors have contributed to this trend, including an increase in the number of people living in flood-prone areas, the report identified global warming as one of the major culprits: “Climate change particularly affects formation of heat-waves, droughts, intense precipitation events, and in the long run most probably also tropical cyclone intensity.”

Munich Re’s report was aimed at the firm’s clients—other insurance companies—and does not make compelling reading for a general audience. But its appearance just two weeks ahead of Hurricane Sandy seems to lend it a peculiarly grisly relevance. Sandy has been called a “superstorm,” a “Frankenstorm,” a “freakish and unprecedented monster,” and possibly “unique in the annals of American weather history.” It has already killed 65 people in the Caribbean, and, although it’s too early to tell what its full impact will be as it churns up the East Coast, loss estimates are topping $6 billion.

As with any particular “weather-related loss event,” it’s impossible to attribute Sandy to climate change. However, it is possible to say that the storm fits the general pattern in North America, and indeed around the world, toward more extreme weather, a pattern that, increasingly, can be attributed to climate change. Just a few weeks before the Munich Re report appeared, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the apparent increase in extreme heat waves. Extreme summertime heat, which just a few decades ago affected much less than 1% of the earth’s surface, “now typically covers about 10% of the land area,” the paper observed. “It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies”—i.e., heat waves—“such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.” It is worth noting that one of several forces fueling Sandy is much-higher-than-average sea-surface temperatures along the East Coast.

Coming as it is just a week before Election Day, Sandy makes the fact that climate change has been entirely ignored during this campaign seem all the more grotesque. In a year of record-breaking temperatures across the U.S., record drought conditions in the country’s corn belt, and now a record storm affecting the nation’s most populous cities, neither candidate found the issue to be worthy of discussion. Pressed about this finally the other day on MTV, President Obama called climate change a “critical issue” that he was “surprised” hadn’t come up during any of the debates, a response that was at once completely accurate and totally disingenuous. (As one commentator pointed out, he might have brought up this “critical” issue on his own since “he is the friggin’ POTUS.”)

It is, at this point, impossible to say what it will take for American politics to catch up to the reality of North American climate change. More super-storms, more heat waves, more multi-billion-dollar “weather-related loss events”? The one thing that can be said is that, whether or not our elected officials choose to acknowledge the obvious, we can expect, “with a high degree of confidence,” that all of these are coming.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/watching-hurricane-sandy-ignoring-climate-change.html

Elizabeth Kolbert: A LOT OF GAS

A LOT OF GAS

by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, April 2, 2012

Last week, Mitt Romney, who, it now seems, is going to become the Republican nominee whether anybody likes it or not, called on President Barack Obama to fire three of his Cabinet members: the Energy Secretary, Steven Chu; the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar; and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson. According to Romney, the three have spent the past few years carrying out a not-so-secret plan to raise the price of gasoline at the pump. Only by firing the “gas-tax trio,” Romney told Fox News, can the President demonstrate that he did not approve of this plan. “Time for them to go,” Romney said.

Romney’s remarks came just days after Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, also on Fox, accused the Administration of driving up the cost of gas in the service of its “radical” agenda. “The reality is, gasoline prices have doubled under this President—highest prices for oil and gasoline in a hundred and fifty years,” Jindal said. “People used to think it was because of incompetence from the Obama Administration on energy. I think it’s because of ideology.” (As far as “reality” goes, Jindal’s characterization of gas prices is inaccurate; they were higher in 2008, under President George W. Bush.) Romney and Jindal, meanwhile, were echoing comments made by Newt Gingrich, who accused the President of adhering to a “radical ideology, which wants to artificially raise the cost of energy.” And Gingrich was following Rick Santorum, who, back in February, declared that Obama’s energy policies are based on a “phony theology” that “elevates the earth above man.”

Like almost anything that the Republican candidates can manage to agree on, the Obama Administration gas-price-hike conspiracy theory is nearly a hundred-per-cent hokum. The fakery begins with the theory’s premise: that the President could, if he wanted to, reduce the price of oil. Oil, as it is well known, is a global commodity traded on a global market. Gasoline prices have risen—they are up roughly fifteen per cent since the start of the year—mostly because demand is climbing in countries like China and because instability in the Middle East has prompted worries about supply. (Since sabre rattling on Iran tends to increase those worries, candidates like Santorum, who calls the Administration’s policies toward Iran “appeasement,” are almost certainly aggravating the very situation they decry.)

But an idea doesn’t have to be true, or even especially convincing, to be politically effective, and nowadays it’s the most rational policy options that seem to have the hardest time getting heard. When it comes to gas prices, it’s been clear for, well, let’s just say forever that the cost of gasoline in America is actually too low. Cheap gas generates sprawl and traffic. It discourages the use of mass transit and the development of alternative fuels. It contributes to regional smog and to global climate change. The easiest and most obvious solution has long been to raise the federal gasoline tax, which now stands at only 18.4 cents a gallon. Among economists, there’s widespread support for this idea, including from Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor who happens to be a top adviser to Romney. Writing in the Times earlier this year, Mankiw observed, “Economists who have added up all the externalities associated with driving conclude that a tax exceeding $2 a gallon makes sense.” He went on, “By taxing bad things more, we could tax good things less.”

Last week, as the Republicans continued to hammer away at the President on gas prices, he set off on an energy-themed cross-country tour. (House Speaker John Boehner dubbed it a “tour de farce.”) The tour, which coincided with a freakish March heat wave, included visits to a solar plant in Boulder City, Nevada; an oil field in Maljamar, New Mexico; and the site of a proposed pipeline in Cushing, Oklahoma. At each of these stops, Obama touted what he has taken to calling his “all-of-the-above energy strategy.” He said that he favored more domestic oil production and more solar-power installations, a cleaner environment and a stronger economy. He made much of the fact that, under his watch, domestic energy production has steadily increased and that enough new oil and gas pipeline had been laid to “encircle the earth and then some.”

“Since I took office, our dependence on foreign oil has gone down every single year,” the President said in Cushing. “Last year, we imported one million fewer barrels per day than the year before.” Obama sounded, as he generally does, thoughtful and reasonable, and the figures that he cited were, for the most part, accurate. Indeed, as the Times reported last week, dependency on foreign oil has fallen dramatically in recent years. But, in terms of what matters most, the President’s energy tour was a dispiriting affair. In the course of two days, he made four speeches. The number of times he mentioned the major impact of America’s energy use—global warming—was zero. In Oklahoma, he announced that he was expediting the construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. The announcement made no sense—except, perhaps, as political theatre. A few months ago, the Administration refused to allow construction of the pipeline’s northern leg, precisely on the ground that Republicans were trying to rush the permitting process. The whole point of the Keystone pipeline is to transport more dirty oil from Canada’s tar sands, which goes to show that you can’t be in favor of more pipelines and in favor of a cleaner environment at the same time. A smorgasbord energy strategy is, as Joe Romm observed recently on the blog Climate Progress, hardly any strategy at all: “Just a year ago, ‘all-of-the-above’ was actually a standard Republican talking point, so much so that Democrats routinely mocked it.”

What the country needs—and has always needed—is an energy policy that, instead of pandering to Americans’ sense of entitlement, would compel us finally to change our ways. In addition to a phased-in increase in the gas tax, it would include a comprehensive, economy-wide tax on carbon, or, alternatively, a cap-and-trade system. As it turns out, Mankiw isn’t the only senior person in a Republican campaign to see the importance of a new policy. When Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he presided over the introduction of one of the country’s first cap-and-trade programs, for the six largest power plants in the state. And in his book “No Apology” he wrote that “higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency.” Perhaps, once he secures the nomination, he can Etch A Sketch his way back to reality, and challenge Obama to do the same. ♦

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/04/02/120402taco_talk_kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert: HURRICANE IRENE AND GLOBAL WARMING: A GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE?

HURRICANE IRENE AND GLOBAL WARMING: A GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE?

by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, August 28, 2011

Nowadays, whenever there’s an Irene-like event—a huge storm, a terrible flood, a killer heat wave—the question is raised: was this caused by global warming? The very frequency with which this question is being asked these days should make people take notice, but the answer that comes back is usually squishy enough to allow them to forget about the issue until the next disaster occurs, at which point the process starts all over again. The problem here, as several commentators have pointed outthis weekend, is that the question being posed is not the question we should be asking.

The standard answer to the question “Was Irene (or the recent flooding along the Missouri River, or the current record-breaking Texas drought, or [choose your own favorite example]) caused by global warming?” is: No one event can be definitively attributed to climate change (though in some cases, you can get pretty close). Hurricanes fall into the category of “weather,” which is driven partly by large and predictable forces and partly by those that are stochastic, or random.

How about posing the question this way: Are more events like Irene what you would expect in a warming world? Here the answer is a straightforward “yes.” In fact, experts have been warning for years that New York will become increasingly vulnerable to storm surges and flooding as the planet heats up. In 2009, the New York City Panel on Climate Change, appointed by Mayor Bloomberg, concluded that, as a result of global warming, “more frequent and enhanced coastal flooding” was “very likely” and that “shortened 100-year flood recurrence period” was also “very likely.” Much of the problem simply has to do with sea levels—as these rise, any storm or storm surge becomes more dangerous. Marcus Bowman, an oceanography professor at Stony Brook University, has warned that the city could one day have “flood days,” the way it now has snow days.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures make other risks worse as well. Warm air holds more moisture, so as temperatures rise there is more water available to the system. And warmer ocean temperatures mean there is more energy available to fuel severe storms like Irene. As Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, explained recently on the blog Climate Progress, “Owing to higher SSTs [sea surface temperatures] from human activities, the increased water vapor in the atmosphere leads to 5 to 10% more rainfall and increases the risk of flooding.” Also, “because water vapor and higher ocean temperatures help fuel the storm, it is likely to be more intense and bigger as well.”

When we add all of these risk factors together, we can say with a great deal of confidence that in the future, there will be more and more events like Irene. We can comfort ourselves by saying that this particular storm was not necessarily caused by global warming. Or we can acknowledge the truth, which is that we are making the world a more dangerous place and, what’s more, that we know it.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/08/hurricane-irene-and-global-warming-a-glimpse-of-the-future.html

Above: Waves crash onto a road as Hurricane Irene arrives in Southampton, New York. Photography by Joe Raedle/Getty.

Elizabeth Kolbert: "Storms Brewing" The New Yorker, June 13, 2011

STORMS BREWING

by Elizabeth Kolbert

, The New Yorker, June 13, 2011


When President Barack Obama arrived in Joplin, Missouri, on May 29th, the sun was shining. He toured one of the neighborhoods that the previous week’s tornado had destroyed, then spoke at a memorial service for the dead. (By late last week, the official toll was a hundred and thirty-eight people.) At the service, the President’s tone turned brooding. “The question that weighs on us at a time like this is: Why?” he said. “Why our town? Why our home? Why my son, or husband, or wife, or sister, or friend? Why?” Such questions, the President went on, cannot be answered, as “these things are beyond our power to control.”

Obama’s visit to Joplin was the third that he had made in a month to the site of a weather-related disaster. In mid-May, the President met with Memphis residents who had been left homeless by the flooding of the Mississippi River, and, not long before that, he toured sections of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that had also been flattened by a tornado. Meanwhile, even as the President was consoling the bereaved in Joplin, residents in Vermont were bailing out from record-high water levels around Lake Champlain; Texas was suffering from a near-record drought that could cost the state more than four billion dollars in agricultural losses; and officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were forecasting that the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season, which formally began on June 1st, would once again be “above normal.” (The 2010 season was tied for the third most active on record.) The news from abroad was, if anything, more worrisome. Last week, the Chinese government estimated that more than four million people were having trouble finding drinking water, owing to a drought along the Yangtze River. The French agricultural minister warned that an exceptionally hot, dry spring would reduce that country’s wheat harvest. And in Colombia more than two million acres of land have been submerged after almost a year of nearly continuous rain. “Over the past ten months, we have registered five or six times more rainfall than usual,” the director of Colombia’s meteorological agency, Ricardo Lozano, said.

For decades, climate scientists have predicted that, as global temperatures rose, the side effects would include deeper droughts, more intense flooding, and more ferocious storms. The details of these forecasts are immensely complicated, but the underlying science is pretty simple. Warm air can hold more moisture. This means that there is greater evaporation. It also means that there is more water, and hence more energy, available to the system.

What we are seeing now is these predictions being borne out. If no particular flood or drought or storm can be directly attributed to climate change—there’s always the possibility that any single event was just a random occurrence—the over-all trend toward more extreme weather follows from the heating of the earth. As the cover of Newsweek declared last week, “weather panic” is the “new normal.” The larger problem is that this “new normal” won’t last. Each additional ton of carbon dioxide that’s spewed into the atmosphere contributes to further warming, thus increasing the risk of violent weather. The day after the President visited Joplin, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, in Paris, announced that, despite the economic slowdown, global CO2 emissions last year rose by a record amount, to almost 31 billion metric tons. “I am very worried,” Birol said. “This is the worst news on emissions.”

When Obama took office, he appointed some of the country’s most knowledgeable climate scientists to his Administration, and it seemed for a time as if he might take his responsibility to lead on this issue seriously. That hope has faded. The President sat on the sidelines in 2009 and 2010 while congressional leaders tried to put together majorities in favor of climate legislation. Since the midterm elections, Obama has barely mentioned climate change, and just about every decision that his Administration has made on energy and the environment has been wrong. In March, the Administration announced that it would be opening up new public lands in Wyoming for coal mining. In April, the White House delayed plans to impose stricter controls on the mining technique known as mountaintop removal. In May, the Administration put on hold rules aimed at cutting pollution from power plants at places like paper mills and refineries. Also in May, the President announced plans to increase domestic oil production by speeding up permits to drill off the coast of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico. “Is Obama’s call for more drilling bad messaging masquerading as cynical policy—or vice versa?” the liberal blog Climate Progress asked.

Of course, it almost goes without saying at this point that the President’s potential opponents next November are all worse on the issue. Tim Pawlenty, who, as governor of Minnesota, took some commendable actions on climate change, has now renounced them, saying that everyone “has got some clunkers in their record.” Much the same holds for the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, minus the commendable actions. National Journal has summed up the situation this way: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe.”

It would have been insensitive for the President when he visited Joplin, or Memphis before that, or Tuscaloosa before that, to have turned the conversation to climate change. Grieving relatives and displaced families aren’t the right audience for a discussion of energy policy. It should be noted, too, that tornadoes are very tough to predict, and no one yet knows whether this year’s unusually deadly season is the start of a new pattern, or just an aberration.

But, now that the immediate crisis has passed, the President needs to stop asking the kind of questions that can’t be answered and start addressing those that can. Obama knows—and, indeed, has stated as much—that if we continue along our present path we’ll guarantee our children a much more dangerous future. Taking the steps that would reduce the risks of climate change is not going to be politically popular, which is why it is the President’s obligation to press for them. It may be beyond our power to control the climate, but we can determine it. This is precisely what we’re doing right now, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. 

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