The Environment

Ecological Collapse of Pre-Industrial Societies
by Jared Diamond

In this paper (as in his recent book “collapse” Jared Diamond dispels the belief that pre-industrial societies lived in harmony with nature.  He observes that many pre-industrial societies- including indigent North and South American societies prior to the arrival of Europeans- suffered rapid large-scale decrease in their population as a result of self-inflicted ecological disasters.

Diamond notes that ecological disasters are neither completely inevitable (many human societies have existed for thousands of years without signs of collapse), nor entirely avoidable (sometimes catastrophic weather changes are responsible, for example). 

Examples of pre-industrial collapses:

Polynesian islands societies:

Polynesian islands were populated by canoe voyagers, who eventually lost touch with their ancestral populations.  Easter Island (located about 2000 miles west of Chile, famous for its giant stone statues) is one of the most widely discussed examples. 

Europeans arrived on Easter Island in 1722.  By that time, Polynesians (who arrived around 300 A.D.) had converted what was once a tropical forest into an island with little vegetation or wildlife.   The standard story of the island population’s demise is fairly straightforward:  the population explodes as a result of rich natural resources and all the trees were cut down for building purposes.  Since the trees supported the wildlife, the wildlife died, and the inhabitants lost their primary food supply, as well as their source of materials for building boats. 

Easter Island and others (Henderson, Pitcairn, Necker, etc.) all suffered collapse because of man plundering rather fragile environments.  Other similar islands like Tahiti and Tonga survived, not so much because the people were smarter, but because greater rainfall and warmer weather allowed forest to regenerate faster than they were destroyed.

Native American Societies:

Diamond tells a similar story for the Native Americans of the Southwest United States, such as the Anasazi.  The tribes of this area were largely nomadic until agricultural techniques arrived from the south.  This allowed for the creation of stable complex farming societies, which resulted in  deforestation, hence elimination of reliable natural food supply, and over-reliance on a fickle climate for farming.  The collapse of the Anasazi of Chaco Canyon (in what is now New Mexico) was particularly dramatic, as an enormous population was sustained by outlying areas for many years after the local environment had been degraded.   

Diamond’s conclusions:

Diamond thinks that in most ways we are less prone to collapse today because of greater ecological knowledge, advanced distribution and storage, and more rapid communication.  Societies of the past were far more isolated, and less able to extend aid to each other when ecological disasters occur.   On the other hand, industrialization and  increasing world-wide population is exerting pressure on the global environment in ways that humans have never had to deal with before.  

Climate Science and Climate Policy
by Steven Schneider

Schneider picks up where Diamond leaves off, with the effect of anthropogenic climate change.  Schneider, a Stanford climatologist, discusses different aspect of the climate debate.

“Mediarology”

Schneider is an advocate of educating citizens about climate science, but thinks the media generally does miserable job at it.  The reason is simply that good climate science doesn’t make for good news.  It’s easier to sell papers (or whatever) by representing the extreme positions of the Deep Ecology movement on the one hand and Big Business on the other.   Deep Ecology advocates typically misrepresent all sorts of alternative renewable energies as solutions to climate crises, whereas Big Business advocates typically either trivialize the problems or make them appear insurmountable in an effort to discourage action.  He writes
Citizens must demand that scientists provide honest, credible assessments that answer the "three questions of environmental literacy": 1) What can happen?; 2) What are the odds of it happening?; and 3) How are such estimates made? Citizens must also achieve a certain level of environmental, political, and scientific literacy themselves so that they feel comfortable distinguishing climate change fact from fiction and making critical value judgments and policy decisions, in essence becoming "citizen scientists".  Just as popularization of potential probabilities and consequences will occur with or without input from scientists, policy decisions will be made with or without input from an informed citizenry. I hope that citizens will take responsibility for increasing their scientific, political, and environmental literacy and recognize the importance of the positive effect that an informed public will have on the policy process.
The key issue above is getting normal people to understand how science actually works, the fact that it does not, and can not be expected to deliver anything like theories that are guaranteed to be true, or solutions that are guaranteed to work.  Uncertainty and risk are here to stay.
Climate Science
Regarding the nature of this uncertainty, Schneider says:

These problems are compounded by the global scale of climate change, which produces varying impacts at local scales, long time lags between forcing and its corresponding responses, very long-term climate variability that exceeds the length of most instrumental records, and the impossibility of before-the-fact experimental controls or empirical observations (i.e., there is no experimental or empirical observation set for the climate of, say, 2050 AD, meaning all our future inferences cannot be wholly “objective,” data-based assessments — at least not until 2050 rolls around.)

Some things that are not subject of serious dispute:

1.   Earth's surface air temperature has warmed significantly, by about 0.7°C since 1860, and an upward trend can be clearly discerned by plotting historical temperatures. All but three of the ten warmest years on record occurred during the 1990s. 
2.  Human activities have caused increases in radiative forcing, with radiative forcing defined as a change in the balance between radiation coming into and going out of the earth-atmosphere system. In the past few centuries, atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by more than 30 percent, and virtually all climatologists agree that the cause is human activity, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels and, to a considerable extent, land uses such as deforestation. 
These two facts do not themselves imply that recent global warming is due to increased CO2 levels, however: 
These and other climate change projections depend on detailed modeling. The most consistent way scientists codify our knowledge is by constructing models made up of the many subcomponents of the climate system that reflect our best understanding of each subsystem. …..While modeling has become both more complex and more accurate as computing abilities have advanced and more is understood about the climate problem, scientists still have to deal with an enormous amount of uncertainty, as mentioned above. In climate modeling, one major unknown is climate sensitivity, the amount by which the global mean temperature will increase for a doubling of CO2 concentrations. Many scientists have done extensive empirical and modeling research on this subject, and most have found that most climate sensitivity estimates fall somewhere within the IPCC's range of 1.5-4.5oC. However, more recently some have estimated it could be lower than 1.5oC or it could be an alarming 6oC or higher (Remember that a 5-7oC drop in temperature is all that separates Earth’s present climate from an ice age).
So, the most important thing to understand here is that while there are many different models being used to predict the future climate, and these models reflect the diversity of opinion within the scientific community regarding the kind and degree of various causal influences, the vast majority of the models that exist today are predicting a significant rise in global temperature as a result of increasing CO2 concentration.
Climate Impacts 
Some of the basic expected climate impacts are:
•	more frequent heat waves
•	more intense storms (hurricanes, tropical cyclones, etc.) 
•	a surge in weather-related damage; 
•	increased intensity of floods and droughts; 
•	warmer surface temperatures, especially at higher latitudes; 
•	more rapid spread of vector-borne disease;
•	loss of farming productivity in warm climates and movement of farming to other regions. 

Climate Policy

To many people the above considerations obviously warrant doing something to reduce our carbon emissions.  However, as Schneider points out, any sort of normative conclusion will have to involve some kind of cost-benefit analysis.  The basic problem is that the emission of green house gases correlates with rising affluence.   So the critical question is whether the benefit we would accrue from curtailing our carbon footprint would be greater than its costs.   Different cost benefit analyses (CBA’s)  are based on different economic assumptions, and there is considerably less convergence on CBA’s than there is on environmental models predicting climate change. 

The Great Global Warming Swindle
critique by David Jones et al

Some of the science we discussed above is repudiated in the movie The Great Global Warming Swindle, so it’s worth pointing out some of the places the movie goes astray. 

1.  The movie claims that global average temperatures were much higher during the middle ages, using an IPPC graph as evidence.  This was a 17 year old-graph in which little confidence existed concerning whether the recorded temperatures from earlier periods reflected global temperatures.  It has since been substantially revised.

2.  Several other outdated data sets are used justifying the claim that the majority of recent global warming occurred prior to substantial accumulations of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the environment.

3.  The documentary falsely claims that volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than human activities.  The current accepted proportion is that volcanoes produce about 2% of the carbon dioxide that is produced by fossil fuels.
4.  The documentary proposes that variations in global average temperature can be explained by the effect of solar activity.  Some studies to this effect have been published, but they have all been examined and refuted in peer-reviewed research.
5.  Movies like GGWS are pretty easy to make in theory.  You simply round up a group of fringe scientists whose work has been repudiated or ignored by the mainstream.  These scientists always exist, and they can usually produce rationales for their own work that the laymen will find compelling if considered in isolation.   Of course, these fringe scientists could be right, but usually they aren’t.  Absent some compelling reason to think that the mainstream view has resulted from a process that compromises scientific neutrality or skepticism, it’s not the way to bet.
 
The Kyoto Placebo, 
by Ruth Bell

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol is a plan for limiting C02 emissions worldwide.  It was ratified by 157 countries, but not the United States and Australia.  The U.S. has, of course, received a great deal of criticism for its failure to do so, as it emits more C02 than any other country in the world.  

In this article Bell claims that the main problem with Kyoto is that it is based on an unproven system of emission credits.  The idea of emission credits was actually developed in the United States, and it is highly innovative.  Basically, it works be setting a basic global emissions reduction target, and assigning different countries their particular targets on that basis.  Countries that are able to do better than the target they are assigned, can earn emission credits, which they can then sell to countries that are unable to meet their own targets.

Bells main objection to this scheme is that there is currently no means of accurately measuring the extent to which developing countries have met or exceeded their targets.  She claims that:

In the United States, the market approach succeeds only because it is implemented in a way that is far from laissez-faire. Its basic regulatory demands—a steady decrease of emissions over time—are nonnegotiable. As plants that can cut emissions with relative ease sell their incremental pollution reductions to other plants that cannot do as well, transactions are regulated down to small details and vigorously enforced. The United States requires every plant in the domestic SO2 trading system to install a special (and expensive) form of equipment called a Continuous Emissions Monitor, which sends real-time data via computer to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters in Washington. Traders must use elaborate accounting measures and work in such complete transparency that transactions are tracked on the EPA Web site.
Other countries, even fairly advanced ones, lack the monitoring and enforcement structure to reproduce the U.S. successes on a global scale.  
Bell also thinks that most countries simply will not be motivated by the market structure of Kyoto.  She claims there are three problematic assumptions:
1.  Industry wants to save on compliance costs.  
•	Bell:  in undeveloped countries there are no compliance costs because there are no real enforcement mechanisms.
2.  The opportunity to trade will be embraced.
•	Bell: this is true only of countries that have a truly capitalist culture.  Eastern bloc countries still don’t get it.
3.  The technology for reducing carbon-emissions will be embraced and used if it is made affordable.  
•	Bell:  Why?  Poor countries are legitimately far more concerned about short-term productivity goals than an screwing with long term global impact issues.

The Case for Carbon Capture and Storage
by Jennie Stephens and Bob van der Zwaan 

Deep ecologists tend to assume that there are no technological solutions to global warming, and that human society simply has to change to produce less C02.   But technological solutions are conceivable.  Given the difficulty of achieving international cooperation, it is foolish to ignore them.

Carbon sequestration is just the process of removing C02 from the atmosphere and storing it in some other molecular form.  Trees, for example, may be viewed as carbon sequestration devices, though they give it back to the atmosphere when they burn or decompose.   The ocean is also a primary sequestration device, though one that is currently alarming scientists a great deal because of its effect on alkalinity.  

One of the main problems with CCS technology is that it requires energy, especially for compressing captured C02 for storage.  It also takes energy to move the captured C02 for geological deep sea storage.  So the cost/analysis is crucial to its viability.  Still,  the basic idea is very satisfying: we put C02 back where it came from, into the geologic reservoirs from which fossil fuels have been removed.

Injection technologies are already fairly well developed, but the primary safety concern is the possibility of rapid catastrophic leakage into the atmosphere.  Beyond emphasizing the importance of identifying safe geologic formations, this article makes an argument for providing government subsidies to encourage more research in this area.   Even though it is a promising technology, the R&D costs are so high that private industry is not likely to pursue it on its own.

NETL video

How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor
by C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer

Broadly speaking biofuel is any fuel made from biomass, which of course is what oil and carbon are.  In practice, the term is used more narrowly to refer to fuels made from crops, like sugar cane and corn.   Ethanol (from corn and sugar cane and biodiesel (from rapeseed and sunflowers) are the primary candidates.  The rising price of gas as well as increased political pressure to gain a measure of independence from foreign oil supplies has created enormous interest in this area.

From a global warming perspective, the use of biomass makes sense.  Ethanol, for example, does produce C02 
when it is burned, but it is basically just releasing the carbon that it captured quite recently.  (Fossil fuels, by contrast, are releasing carbon that was captured and sequestered billions of years ago.)

The main point of this article is that ethanol plants will soon start cutting into our food supply, and rich nations hunger for power can mean starvation for the poor.  They say
This might sound like nirvana to corn producers, but it is hardly that for consumers, especially in poor developing countries, who will be hit with a double shock if both food prices and oil prices stay high. The World Bank has estimated that in 2001, 2.7 billion people in the world were living on the equivalent of less than $2 a day; to them, even marginal increases in the cost of staple grains could be devastating. Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn -- which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year. By putting pressure on global supplies of edible crops, the surge in ethanol production will translate into higher prices for both processed and staple foods around the world. Biofuels have tied oil and food prices together in ways that could profoundly upset the relationships between food producers, consumers, and nations in the years ahead, with potentially devastating implications for both global poverty and food security. 
The basic problem is that as oil prices rise, we are more willing to pay higher prices for corn.   If we want to talk about biofuel “singularity,”  it is the point at which it is more lucrative to producers to sell corn for fuel than to sell corn for food.
This article is not against the use of biofuels, but it is against the way that biofuels are currently subsidized.  For various historical reasons corn suppliers currently receive enormous subsidies from the government, so it is now effectively subsidizing the mechanism for mass starvation.  Various grasses are actually more efficient routes to ethanol production, and far easier on the environment to produce, but the current system does not incentivize their production.  Removing government subsidies on corn altogether (which economists have advocated for years) would redirect R&D to to the most efficient ways of producing biofuels.