Kashmira Kakati

Few wild animals are more charismatic than tigers and other big cats. And few are more threatened by habitat loss, poaching and other problems.

So a new set of photos, made by automated cameras in a rain forest in northeast India are “an encouraging sign,” according to group of conservation organizations aiming to protect biodiversity hotspots. The photos show that one forest area is home to seven cat species  — clouded leopards, marbled cats and golden cats, all of which are rare, and tigers, leopards, leopard cats and jungle cats, which are more numerous.

The animals, along with wild dogs, bears, mongoose and other creatures, were photographed in the Jeypore-Dehing forests in Assam, a state in northeast India. The photos were made with camera traps — automated cameras equipped with infrared triggers.

The work, led by Kashmira Kakati, a wildlife biologist, and financed by the Government of Assam and a group of conservation organizations including the Wildlife Conservation Society, suggest that the forest is home to a range of valuable species, scientists familiar with the work said in announcing the findings.

But they said the region is threatened by poaching, oil and gas drilling and unsustainable development, including a hydroelectric project.

Corals around the world, already threatened by pollution, destructive fishing practices and other problems, are also widely regarded as among the ecosystems likely to be first — and most — threatened with destruction as earth’s climate warms.

Todd LaJeunesse Todd LaJeunesse collected a tiny fragment from a cluster of Sarcophyton soft corals in the western Indian Ocean, off the coast of Zanzibar.

But there is reason to hope, researchers are reporting. The scientists, from Penn State University and elsewhere, have produced new evidence that some algae that live in partnership with corals are resilient to higher ocean temperatures. One species, Symbiodinium trenchi, is particularly abundant – “a generalist organism,” the researchers call it, able to live with a variety of coral hosts.

Corals and algae live together in what scientists call a symbiotic relationship. Coral polyps shelter the algae and as the tiny plants photosynthesize they produce sugars the corals rely on for food. When water warms, though, reefs’ brown or green algae partners die, leaving the reefs white. These so-called bleaching events have become more common as ocean waters warm.
Read more…

Andrew A. Lacis, the NASA climatologist whose 2005 critique of the United Nations climate panel was embraced by bloggers seeking to cast doubt on human-driven climate change, has sent in two more commentaries on the state of climate science.

I’m posting them sequentially here. [Here's part 2.] I’m offline for the most part through the rest of the week, so this is all for now on this issue. Here’s the first take from Dr. Lacis, providing his defense of the role of carbon dioxide in warming:

Human-induced warming of the climate system is established fact.

How do we know this to be true? What does it take to get something established as fact? I will try to explain this quandary here the same way that I explain it to myself.

We have come to understand that nothing happens in this world expect as allowed by the laws of physics. What this means is that for every physical action there is going to be a well-defined cause, and a well-defined effect. Quantum mechanical weirdness that operates at atomic scale does not invalidate this physical description of the macroscopic range that is of interest.

Human experience has demonstrated that it is through measurement and physics that we understand the world that we live in. The term “physics” includes also the mathematical description of these laws which permits mathematical models to be constructed to conduct virtual experiments of real-world situations.

In this way, by utilizing global-mean decadal-average quantities, we have come to understand that water vapor accounts for 50 percent of the (33 K, 60 deg F) greenhouse effect. Longwave absorption by clouds contributes 25 percent, and CO2 accounts for 20 percent. The remaining 5 percent of the greenhouse effect is split between methane, N2O, CFCs, ozone, and aerosols. Significantly, CO2 and the minor GHGs do not condense or precipitate at current atmospheric temperatures. This provides a stable reference temperature structure for the fast feedback processes to operate and maintain the amounts of atmospheric water vapor and clouds at their quasi-equilibrium concentrations. Hence the strength of the terrestrial greenhouse is sustained and effectively controlled by the atmospheric temperature floor that is provided by CO2 and the other non-condensing greenhouse gases. (More detail is contained in my Greenhouse Tutorial which is a related supporting commentary.)

The bottom line is that CO2 is absolutely, positively, and without question, the single most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. It acts very much like a control knob that determines the overall strength of the Earth’s greenhouse effect. Failure to control atmospheric CO2 is a bad way to run a business, and a surefire ticket to climatic disaster.

My earlier criticism had been that the IPCC AR4 report was equivocating in not stating clearly and forcefully enough that human-induced warming of the climate system is established fact, and not something to be labeled as “very likely” at the 90 percent probability level. It would seem that the veracity of the human-induced warming would hinge on establishing the pedigree of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2. On this point, the IPCC report is crystal clear. Pages 137-140 of IPCC AR4 describe high-precision in situ measurements of atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa, documenting the steady increase in CO2 along with its characteristic seasonal fluctuation. These measurements, supplemented by analyses of air bubbles trapped in ice core samples, show unequivocally that atmospheric CO2 has increased from a pre-industrial level of 277 ppm in 1750 to present day concentrations that are approaching 390 ppm.

The IPCC report also shows the corresponding decrease in atmospheric oxygen, thus providing irrefutable verification that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is linked directly to fossil fuel oxidation. In Chapter 7, the IPCC report states it clearly: “the increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases during the industrial era are caused by human activities”. Undoubtedly, volcanic eruptions have contributed some atmospheric CO2, but this can only be miniscule as neither the 1991 Pinatubo eruption (largest of the century), nor the 1986 Lake Nyos CO2 eruption that killed thousands, so much as registered a blip in the Mauna Loa CO2 record.

In view of all this, the IPCC AR4 Chapter 9 Executive Summary states that: “It is likely (66 percent probability) that there has been a substantial anthropogenic contribution to surface temperature increases in every continent except Antarctica since the middle of the 20th century.” How can this be considered anything other than inaccurate and misleading?

To understand climate change, it is necessary to know the radiative forcings that drive the climate system away from its reference equilibrium state. These radiative forcings have been analyzed and evaluated by Hansen et al. (2005, 2007). They include changes in solar irradiance, greenhouse gases, tropospheric aerosols, and volcanic aerosols. Of these forcings, the only non-human-induced forcing that produces warming of the surface temperature is the estimated long-term increase by 0.3 W/m2 of solar irradiance since 1750. Volcanic eruptions are episodic, and can produce strong but temporary cooling. All of the other forcings are directly tied to human activity. When it comes to radiative forcing of global climate change, it is abundantly clear that whether we like it or not, or whether we care to admit it, it is humans who are driving the bus.

Here’s part 2.

Here’s the second (and final) installment from Andrew A. Lacis of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies providing more detail on his view of the evidence showing a human warming influence on the climate. [Part one is here.] This post builds on his earlier efforts here to challenge arguments of skeptics of human-driven warming. (I’ve added a link or two to Web sites explaining some of the acronyms.)

Greenhouse Tutorial

In the context of global climate, absorbed solar radiation (about 240 W/m2, with 30 percent of the incident radiation being reflected back to space) is the energy source that keeps the Earth’s surface warm. The Planck radiation law determines that a temperature of 255 K (about 0° F) is needed to have energy balance with the absorbed solar radiation. If the Sun were suddenly turned on, the Earth would begin warming, and would keep warming until it reached a 255 K temperature, at which point it would be radiating 240 W/m2 of thermal energy out to space, in equilibrium with the solar energy input.

The global-mean surface temperature of the Earth is observed to be 288 K (60° F). Why is this so much warmer than the 255 K effective temperature of the thermal radiation emitted to space? The reason is that the Earth has an atmosphere that contains gases that absorb thermal radiation. These gases are distributed throughout the atmosphere, and they also must maintain energy balance on a local scale, meaning that the same amount of radiation absorbed (e.g., from the ground), must be re-emitted (in both upward and downward directions) so as to maintain constant temperature. This radiative process of localized absorption and emission of thermal radiation establishes a temperature gradient within the atmosphere, and in so doing, results in heating the ground surface to a higher temperature than would be the case with no atmosphere. This is the greenhouse effect, and it keeps the surface temperature of the Earth 33 K (60° F) warmer than it would otherwise be for the same 240 W/m2 of solar heating. Read more…

Ecoartspace, an organization that focuses on addressing environmental issues through the visual arts (the image below, from a 2009 exhibition, is by Nils-Udo), got in touch with me recently about a planned spring exhibition of small works on paper devoted to a simple question: What matters most?

I brainstormed a bit with Amy Lipton, one of the founders of the nonprofit group, and proposed that the effort get a kick-start by posing that question to an array of people who are involved in examining the human journey — including Dot Earth readers, of course. (This blog has periodically explored the role of the arts in fostering public engagement on the human relationship with the home planet). The responses could provide inspiration or provocation to the artists in their work.

I sent the question to a wide variety of people, from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to the author Terry Tempest Williams. The initial batch of answers is posted below. What’s your answer?

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon:

What matters most has not changed over time: the quest for dignity, justice, and peace, the essential yearnings for hope and human compassion, the desire to build a better life for our children. These aspirations are at the heart of the United Nations work. What has changed is our ability to provide a decent life for this and future generations on a planet that is under increasing, severe strain. How will we feed, shelter, and educate three billion more people by 2050 in an era of accelerating climate change, resource scarcity and environmental degradation? We need to redefine our relationship to the planet, and in so doing, build a more equitable society for all.

Sylvia Earle, ocean explorer and defender:

Exploring and protecting the ocean tops my list. All life requires water, and most of Earth’s water -– and most living things –- are in the sea. What we have put there in just half a century — hundreds of millions of tons of noxious wastes — and what we have taken out –- hundreds of millions of tons of wild creatures –- have changed the nature of the systems that drive climate and weather, generate most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, regulate temperature, and otherwise are the foundation of our life support. No blue, no green; no ocean, no life. If we fail to take care of the ocean, nothing else matters.

Alec Loorz, youth climate campaigner:

Climate change is the most urgent issue of our time. And it will affect the youth more than anyone else. We, as youth are going to have to grow up to face the consequences of what the world does, or fails to do now. So now is the time for the youngest generation to stand up and take back our future. What is needed is a revolution. A real revolution, more than just changing light bulbs and buying a hybrid. We, as youth need to let the ruling generation know that “iMatter.” And I, along with my whole generation can create a new way of living that values our future just as much as any short term interests. We have the power to make this a reality.

Read more…

Amid a prolonged exchange of e-mail messages Thursday with a heap of authors from past and future reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, along with some stray experts, the climate historian Spencer Weart chimed in with a “history” of the recent flare-up in the two-decades-and-counting climate wars.

Dr. Weart, himself a physicist, said he had just finished reviewing a draft of a social history of 20th-century physics and was inspired to muse on what a historian in 2210, writing a survey of science in the 21st century, might say in the chapter on climate:

The controversy was one more step in the trends we have seen operating since the mid 20th century. First, the decline in the prestige of all authorities and would-be authoritative organizations. Second, the great expansion of the scientific community coupled with an increasing interdisciplinarity: strengths which brought a weakness in that that there were no longer any universally respected spokespeople (like Millikan, Einstein, or even Sagan); it is characteristic that the spokesman for the I.P.C.C., Pachauri, was unknown before he took the position, was not even a scientist, and indeed was accepted for the post by the Bush administration precisely because of these deficiencies. Third, the decline of science journalism; where Walter Sullivan and his like had admired the scientific community and were respected in turn, many of the media people who now attempted to explain science, such as the “weather” reporters on television, scarcely understood what they were dealing with.

These trends had been exacerbated since the 1990s by the fragmentation of media (Internet, talk radio), which promoted counter-scientific beliefs such as fear of vaccines among even educated people, by providing facile elaborations of false arguments and a ceaseless repetition of allegations.

The scientific community — for it was not only the I.P.C.C. but the entire scientific community whose reliability was now called into question — was unprepared for the attacks they now faced. We can easily speculate about the personal and social characteristics that to this day make many scientists unfit for aggressive personal controversy. But it will suffice to point out that unlike, for example, any political organization or business corporation, the I.P.C.C. lacked a well-funded and expert public relations apparatus. Even the universities, notably East Anglia, showed a complete lack of understanding of the basic need to respond promptly with a coherent statement of the full factual history of their problems.

To make matters worse, some scientists, and still more people among environmental and other organizations, made statements not supported by what was reliably known. An example was implicit or explicit claims that hurricanes were increasing as a result of human interference with the climate. There was no way for the general public to know whether scientists actually made such claims, still less whether the claims were made honestly or disingenuously. Thus a single error, such as the obviously wrong claim that Himalayan glaciers would vanish within decades, could be suspected to be a deliberate falsehood. Read more…

NASA Andrew A. Lacis of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Andrew Lacis, a climate scientist at NASA, flashed around the skeptic blogosphere after A.W. Montford found Dr. Lacis’s 2005 critique of early drafts of an important chapter in the 2007 reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Earlier this week I wrote a piece examining Dr. Lacis’s views as well as the wording of the final version of that report section, which dealt with the tough question of detecting the human climate influence amid all the various forces creating climate patterns.

Dr. Lacis offered quite a bit of additional detail in a subsequent comment and now has sent in a fresh missive that, while sustaining his criticism of some of the report language, won’t provide much comfort to anyone seeking to use his views to undermine the case for human-driven warming. He says he’ll add more soon, and I’ll update this post when that happens. In the meantime, Dr. Lacis has the floor:

The question has been raised: given the published version of [the] I.P.C.C. AR4 document, would I still level the same review comments at the current Chapter 9 Executive Summary? It turns out that my basic criticisms might well be substantially the same as before, except perhaps (being now a few years older and wiser) I might be inclined to tone down the volume on some of my statements.

But, if I were to do so, I have no doubt that my comments would again be misinterpreted, misused and otherwise taken out of context. Clearly, most of the present brouhaha on this topic has been artificially generated with no real scientific rationale for doing so. Much of the problem is semantics. We all speak English, but the language that we use (in particular terminology that has technical meaning) conveys different meaning to different people. Recall how Bill Clinton was arguing about what the real meaning of the word “is” is, or was.

There is a great deal of irony in this basically nonsensical stuff, some of which I find rather amusing. The global warming denier blogs, where this issue first came up, seem to think that I was being critical of the I.P.C.C. report in the same way as seen from their perspective, and, as a result, I have received e-mails from the denier crowd hailing my remarks and commending me for “speaking up” on this important topic.

Little do they realize that the basic thrust of my criticism of the I.P.C.C. draft was really to register a clear complaint that I.P.C.C. was being too wishy-washy and was not presenting its case for anthropogenic impact being the principal driver of global warming as clearly and forcefully as they could, and should. Read more…

Science Magazine has removed the pay wall from “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People.” The paper concludes, as many have before, that keeping up with humanity’s needs as numbers and appetites crest toward mid-century poses big challenges. But it expresses optimism that a sustained focus on efficiency, technology and policy innovations can do the trick. (The images above, from the paper, show how investments in water storage and other measures helped restore vegetation in a dry region in Niger.) Here’s the summary:

Continuing population and consumption growth will mean that the global demand for food will increase for at least another 40 years. Growing competition for land, water, and energy, in addition to the overexploitation of fisheries, will affect our ability to produce food, as will the urgent requirement to reduce the impact of the food system on the environment. The effects of climate change are a further threat. But the world can produce more food and can ensure that it is used more efficiently and equitably. A multifaceted and linked global strategy is needed to ensure sustainable and equitable food security, different components of which are explored here.

The authors include a menu of possible uses for genetically modified crops, but stress that technology alone is far from sufficient if policies are not shifted to advance the appropriate use of the right agricultural strategy or tool in the right place. Over all, a focus on “sustainable intensification” of production of crops and livestock will be vital to limiting impacts on remaining undeveloped ecosystems. Read more…

Anyone tracking the long fight over curbing greenhouse gases can see the tendency of the most passionate advocates on either side to try to build their cases around certainty.

“There’s no longer any debate,” became a mantra in the post-Katrina surge of greenhouse campaigning, cresting after the 2007 publication of the fourth set of reports on warming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That push also had its greatest momentum when there was a convenient target — a Republican administration with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry and a go-slow legacy on the climate issue.

The assertions of certainty often spilled over from the basics — rising emissions equal rising risk — to specifics like the far tougher challenge of attributing recent change to the greenhouse buildup.

Now the foes of limits on greenhouse gases have the ball, proclaiming the death of global warming science on the basis of flaws in the climate panel’s report, recent fluctuations in temperature and the issues raised by the exposed e-mail messages and files of some climate scientists. As David Roberts at Grist noted ruefully on Twitter, they also now have a target in a Democratic president and Congress.

In the meantime, with the global economy slowly sputtering back to life, long-lived emissions of carbon dioxide are poised to rise again, adding in the longterm to the heating of an already warm planet.

Several Dot Earth readers have weighed in with useful thoughts on how much of this tussle over certainty is a distraction — perhaps in some cases an intended one, aimed to further delay an intensified push for a post-fossil energy menu. (I’ve written on this repeatedly, including in a piece from 2000 on “Global Waffling”).

Here’s Andrew Kent, who blogs at Wag:

…I still have problems with this whole business of debating the levels of certainty associated with global warming science. My view is that ultimately it’s a waste of mental energy, since we’ve already got enough certainty to know that it’s a good idea to take out an insurance policy against the worst-case scenario – and by the time you’ve got the hindsight to have “no error bars,” it’s already too late to do anything about GHGs:

Climate science is intimately concerned with predicting the future. The earth is not a controlled experiment that allows scientists to add CO2 and empirically test the precise amount of warming that results. There are simply too many variables not in scientists’ control. To predict the consequences of carbon emissions, we must therefore rely on climate models built from our best understanding of how the climate system works. And yes, those models are uncertain, with error bars greater than zero: as with any prediction of future events, you inherently can never be certain you’re right until those events have already occurred. Certainty can only exist with hindsight. Read more…

Two years before the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was released in 2007, this comment about an early draft of the report came in from Andrew Lacis, a physicist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the NASA lab led for decades by James Hansen:

There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn’t the I.P.C.C. Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community – instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted. Read more….

Dr. Lacis, who wrote the comment in November 2005, was referring to the executive summary of the chapter in the Working Group 1 report on the basic science of human-driven global warming entitled Understanding and Attributing Climate Change. The comment was summarily rejected. This made waves today after a Bishop Hill blog post was picked up by WattsUpWithThat.*

I was immediately curious, of course, whether Dr. Lacis still held this dim view of that chapter summary, so I contacted him and we just spoke a short while ago.

“The revised chapter was much improved,” he said. “That’s different than saying everything in there is nailed down, but I think it’s a big improvement.”

Overall, he said, “I commend the authors for doing as good a job as they did. That’s the way the science process ought to work. You get inputs from everybody, find any bugs, crank through and the science moves forward.”

But after reviewing the chapter myself just now, I have to say that at least one passage  — as far as I can tell — did not contain a single caveat and did not reflect the underlying body of evidence and analysis at the time (or even now):

Human-induced warming of the climate system is widespread. Anthropogenic warming of the climate system can be detected in temperature observations taken at the surface, in the troposphere and in the oceans.

I have yet to see anyone provide definitive evidence — with no error bars — that the fingerprint of human-generated greenhouse gases (or other emissions or actions) is unequivocal. The only thing described as “unequivocal” in the report was the warming, not the cause, unless I really haven’t been paying attention for the last two decades.

I’ve sent out an email to the lead authors and overall leaders of the report on the basic science and will update this post when they respond.

[UPDATE, 2/11: I'm adding several important reactions in the comment string below, starting with that of Susan Solomon, the co-chair of Working Group 1]]

[UPDATE, 2/10: The journal Nature has published a roundup of new approaches for reviewing climate findings, including what might be called a WikiPCC. This was touched on by me in a print story last summer.]

[UPDATE, 4:10 p.m.: Gabriele Hegerl, one of two coordinating lead authors for this chapter, just sent this reply (which was copied to an array of other panel authors) [6:50 p.m.: Dr. Hegerl also sent an addendum which I've appended below]:

Andrew Lacis’ comment at the time seemed to result from not realizing that all the ‘meat’ in the chapter is BEHIND the executive summary (and he seems to have been satisfied as he seems to have commented only on technical issues on a later draft).

[if you want to know more detail on where findings come from: In every subsection, for example, the one on causes of observed surface temperature changes, a large number of studies are assessed that try to attribute observed warming to causes. Some of them are optimal fingerprint detection studies (estimating the magnitude of fingerprints for different external forcing factors in observations, and determining how likely such patterns could have occurred in observations by chance, and how likely they could be confused with climate response to other influences, using a statistically optimal metric), some of them use simpler methods, such as comparisons between data and climate model simulations with and without greenhouse gas increases/anthropogenic forcing, and some are even based only on observations. How well we can distinguish between different external influences on surface temperature (such as natural, including solar, vs. greenhouse gas forcing) is, for example, discussed in section 9.4.1.5). What the last millennium tells us is in Section 9.3. For each section, the results are summarized at the end (e.g., 9.4.5 summarizes 9.4) and the most robust ones carried forward to the executive summary. If you want to know more detail, look at the summary table at the end of the chapter]

We felt Andrew Lacis’ comment reflected that he couldn’t clearly see where statements came from, which is why we strengthened the pointers from the technical sections to the executive summary. Read more…

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago sent the note appended below several days ago and I thought it worth featuring as a “Your Dot” contribution to stimulate discussion of an important question in the climate challenge. Once emitted, carbon dioxide is a “globally well mixed gas” that knows no borders. Every year, commerce becomes increasingly “globally well mixed” as well. So if the world moves toward a system for tracking emissions, who is responsible for a particular batch of carbon dioxide — the company that mined and sold the coal, the power plant that burned it, the consumer who buys the exported widget made with the electricity generated by that combustion, or…?

Here’s Dr. Pierrehumbert’s riff on one example (I added the links for context):

Perhaps you’ve already noticed the $60 billion coal deal with China, under which Australia will mine about 600 million tons of coal for export to China:

There’s a lot of greed and hypocrisy here. Politicians in the developed world are always crowing about how a carbon control agreement is no good if China is not part of it and keeps burning coal. Yet, in the one case where we in the developed world have direct leverage over China’s coal burning, we fail to act.

We’re quite happy to sell China the rope with which they’ll (help us) hang the world’s formerly equable climate, and all of us with it. Controlling coal exports would have real leverage, since many current estimates indicate that China could be running out of coal in the coming decades (see esp. the paper by Nehring in Proc. Roy. Soc.)

To put the size of this deal in perspective, the papers in the “trillion ton” special issue of Nature
estimate that we can only emit another 500 gigatonnes of carbon if we are to avoid the E.U.’s target for dangerous climate change — which is already much in excess of Hansen’s preferred target. 600 million tonnes of coal, plus energy cost of mining and transport, would probably amount to 500 million tons of carbon emissions as CO2. So, this deal alone uses up a tenth of a percent of humanity’s allowable allotment of fossil fuel burning. Sad, very sad.

–Ray

I know of quite a few economists who would say it’s completely unrealistic to think a coal-producing country would constrain such commerce unless and until there’s an economic cost in doing so. (A broad body of science says there is a long-term environmental cost, but that message butts up against the discount rate and our tendency to frame today’s policies around today’s priorities)

And there are others who would also warn about the trade wars — and perhaps someday shooting wars — that would break out if countries started restricting trade in fossil fuels. Still, the issue of responsibility for emissions is well illustrated here. Thoughts welcome.

I sent a query on this to a variety of economists and specialists in international climate policy. Here are some responses (more posted as they come in):

William Moomaw, Tufts University:

Who owns the emissions from burning fossil fuels and the products made with them? At the present time of course no one does. However in accounting for emissions from petroleum that is burned as gasoline in cars, it is the country where it is burned that is credited with those emissions., and not the producer nation of the original oil. If the producing country refines the oil, the associated emissions of the extraction and refining process stay in the country of origin.

So why would coal be different? China has made it clear that a large amount of their emissions are associated with being the world’s factory nation, and has suggested that they are not responsible for those emissions. Similarly, it is developing country demand for beef that is most responsible for Amazonian deforestation and European demand for biofuels and other products associated with palm oil that is leading to the deforestation of Indonesia and Malaysia.

A group of students of mine once proposed that emissions should follow the fuel and the products (if a system could be developed to make that feasible). Then all of the emissions associated with producing goods for the U.S., Europe, Japan and Australia would be theirs and not associated with the developing country that produced the goods. If developed countries were to be subject to limitations on GHGs then there would be  competition among developing countries to lower embedded emissions in their products as buying nations demanded lower emissions.

This has interesting implications for trade if governments demand lower carbon products be exported to them. If the requirements are put in private contracts by private importers, there is no problem. This is actually one reason that CFCs were phased out even in some developing countries in the 1990s. Major manufacturers of computer chips and electronic devices  demanded that the chips be made CFC-free in contracts, and provided technical assistance.  Most supplying manufacturers in developing countries complied long before the deadline, which is 2010 for developing countries.

A challenge would be to track “all”embedded  GHG emissions in all products. That in fact may not be necessary, and we need to avoid having the perfect be the enemy of the good. A great question with undiscovered implications.

Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University:

Economic theory suggests that it should make no difference where the tax is levied, provided  it is levied only once in the production process.  If the tax is levied on mining of coal or petroleum, then capital and labor will move out of those industries to untaxed parts of the economy, supply will fall, and prices paid by the consuming industries will rise, so part of the tax will shift to the latter. If the tax is levied on energy-consuming industries, then, similarly, the supply of those products using the most energy will fall the most, so that the demand for carboniferous fuels will decrease, and so their price will decrease, i.e., the tax will be shifted to the mining industries. Thus, in any case, the tax will eventually be shared among all relevant industries.

Peter Barnes, Tomales Bay Institute (mainly a reply to Dr. Arrow):

All true, but let us not forget that the ‘relevant industries’ ultimately pass the cost of the tax (or permit fee) to the end users of their products — i.e. consumers — so that in the end, the carbon tax or fee is effectively a sales tax. That is why some sort of revenue recycling to consumers is an essential piece of any carbon pricing system.

That said, I think Andrew may have been wondering about which COUNTRY has to count the emissions toward their cap or target — the country that exports the coal, the country that makes (say) the cars, or the country that buys them? I don’t have a good answer to that question.

Matthew Kuperus Heun, Engineering Dept., Calvin College:

Regarding your question about who is responsible for the GHG emissions when coal is traded internationally, I’ll share what I tell my students during our carbon trading simulation: “The carbon follows the money.” In my opinion, the point of release into the atmosphere (in the absence of storage, the same place where combustion happens) is the point at where the taxes or penalties should be levied. The emitter then passes the additional cost to the people who buy the product with the embedded carbon. I know you’re moving into an educational role, and on your new endeavours I wish you well! If you’re interested in how I run my carbon trading simulations and in the responses we get from students, you can see the paper at asa3.org/asa/PSCF/2009/PSCF6-09Heun.pdf. I hopes this helps the conversation.

David Victor, University of California, San Diego (mainly responding to Dr. Arrow):

Ken Arrow is right–in theory it doesn’t matter who owns the emissions. But that theory holds only so long as the property rights (the assets and liabilities connected to the emissions) are well enforced. The international system is anything but well enforced. That says to me that “ownership” will flow to the least ambitious actors–the countries concerned the least with actually paying the costs of controlling emissions. For the Oz-China deal, that means China. For other deals–such as Indonesia to India or South Africa to India, which are both big export routes–it is not so clear who will own the emissions. As the market for coal goes global (see our piece in Boston Review on this issue, September 2009) the future of global warming will depend on the interests in the countries that are least interested in slowing global warming. Often that will mean China. On this question, the best single study is actually a novel–Matthew Glass’s “Ultimatum” (see a review of that and many other new books on global warming in the March issue of The National Interest).

When the Heartland Institute held its gathering in New York City last year celebrating climate skepticism, Exxon Mobil made a point of saying it had stopped contributing money to that group, explaining that it did not want to support groups “whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion about how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

But it turns out that Exxon money is still flowing to such efforts, just indirectly. An article on Monday in Britain’s Independent newspaper laid out some of the links:

Free-market, anti-climate change think tanks such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in the U.S. and the International Policy Network in the U.K. have received grants totaling hundreds of thousands of pounds from the multinational energy company Exxon Mobil. Both organizations have funded international seminars pulling together climate change deniers from across the globe.

Environmental Web sites that had previously noted the shrinking flow of oil money for efforts challenging global warming science on Monday were echoing the Who hit, “We Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

I reached out for a response to Alan Jeffers, media relations manager for the oil company. He did not deny the money flow of money to skeptics/contrarians/denialists/realists (take your pick depending on your worldview) and defended the company’s actions this way: Read more…

Richard Alley’s name has been thrown around a bit by bloggers asserting that ice-core records from Greenland show that carbon dioxide has scant, if any, influence on climate. Dr. Alley, a glaciologist and climate scientist at Penn State, is a longtime contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, author of a nice history of ice and climate, “The Two-Mile Time Machine,” and — as many Dot Earth readers are aware — a teacher with musical and terpsichorean talents (see the YouTube video below for his orbital dance explaining how ice-age cycles help show the amplifying power of greenhouse gases).

There have been repeated references to his work here by skeptics of human-driven warming, most notably by “Wmar.” Here’s an example (link to full comment is here):

The ice tells us about the past, and from Dr. Alley of the I.P.C.C., it is entirely clear that the carbon/temperature link is either a fallacy or negligible. Unlike the I.P.C.C. or any such pro AGW group, the ice cores have no emotions or agendas and simply are what they are … let’s have a look shall we?
WattsUpWithThat…

I sent a query to Dr. Alley about such interpretations of his work and the ice-core record and he sent a reply, the heart of which is pasted below. Where he refers to GISP2, he’s describing a particular ice core extracted during what was called “Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2.”

First off, no single temperature record from anywhere can prove or disprove global warming, because the temperature is a local record, and one site is not the whole world. One of the lessons drawn from comparing Greenland to Antarctica and many other places is that some of the temperature changes (the ice-age cycling) are very widespread and shared among most records, but other of the temperature changes (sometimes called millennial, or abrupt, or Younger-Dryas-type) are antiphased between Greenland and the south, and still other temperature changes may be unrelated between different places (one anomalously cold year in Greenland does not tell you the temperature anomaly in Australia or Peru). After scientists have done the hard work of working out these relations, it is possible to use one ice-core record to represent broader regions IF you restrict consideration to the parts that are widely coherent, so it is O.K. to plot a smoothed version of an Antarctic temperature record against CO2 over long times and discuss the relation as if it is global, but a lot of background is required.

Second, although the central Greenland ice-core records may provide the best paleoclimatic temperature records available, multiple parameters confirm the strong temperature signal, and multiple cores confirm the widespread nature of the signal, the data still contain a lot of noise over short times (snowdrifts are real, among other things). An isotopic record from one site is not purely a temperature record at that site, so care is required to interpret the signal and not the noise. An extensive scientific literature exists on this topic, and I believe we are pretty good in the community at properly qualifying our statements to accord with the underlying scientific literature; the blogospheric misuses of the GISP2 isotopic data that I have seen are not doing so, and are making errors of interpretation as a result. Read more…

CBS News has run a report summarizing fallout from the illegal distribution of climate scientists’ email messages and files and problems with the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The conclusion is that missteps and mistakes are creating broader credibility problems for climate science.

[UPDATE, 2/8: Elisabeth Rosenthal has filed a piece reviewing the issues facing the panel. The climate panel posted two statements on its Web site refuting some criticisms and acknowledging some problems.]

Senator James M. Inhofe was quick to add the report to the YouTube channel of the minority on the Environment and Public Works committee:

Ralph J. Cicerone, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, has an editorial in this week’s edition of the journal Science (subscription only) noting the same issue. Over all, he wrote, “My reading of the vast scientific literature on climate change is that our understanding is undiminished by this incident; but it has raised concern about the standards of science and has damaged public trust in what scientists do.” Read more…

Trevor Houser, who just left the American climate change negotiating team to return to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has taken a close look at the greenhouse gas emissions reductions pledges of the 92 countries that submitted plans this week under the Copenhagen Accord. Here’s the report.

The participating countries (40 developed and 52 developing) account for 83 percent of global emissions and 75 percent of global population. He was trying to determine whether their plans, if implemented faithfully, would accomplish the central goal of the accord, which is to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and thus avoid the worst projected impacts of a heating planet.

His conclusion? Maybe.

He found that success depends on what countries do after 2020 and whose model one applies to match carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to temperature rise. Under one model, developed in part by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the reductions contained in the various national plans would limit temperature increase to 1.3 to 2.4 degrees Celsius, with a “best guess” of 1.8 degrees. Using the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the temperature rise would be 2.1 to 2.4 degrees Celsius, slightly above the 2 degree target.

Mr. Houser finds that a promising result. “Either way,” he writes, “if countries follow through on their pledges and follow on with more aggressive action, keeping global temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius is still within reach.”