Climate Change

In Joint Steps on Emissions, China and U.S. Set Aside ‘You First’ Approach on Global Warming

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President Obama with President Xi Jinping of China in Beijing on Tuesday during a conference of Pacific Rim economies. Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Updates below, 12:42 p.m. | After years of “you first” rhetoric on addressing the unrelenting buildup of climate-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, China and the United States, the world’s biggest emitters, agreed in Beijing on Wednesday to intensify domestic steps and international partnerships to rein in their contributions to global warming. Click here for the news coverage in The Times.

With recent new commitments from Europe, this means that countries responsible for more than half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions are accelerating their emissions cutting plans, according to a White House official who spoke only on condition of anonymity. There are plenty of hurdles ahead, but this shift bodes well for the next rounds of negotiations toward a global climate agreement, in Lima next month and Paris a year from now.

China, ending months of uncertainty, said it would pursue policies that result in a peak in its carbon dioxide emissions around 2030, with “the intention” of trying to peak earlier, and to increase the non-fossil fuel share of all energy to around 20 percent by 2030. That would require adding roughly 1,000 gigawatts of renewable and nuclear generation capacity — about equivalent to all of China’s coal burning plants today.

For those eager for the details, here’s the text of the joint announcement, followed by some enthusiastic comments from David Victor, a longtime climate policy analyst at the University of California, San Diego: Read more…

film

‘Song From the Forest’ Charts a Musicologist’s Love Affair With Pygmy Music and Culture

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A scene from "Song from the Forest," a documentary on the life of Louis Sarno, an American living with Bayaka pygmies in Central African Republic. Song from the Forest

Back in March, while at the South by Southwest festival to discuss data visualization with a NASA team, I had a chance to watch “Song from the Forest,” a deeply captivating visual and sonic exploration of the strange, music-driven life of Louis Sarno, an American ethnomusicologist who was lured to the Congo River basin in the 1980s by recordings of pygmy songs and, in many ways, never came back.

This trailer captures the feel of the film well:

The documentary, which has won awards and had a successful release in Europe, will have its New York City premiere Friday at 5 p.m. at the Bowtie Chelsea Cinemas, followed by a discussion with the director, Michael Obert, the music supervisor, David Rothenberg, and others.

I hope the screening helps the film garner sufficient attention to gain more of a foothold here.

The film’s allure lies both in the obsessive, yet humorous nature of its core character (in a way, Sarno somehow captures qualities of Groucho Marx and Kurtz, Marlon Brando’s character in “Apocalypse Now”) and the magnetic appeal of the Bayaka pygmy people, whose musicality drew him to the Congo River basin and held him there for much of his life, like some siren’s call.  Read more…

polarization

How ‘Solution Aversion’ and Global Warming Prescriptions Polarize the Climate Debate

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A portion of a street sculpture in Aspen, Colo. Andrew C. Revkin

Anyone eager to understand, and move past, the deep political polarization around global warming would do well to explore the findings in “Solution aversion: On the relation between ideology and motivated disbelief,” published in the November issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The paper is behind a subscription wall, but a Duke University news release does a fine job laying out the basic findings, as does Chris Mooney, getting into gear in his new blogging position at the Washington Post. Here’s an excerpt from the Duke release, followed by more from Mooney and some thoughts from me on how this work echoes points explored here for many years: Read more…

web

Pondering Dot Earth’s Path After Seven Years and 2,500 Posts

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A whiteboard drawing outlining the themes and design of the Dot Earth blog in 2007. Jeremy Zilar

In the seven years since I used a whiteboard to shape the themes and design of Dot Earth with The Times’s content strategist and blog specialist, Jeremy Zilar, I’ve used this platform to explore humanity’s puberty-like growth spurt, growing pains and promising prospects through 2,500 posts. As many readers probably recognize, the flow here is more an over-the-shoulder view of me learning than a series of declarations and distillations. Given the complexity and uncertainty attending most of the issues I deal with — particularly global warming — I think this approach is the best fit.

Through this span, blogging has gone in and out of style, with the ebb tides mainly reflecting that conventional journalism is becoming ever more blog-like. See The Upshot, Vox and Vice for examples.  Read more…

prediction

The ‘Super El Niño’ Forecast Fadeout

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Updated, 7:48 p.m. | On time scales from decades to months, fluctuations in ocean conditions present persistent challenges to climate scientists (see the “pause” in warming) and weather forecasters. The latest example is the fadeout of portentous predictions of a “super” or “monster” El Niño warming of the tropical Pacific. It’s hard for me to avoid thinking of the departed comedian Chris Farley when exploring this weather phenomenon: Read more…

health

A Doctor-Parent Exchange Reveals a Dangerous Gap Between Fears and Facts on Ebola and Flu

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Updated, Nov. 7, 3:25 p.m. | Via Facebook, my old friend Jeff Kluger at Time Magazine drew my attention to a sobering Twitter item by David Stukus, an allergist and pediatrics professor in Columbus, Ohio:

David Stukus, a doctor in Ohio, tweeted about a sobering interaction with a parent worried about Ebola -- and about flu vaccines.

[Insert, Nov. 7, 3:25 p.m. | I reached Dr. Stukus by phone today and he clarified one detail -- he was recalling a colleague's experience, not his own. I commented on his active engagement on Twitter and he said the platform helps him "increase patient engagement with evidence-based medicine" in a world flooded with misinformation. As I've been saying for a long time, 140 characters can indeed matter.]

The anecdote is a valuable reminder of the enormity of the gap between fears and facts in many people’s perceptions of health risks — and of how that gap contributes to illness.

For more, read: Read more…

politics

One Factor Blunting Impact of Green Spending on Election: Inertia

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After the Republican success in the mid-term elections, it’s no surprise that a search of Twitter for “Steyer election Koch” — meaning for discussions of the relative impact of the millions spent on campaigns by the liberal billionaire Tom Steyer and the conservative Koch brothers — turns up a lot of heated assertions.

On election night, Peter Dykstra, writing for The Daily Climate, had posted a thorough critique of false equivalence in stories (including in The Times) equating the two efforts to influence races in which coal, climate change or related issues were relevant. He used a baseball analogy, saying Steyer had just entered a game in which the other team has long had “big bats, a huge payroll, and a different rulebook.”

But to me, the debate over whose money mattered more and the warning about false equivalence (which is valid) both miss a factor I’ve been noting for awhile.

The two teams are not playing for the same outcome.

I made this point in a talk a couple of years ago, and Kathy Zhang, then a student, created this simple, but telling, cartoon to illustrate the point:

A cartoon by Kathy Zhang illustrates the asymmetrical nature of the fight over climate policy. Stasis is easy. Kathy Zhang

With last night’s political outcomes in mind, which stick figure would you label as Tom Steyer and which as one of the Koch brothers?

Would the relative amounts of spending be the prime factor determining who moved the boulder?

The Koch brothers and their allies want to maintain the status quo, while Steyer and others seeking a political path to a post-carbon economy have an epic challenge in trying to prod Americans out of a fossil-fueled comfort zone that took a century to form.

I’m sure Steyer is in this for the long haul and it’s clear that he, like any smart investor, is hedging his environmental bets, putting money into far more than political campaigns.

Given that the fight for new energy norms requires an unlikely mix of urgency and patience, along with relentless experimentation, I’d say he’s on a good course.

Addendum | Zhang, who was a student then, is now working in communications for the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Keep up the good work, Kathy.)

Updated, Nov. 6, 1:59 p.m. | Jeff Sachs, the Earth Institute economist and United Nations advisor, has a relevant Huffington Post column on the perils of plutocracy.

Climate Change

Panel’s Latest Warming Warning Misses Global Slumber Party on Energy Research

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The year-long rollout of the latest assessment of climate change science and solutions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ended today in Copenhagen with the release of a final synthesis report offering an overview of the world’s climate trajectories and choices.

This report cuts across the earlier panel reviews of basic climate science and related economic, technical and policy questions to identify overarching themes.

There’s much that’s valuable, if familiar, including a recitation of ways to limit the buildup of greenhouse gases:

A list of steps that could limit global warming, provided at the release of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC.ch

But there’s also much that is important but largely missing. Look a little closer at the second of four steps above: “Greater use of low-carbon and no-carbon energy; many of these technologies exist today.”

The new synthesis tends to echo the panel’s earlier reports on global warming mitigation options, implying that a price on carbon and some shifts in policy (subsidies, for instance) are all that’s needed for an swift and affordable transition from conventional use of fossil fuels.

But without a substantial boost in basic research and development and large-scale demonstration projects related to technologies like mass energy storage, capturing and storing carbon dioxide, grid management and a new generation of nuclear plants, it’s hard to see timely progress.

In all of the graphics and take-home points in the panel’s synthesis effort, the only language I can find on these points is turgid and buried. Skip to the bottom of this post to see what I mean.

In the long slide presentation shown at the Copenhagen release, somehow the panel failed to fit in a single graph like this one from the International Energy Agency showing how utterly inconsequential energy research is in advanced democracies (the O.E.C.D.) compared to budgets for science on other things we care about:

Expanded access to clean energy is an underpinning of global wellbeing, but energy research remains a low priority for the world's wealthy democracies. This graph shows O.E.C.D. countries’ spending on research, development and demonstration as a share of total research budgets International Energy Agency (OECD data)

I’d be interested to see a full analysis, including in China, of research budgets over time, as with this look at America’s science investments since the Space Race (I’ve published some version of this graph regularly since my 2006 page-one article, “Budgets Falling in Race to Fight Global Warming”:

Read more...
wildlife

Can Congress Act to Block Fungal Threat to U.S. Amphibians?

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A fire salamander that was infected by the fungus Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, which may have reached Europe through the pet trade from Asia. Frank Pasmans/Ghent University

I hope you’ll read and disseminate Jim Gorman’s story on the new Science paper pointing to a potential ecological catastrophe in North America should a potent chytrid fungus that attacks salamanders arrive on these shores. The fungus originated in Asia and its arrival in Europe has already caused substantial salamander and newt losses there. A related fungus has already devastated a host of frog species around the tropics, as I’ve explored in many posts.

In laboratory tests, the researchers found a 100-percent mortality rate in Eastern newts (one of my favorite forest and pond creatures) exposed to the fungus.

In laboratory tests, all Eastern red-spotted newts (Nothophthalmus viridescens) died after being exposed to an Asian fungus that recently reached Europe, probably carried by salamanders in the pet trade. Andrew C. Revkin

As Gorman noted, legislation has been introduced in Congress that could limit chances of the fungus coming to the United States through the absurdly under-regulated international pet trade: Read more…

energy

Building Sustainable Energy Access, from the Outside In

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A solar engineer cleans a solar array in a rural village of Puttur in Karnataka state in India. The solar array powers a school that now has extra classes for students at night thanks to the additional power. Harish Hande, SELCO

David Roberts, thankfully back on task after a year away from the environment blog Grist, always provides thoughtful input on energy and climate policy.

He’s tended to write on American policies and politics, but this week has refreshingly focused a two-part post package on developing countries, where energy needs, and growth, are greatest.

In the first post — “How can we get power to the poor without frying the planet?” — he explores the challenges faced in trying to boost energy access without greenhouse-gas overload. He lays out the arguments of a range of analysts including the Breakthrough Institute, Roger Pielke, Jr., and Morgan Bazilian and Dan Kammen and the Sierra Club. He appropriately frames the piece around the mythological challenge of navigating between Scylla and Charybdis — finding ways to boost energy access while limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Read more…