Michael MacCracken: The US Needs to Lead in Addressing Human-Induced Climate Change, Not Be Afraid of the Future and Revert to the Pollution-filled Past

The US Needs to Lead in Addressing Human-Induced Climate Change, Not Be Afraid of the Future and Revert to the Pollution-filled Past

by Michael MacCracken, Climate Alert, June 2, 2017

Growing scientific understanding of the factors that caused changes in Earth’s climate over its geological history makes clear that carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the world’s dependence on coal, oil, and natural gas for its energy have set the world on a path to changes in the climate that will be far more rapid and extensive than anything civilization can easily withstand. While there can be legitimate discussion over how best to reduce our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, President Trump’s cavalier call to ignore scientific understanding and pull the US out of the international effort to reduce global emissions exhibits a fundamental rejection of the urgency of needing to deal with the growing risks of human-induced climate change. Perhaps the most unfortunate result of Trump’s announcement is the ongoing failure of President Trump and so many of his supporters to put faith in US ingenuity and creativity to deal with climate change, thinking the costs of moving forward will be far more then the more and more costly impacts that are emerging.

America became the world’s preeminent economic power during the 20th century by optimizing its transportation sector, water resource infrastructure, agricultural production, and coastal development to the relatively stable climate and sea level conditions that prevailed before human-induced changes started to become evident. With more and more rapidly changing and threatening conditions during the 21st century, more and more resources will need to be devoted to rebuilding and recovery from extreme weather events and moving back from the existing coastline, making less and less available for societal health, well-being, and advancement.

The only silver lining to Trump’s dark recalcitrance is that it has strengthened the resolve of virtually all of the world’s other nations to take more and more aggressive actions to limit their emissions of climate-altering substances. Increasingly, these nations are seeing both the importance and benefits of moving forward technologically, not only in communications and industrial production as has been occurring, but also in getting energy from clean and renewable resources rather than from polluting and climate-changing sources. Technological advances are proving that clean energy can be less expensive than the present mix of air polluting and climate-disrupting fossil fuel sources; pursuing the conversion of the global energy system, creating high-quality jobs, and enhancing the energy independence of each nation will also help reduce the economic and trade imbalances caused by the exporting and importing of coal and oil.

While the Paris Agreement can indeed be criticized, President Trump has chosen the completely wrong reason for being unhappy with it. A much more justifiable objection is that it calls for too little effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and spreads that action over too long a time period—and interestingly, technological innovation is showing that much faster change is going to be possible. It is becoming increasingly obvious that it makes sense, both to slow the growing climate risks and to take advantage of the growing economies of clean energy, to move even more quickly and aggressively. For the US, an example of a step that could help the economy and the environment would be augmenting the present regional electric grids with a national high-voltage/direct current network, creating the equivalent of an interstate highway system for the efficient transfer of electricity, which would allow solar and wind resources from around the nation to be used to cost effectively power homes, promote industrial development, and make transportation much more efficient—and ultimately less expensive. Yes, actions will be needed to moderate the economic impacts on those such as coal miners and others whose back-breaking efforts have gotten our economy to its present state of development, but going back to out-dated approaches while all the rest of the world is rapidly moving to new approaches is simply not the path to “Make America Great Again.” The US needs to rely on its creativity and inventiveness to lead, not close our eyes to the opportunities the future provides.

Michael C. MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs, Climate Institute

http://climatealert.info/2017/06/02/the-us-needs-to-lead-in-addressing-human-induced-climate-change-not-be-afraid-of-the-future-and-revert-to-the-pollution-filled-past/

In Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Climate Science Watch

Displaying his trademark doublethink, Bjorn Lomborg’s latest op-ed in the Wall Street Journal switches between recognizing the risks of climate change and rejecting the need for meaningful action in the near term. Lomborg incorporates misleading and discredited scientific information to justify dangerous delays in climate action. 

The following is a guest post from Climate Nexus and the Climate Science Rapid Response Team (in PDF format here):

In WSJ op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats

Bjorn Lomborg’s latest op-ed in the Wall Street Journal displays a brand of doublethink that has become his trademark. He switches between recognizing climate change and its risks, to rejecting the need for meaningful action in the near term. While he makes several sensible recommendations in this op-ed, he also incorporates misleading and discredited scientific information to justify dangerous delays in climate action. 

The claim:

Lomborg makes many statements that almost all climate scientists would agree with. These include:

• Investments in hurricane resilience should be increased due to projected increases in storm intensity.
• In the long run, the world needs to cut carbon dioxide emissions.
• Investments in renewable energy technology R&D should be dramatically increased.

However, Lomborg ends these common-sense recommendations with the conclusion that current investments in climate mitigation, including renewable energy subsidies, are wasteful. He uses a series of distracting and misleading statements about trends in extreme weather to minimize the risks we face and delay action.

The context:

• The Wall Street Journal has a long history of reporting on the impacts of climate and environmental threats in their news pages, but minimizing and discrediting the same threats in their editorial pages.
• In 2003, a Danish government committee found Lomborg guilty of scientific dishonesty. He was later cleared by a separate investigation, but he has been a controversial figure since.

The facts:

Lomborg’s statements on wildfires, drought, hurricanes, and economics are all extremely misleading.

• On wildfires, Lomborg references only the number of global fires. Length of active wildfire season and total area burned are considered much more accurate metrics, and both have increased significantly along with global warming.
• On drought, Lomborg is right that some areas across the globe have become more severely droughted, while some have become less so. This is consistent with climate predictions: dry areas get drier while wet areas get wetter. Lomborg implies that these changes simply cancel each other out, and can thus be ignored. In fact they are often devastating due to crop losses in the droughted areas and flooding in the wetter areas.
• On hurricanes, Lomborg references Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which is still under debate as a way to measure overall hurricane activity. He also references a projected decline in damages as a percentage of GDP without stating that damages are increasing, just more slowly than GDP.
• On economics, Lomborg implies in his op-ed that the climate problem can be solved solely through investment in research and technology. While economists are divided on the role of subsidies, nearly all agree that a price on carbon is necessary to drive innovation and change (including Lomborg himself).

Straight from the scientists:

“Lomborg loves to play the nit-picky ‘I'm the honest statistician’ role and then use this stance to imply that doing much of anything except R&D is a waste, ignoring the huge body of evidence that pricing GHG emissions can have large net benefits. We need to be putting a substantial price on our GHG emissions either with a cap and trade program or with a tax. AND we should be investing heavily in R&D on reducing the carbon and energy intensity of the economy. I’m quite sure that most economists, Republican and Democrat, would agree with these statements.”

-- William Shobe, Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies and a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Virginia

“Using number of global fires as a metric of climate-induced wildfire dynamics is wrong, in that most fires globally are human-caused for agricultural clearing. The better metrics are length of active wildfire season, which has increased by about 2 months in the western US in the last 40 years, and area burned, which has also doubled ... Future projections indicate a dramatic increase in area burned.”

-- Steven Running, Regents Professor, Forest Ecology, College of Forestry & Conservation at the University of Montana, and Director of the Numerical Terradynamics Simulation Group

“The area of drought worldwide is not really very relevant when it is particular areas being impacted with greater and greater intensity ... When those regions are particularly important to society, such as major grain-growing regions, the impacts can be very severe.”

-- Mike MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs with the Climate Institute, former senior global change scientist to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, former President of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences

“Lomborg's allusions to hurricane response to climate change are misleading in a number of respects. While it is true that one published report indicates decreasing global accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), that report was based on a hurricane data set known to have strong biases outside the North Atlantic region. Independent analyses based solely on satellite data show that the proportion of high intensity hurricanes has been increasing in most places. As to the projected decline in hurricane damage as a fraction of GDP, an even casual reading of the relevant paper shows that while actual damage is predicted to increase in most places, GDP is forecast to go up even faster, so that the ratio declines. That paper's projection of increased hurricane damage is consistent with numerous scientific studies that project increasing numbers of the most destructive hurricanes.”

-- Kerry Emanuel, Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science at MIT

“The President did not refer specifically to hurricanes, but he did refer to extreme precipitation events. The Northeast region of the country has experienced a 75% increase in these events.  This means that routine nor'easters, especially when they follow storms like Sandy (that eliminate much of the capacity of natural protection from dunes and marshes) create much more damage ... [NYC] has invested billions over the past few years in adaptation investments. Some have worked well, but some have been overwhelmed by recent events. Only slowing the pace of climate change will allow adaptation investments ... to keep pace...”

-- Gary Yohe, Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/01/25/in-wall-street-journal-op-ed-bjorn-lomborg-urges-delay-with-misleading-stats/

Nation’s Top Climate Scientists Urge President Obama to Reject Keystone XL Pipeline

For immediate release, January 15, 2013, 350.org

OAKLAND CA -- Eighteen of the nation’s top climate scientists released a letter to President Obama today urging him to say no to the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. 

“Eighteen months ago some of us wrote you about the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, explaining why in our opinion its construction ran counter to both national and planetary interests,"  wrote the scientists. "Nothing that has happened since has changed that evaluation; indeed, the year of review that you asked for on the project made it clear exactly how pressing the climate issue really is."

Indeed the past year has shown that climate change is here. A few months after Superstorm Sandy flooded parts of the Northeast, NOAA announced last week that the average temperature for 2012 was 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.2 degrees above normal and a full degree higher than the previous warmest year recorded -- 1988. 

The State Department is expected to soon release its supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) required for the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. The department’s previous pipeline EIS downplayed climate risks by arguing that the tar sands would be developed with or without Keystone XL and therefore the project had no responsibility for the additional greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning tar sands oil. 

But two of Canada's largest banks, TD Economics and CIBC, have recently said that without added capacity, "Canada's oil industry is facing a serious challenge to its long-term growth" and that “Canada needs pipe — and lots of it — to avoid the opportunity cost of stranding over a million barrels a day of potential crude oil growth.”

The Obama Administrations has promised action on climate change but if KXL is approved, the Administration would be actively supporting and encouraging the growth of an industry which has demonstrably serious effects on climate.

Thousands of concerned citizens will come to Washington, DC on February 17th, President's Day weekend, to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline. Rally information is at www.350.org/presidentsday.

### 

1. Full text of the letter: 

Dear Mr. President,

You take office for the second time at a critical moment. As you may know, the U.S. has just recorded the hottest year in its history, beating the old mark by a full degree; the same year that saw the deep Midwest drought, and the fury of Hurricane Sandy, also witnessed the rapid and unprecedented melt of the Arctic ice pack. 

If we are to restrain the rise in the planet's temperature, it will require strong action from, among others, the planet's sole superpower. Some of that work will be difficult, requiring the cooperation of Congress. But other steps are relatively easy.

Eighteen months ago some of us wrote you about the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, explaining why in our opinion its construction ran counter to both national and planetary interests. Nothing that has happened since has changed that evaluation; indeed, the year of review that you asked for on the project made it clear exactly how pressing the climate issue really is. 

We hope, as scientists, that you will demonstrate the seriousness of your climate convictions by refusing to permit Keystone XL; to do otherwise would be to undermine your legacy.

Thank you,

James Hansen, Research Scientist, The International Research Institute for Climate and Society, The Earth Institute, Columbia University

Ralph Keeling, Director, Scripps CO2 Program Scripps Institution of Oceanography

John Harte, Professor of Ecosystem Sciences, University of California

Jason E. Box, Professor, Byrd Polar Research Center

John Abraham, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, University of St. Thomas

Ken Caldeira, Senior Scientist. Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution

Michael MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs, Climate Institute

Michael E. Mann, Professor of Meteorology, Director, Earth System Science Center, The Pennsylvania State University

James McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography, Harvard University

Michael Oppenheimer, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Geosciences, Princeton University

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical Sciences, The University of Chicago

Richard Somerville, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography

George M. Woodwell, Founder, Director Emeritus, and Senior Scientist, Woods Hole Research Center

Mauri Pelto, Department of Environmental Science, Nichols College

David Archer, Professor, Department of Geophysical Sciences, The University of Chicago

Dr. Ted Scambos, Lead Scientist, National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado at Boulder

Terry L. Root, Senior Fellow, Stanford University

Alan Robock, Professor II, Distinguished Professor, Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers University

Affiliations are listed for identification purposes only. 

http://www.350.org/scientists-call-president-reject-keystone-xl-pipeline