The environmental-evangelical movement

For Eco-Evangelicals, Questions About the Future | John E. Senior and John Wihbey | Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media | February 3, 2009

This article came out a while ago, but it's a topic I find really interesting. In many ways, it makes me hopeful that more and more people, especially young folks, are aware of the environmental consequences of our actions. The thing that really struck me was this part:

• "Some evangelicals she [Candis Callison, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] has studied, for example, are motivated by concerns that the world’s poor likely would be dramatically affected by global warming. So it’s the biblical “moral call” to help the dispossessed, Callison said, that remains important."

Whenever people ask me if I think that we're doomed because of climate change, my answer is similar to one that I've heard my adviser give. Wealthy countries and wealthy people in general will probably find ways to adapt or escape from high risk areas. It's the poorer countries and poorer people who will suffer the most from the effects of climate change because they don't have the resources or power to relocate or bioengineer their way out. Well, if this idea motivates people one wouldn't normally expect to do something about climate change, I'm all for spreading the message.

Popular policy

If CO2 really is the threat to our way of life, and even to our species, as Al Gore and the Stern report claim, how should we deal with the problem? And perhaps more importantly, how do we decide what to do?

The root of our climate (and many other environmental problems) boils down to us humans being bad stewards. There are too many of us using too many resources, living in an unsustainable way. There are ethical problems with reducing our numbers, and ethical problems with telling others to live sustainably, especially when we don't. We can't really say to India and China "oops--you can't industrialize and emit CO2 because we already did!" That just wouldn't fly.

Popular proposals to address the excess forcing from our emissions of greenhouse gasses are frequently based on shaky science. It is unclear that anything so far proposed--including this week's proposal to increase the Earth's albedo by breeding crop plants with higher albedo--will actually do anything either in the short or long term. A lot of popular policy proposals are based on a single idea that may or may not be valid at longer timescales.

So, cementing technological solutions with policy decisions probably isn't the best idea. At best we'll get an idea that sort of works and will implement it further than is really useful while ignoring ideas that could be better--faster, cheaper, or just plain more successful. This really is a situation where policy should focus on creating market mechanisms that will encourage (or force) environmental solutions without picking a winner.

Penguins are in trouble

Penguins setting off sirens over health of world's oceans | Vince Stricherz | EurekAlert | Jul 1, 2008

This article is from a while back, and it references a paper published in BioScience in the July/Aug 2008 issue. According to the latest research, populations of different penguin species are declining not only due to overfishing and pollution, but also due to climate change. Increasing temperatures are causing sea ice to retreat earlier in the year before baby penguins have developed insulating fat and feathers, and it's also causing fish populations that penguins depend on to migrate farther and farther away.

I was pretty surprised that I hadn't heard about this sooner. One would think that if a cute and cuddly charismatic megafauna were in trouble, it would get a lot of attention. (It definitely made me feel a bit heartbroken to know that baby penguins are freezing to death.) Maybe it's because no one has photographed a penguin floating on a piece of sea ice yet or maybe it's because 2008 has been an unusually eventful year. In any case, just wanted to put this out there.

(Thanks for adding me to the blog, Kristine!)

Food insecurity

After a more than year-long hiatus, I am resurrecting the Breakfast Club. To start things off, I'll summarize the paper we discussed in the Friday afternoon lit club: "Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat." The paper was pretty much a synthesis of information that was already out there, utilizing previously published predictions of average summer temperature, predictions of summer temperature extremes in the future, and then suggesting based on historical incidents that the extremes we're likely to see will lead to food insecurity.

Frequently I think the papers we read in lit club are more or less jumping off points for a discussion. We (of course) discussed how to do the paper better. The last part of the paper wasn't particularly quantitative, relying on anecdotes rather than any statistical analysis. A more quantitative approach might take the predicted temperature extremes and correlate them to crop losses, and use that to predict some financial loss. A project of this sort focusing on Tanzania is under way here at Purdue, trying to predict the impact of climate change on poverty. One of the complicating factors is the response of countries (which tend to put up protective tariffs when one country has a bad crop year, even though doing so tends to exacerbate the economic impact of the crop failure) and the response of individuals (who may move from rural to urban or urban to rural areas in response to economic stress).

Also discussed: GTAP, which is a database of trade flows between something like 200 countries. It is also the database that shows why biofuels are, in the final analysis, bad for CO2 emissions. As food crops are diverted from food use to fuel use, something else must take its place. Marginal land that was used for grazing, for instance, might be converted to cropland to grow the soybeans that the US stopped growing in favor of corn, and more forest then converted to new grazing land. Using fossil fuels, growing crops simply to burn, we are burning sunshine.