climate change

One of the great things about living in Golden, Colorado is that we (along with Boulder and other communities around here) are a nexus of the renewable energy and climate science research world. In addition, we have producers of oil and natural gas and coal, and scientists and lawyers who deal with these industries. For example, here is a session put on by University of Colorado Law School, Natural Resources Law Center on Friday exploring technological, economic, environmental and regulatory issues around shale plays in the Interior West. There is probably nowhere better to have an informed debate around climate and traditional and new energy technologies. One of my current pet projects is attempting to engineer practitioner- academic dialogues about climate and energy issues where they overlap with public lands and forest issues (like this blog, only in person).

Friday afternoon I attended a lecture by Michael Hulme, the author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change. I thought that this was a great book; but if you want to get a shorter version of some of his ideas, try this piece.

When I was working on this post, I discovered that Mark McCaffrey had already summarized yesterday’s lecture here (and taken better notes; ain’t the internet grand?).

Here are the six framings of climate change that Hulme presented:

1) Market failure (Stern report, etc.) with solution of price on carbon/price signal.

2) Technological failure with solution being massive investment in renewable energy and innovation.

3) Global injustice with solution being addressing the needs of the +1.5 billion living on dollars a day.

4) Symptom of overconsumption, with solution being radically reducing consumption, especially for those who live on $200 a day or more.

5) Climate change, if it is happening, is mostly natural, with adaptation being the typical “solution”.

6) Planetary “tipping point,” which, in the view of Jim Hansen, who introduced the concept of climatic tipping points, will require reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million or less.

So I asked Hulme in the Q&A session why we seem to be fighting about the framings instead of moving toward the obvious common solution found in framings 2, 3, 5 and 6. If low carbon energy were cheaper and environmentally better, everyone would adopt it and it would help poorer countries and regions- and people who didn’t believe in AGW would choose it because it was cheapest. He said that’s what folks who worked on the Hartwell paper thought.

Here’s a link to the Hartwell paper and a quote:

The Paper therefore proposes that the organising principle of our effort should be the raising up of human dignity via three overarching objectives: ensuring energy access for all; ensuring that we develop in a manner that does not undermine the essential functioning of the Earth system; ensuring that our societies are adequately equipped to withstand the risks and dangers that come from all the vagaries of climate, whatever their cause may be.

It explains radical and practical ways to reduce non-CO2 human forcing of climate. It
argues that improved climate risk management is a valid policy goal, and is not simply
congruent with carbon policy. It explains the political prerequisite of energy efficiency
strategies as a first step and documents how this can achieve real emissions reductions.
But, above all, it emphasisses the primacy of accelerating decarbonisation of energy
supply. This calls for very substantially increased investment in innovation in noncarbon
energy sources in order to diversify energy supply technologies. The ultimate
goal of doing this is to develop non-carbon energy supplies at unsubsidised costs less
than those using fossil fuels. The Hartwell Paper advocates funding this work by low
hypothecated (dedicated) carbon taxes. It opens discussion on how to channel such
money productively.

To reframe the climate issue around matters of human dignity is not just noble or
necessary. It is also likely to be more effective than the approach of framing around
human sinfulness –which has failed and will continue to fail.

The Hartwell Paper follows the advice that a good crisis should not be wasted

So what is the connection to matters on this blog? I wonder if these framings could help us better understand each other as we move forward to discuss biomass for energy as in this post and comments.

Here’s a link to CEQ guidance on adaptation, just out.

I wish they had specifically addressed the disorganization across agencies and overlaps and gaps of who is doing what with whom vis a vis adaptation.

In my world, seems like you can’t go to a meeting without someone telling you that you need to change your plans or management on the basis of climate models. Based on years of experience with relatively “simple” vegetation models and a healthy respect for the complexity of Nature, I tend to be a bit skeptical about spending the taxpayer’s dollars doing this, as opposed to a “no-regrets” approach to climate adaptation. The topic of models and how strongly we hold to their predictions is even related to the requirements of the new planning rule.

I ran across this piece (the first in a series) by Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech, that was thought-provoking and also at a level of detail and complexity that feels about right for me. These should be required reading for anyone who is responsible for making investments in resource management or research in the light of climate change, in my view.

Also, kudos to Curry for her blog. Blogs may well be the most powerful form of “extension” (as in research, education and extension), and science education for the public, for the 21st Century.

Here’s a quote:

Returning to the question raised in the title of this post, we have learned much from climate models about how the climate system works. But I think the climate modeling enterprise is putting the cart before the horse in terms of attempting a broad range of applications that include prediction of regional climate change, largely driven by needs of policy makers. Before attempting such applications, we need a much more thorough exploration of how we should configure climate models and test their fitness for purpose. An equally important issue is how we should design climate model experiments in the context of using climate models to test hypotheses about how the climate system works, which is a nontrivial issue particularly given the ontic uncertainties. Until we have achieved such an improved understanding, the other applications are premature and are detracting resources (computer and personnel) from focusing on these more fundamental issues.

As a person who must deal with those attempting to influence policy through linking biological and climate models, I must say I enjoyed this exchange in the comments on the post:

Jim | October 3, 2010 at 10:14 pm | Reply

I guess throwing in biological processes would be darn near impossible and just pile on the pandemonium.

*
curryja | October 4, 2010 at 10:41 am | Reply

Well the good (?) news is that the community is going towards Earth Systems Models that includes human systems and biology, driven by “policy” needs. IMO this is not the optimal way to use resources to get to the heart of the climate modeling problem

Pines, spruces and firs are all suffering attacks from different beetles, and aspens are dying, too, prompting officials and environmentalists to rethink management of what rises among the dead trees. Photo: White River National Forest

This piece in New West on the White River and bug kill, plus a couple of days Martin and I spend in a discussion on landscape scale restoration and collaborative groups, made me think about what Jan Burke and Sloan Shoemaker were quoted as saying in this article:

But it’s not just pine beetles. A spruce beetle epidemic is on the rise. The Douglas fir beetle is taking a toll. So is a phenomenon called sudden aspen die-off.

“I think we are in for a period where we’re going to see some pretty dramatic changes happening,” Shoemaker said, “but that doesn’t mean there’s a crisis or it’s unhealthy or there’s something wrong.”

Over time, forests change slowly, he said, but when they change, they change dramatically. That’s what’s happening now, he said, and we just happen to be around to see it.

“It’s kind of a privilege to be observing a natural laboratory that otherwise we don’t have an opportunity to observe,” Shoemaker said.

The forest may come back differently than before. If it’s warmer, that may mean more deciduous trees, like aspen or Gambel oak, Burke said.

She said she would like to see the Forest Service play a role in encouraging more of a mixture on the forest.

“I’m not saying we’ll get out there and do gardening on 2.2 million acres, but you don’t stand down and do nothing,” Burke said. “By the same token, you don’t stand up and say you’re going to do something everywhere. But somewhere in the middle, there’s a stewardship role.”

Shoemaker is skeptical.

“I think we just need to step back and see how things are going to change and respond,” he said, “but we have a hard time doing that.”

That’s a great conversation to have, but I have a couple of questions..

–Things are changing faster than forest plans could keep up with, so are forest plans passe in this time of rapid change? (formal mechanism for planning)

— When a new climate induced problem shows up, how do we know the right scale to address it? (scale for planning)

— If you had landscape scale collaborative groups, would rapid or slow changes due to climate change just be one more thing to consider in their landscape planning?

And I have to say it is easy for me to agree with both Jan and Sloan on this. Yes, someone should be thinking about what actions we might take to deal with these changed conditions, but we should be very careful about what we actually invest in to deal with changes, and carefully consider the potential payoffs and alternative uses of the funding. The reason for my hinkiness is a great respect for the ability of Nature not to do as humans (however expensive and intricate the models) predict. I am all for investments that are good under current conditions as well as a variety of unknown future conditions. That’s why I am such a fan of TU’s approach “Protect, Reconnect and Restore.” Even if we simply saved some of the funding we put into hosting meetings, seminars, conferences and reading papers on “adapting to climate change” and built that funding into actually Protecting Reconnecting and Restoring,  it’s possible that the environment would be better off in both the short and long runs. At least I think it’s worth consideration when we gauge the desirable degree of proactivity in dealing with climate change.

Interesting article on Dave and current FS climate change efforts here.

Also, I think the chosen advertisement at the Times site is interesting, for Hidden Gems by Pew Environment. I always find the advocacy/analysis tension at Pew to be interesting.

For example on their homepage:

“The Pew Charitable Trusts is driven by the power of knowledge to solve today’s most challenging problems. Pew applies a rigorous, analytical approach to improve public policy, inform the public and stimulate civic life.”

A couple of weeks ago, I was on a field trip on part of the old Routt National Forest, when I had to take a climate change conference call. Since cell phone coverage was spotty, we targeted a good spot and I was dropped off for a couple of hours and sat at creekside while on the calls.

Looking at the dead trees on the hills, it became clearer to me some of the disconnects between climate change as talked about or written about in scientific journals, and as currently lived.

1. People are already dealing with climate change every day as part of their work.
People are felling hazard trees, doing WUI fuels treatments, looking for biomass opportunities, etc. Climate change is just another change agent that affects our work.

2. We may never know how much of what we observe is due to climate change (take bark beetles; 100% climate change? 75% climate change plus the age of trees 25% ?). But we still have to deal with the changes, regardless of their source. So it probably doesn’t make sense to have a separate pot of funds for climate change adaptation or resilience- otherwise we might spend out time in tedious disagreements about whose problem is more climate-induced.

3. We will be dealing with these issues collaboratively, locally (for the most part) using an all lands approach, and involving regulators and communities early and often.

We can’t or shouldn’t get to the point where the community and the FS are in one place, but the regulators have a different worldview.

4. Climate change will include opportunities as well as hazards and difficulties.

For example, at the Steamboat Ski Area, we visited a site where dead trees provided an opportunity for a children’s outdoor ski run.

5. It could be argued that the complex structure of direction in the Forest Service does not make us as flexible and adaptive as we need to be. Changes due to climate change and other factors can occur more quickly, and in different spatial/temporal configurations, than the current structure can easily respond to.

For example, the ranger district or forest is the right scale for many decisions. But not for bark beetles. Should it be dealt with by the current three forests? An interior west scale group? What would be the governance of such a group?
We have the incident command model for fires.. but if something is large, but not a month by month kind of emergency, do we have an organizational structure to deal with it?

6. Safety of our employees and the public need to come first.
I don’t know at the end of the day how many climate change issues will have real safety hazards such as bark beetle and other sources of dead trees. The urgency requires new ways of working together in a timely way. Environmental groups, industry groups, local communities, regulators- we all need to be able to speed up from our bureaucratic and legal natural rate of speed to an emergency rate of speed.

7. If ecosystems are too complex to predict (“more complex than we think, more complex than we can think”), let’s use scenarios and not specific predictions, and pick “no-regrets” strategies. I wonder sometimes if we are overthinking and overanalyzing climate changes and I think we should consider the opportunity costs of what we could to to “protect reconnect and restore” in the Trout Unlimited strategy versus “assess, predict and model.” Note that while common sense and decision theory under uncertainty have always argued for “no regrets” strategies, now at least some water scientists agree.

I would ask us to think about that climate change may be a stressor to our organizational and social systems as well as the environment. It requires us to work together faster, and better than we have in the past. I often wonder if climate science funding were divided half to social scientists (with one quarter to business and public administration schools), what would the “best available science” look like?

I’d be curious about others’ ruminations on these topics…

Excellent story by Noelle Straub of Greenwire in the New York Times here.

With links to the Roadmap and the Scorecard.