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.

Thom's bells

Climate change is depressing.

Last week in Lit club we discussed a paper that pointed out that if we stopped using CO2 this instant, we would still experience 2 degrees C warming. If we can manage to just stop increasing the amount of CO2 we emit (so, keep our emissions to 2006 levels--oops! we're already past that, but close enough) we'll see something like 8 degrees of warming by 2500. That's another PETM, but probably even faster! I know, that's so far out in the future for us measly humans with our short-term attentions, and we may not even have enough fossil fuels available to sustain that level of emissions, but even so, that's depressing.

Today we talked about Geoengineering as an alternative strategy to dealing with global warming. The paper we discussed dealt specifically with the possibility of using sulfate aerosols to cool the planet in much the same way that volcanoes cool the planet naturally. So here's the idea--we take mass of sulfate equivalent to a volkswagon and shoot it up into the stratosphere 20,000 times every day! If we stop, all the warming we prevent with this particular brand of geoengineering comes into play almost immediately. According to their calculations, it would work, as long as we could shoot the sulfate into the stratosphere in a carbon neutral way, and as long as we never stopped. What a great plan, right?

Anyway, I think everyone left the room a bit down, wondering how exactly we can fix global warming, especially in such a way that people will actually be willing to do it. As Matt Huber so eloquently put it, we humans are like voracious locusts, whose every activity puts more CO2 into the atmosphere. We need a giant, non-emitting CO2 sucker and a huge pit in which to dump all the CO2. Any ideas out there?

The Day After Tomorrow

According to this article on BBC news, scaring people into doing something about global warming won't work. There were suggestions from some reviewers that The Day After Tomorrow, (a movie replete with bad science) were more skeptical about global warming after seeing the film. Guessing BBC shouldn't be surprised!

long time, no write

The semester's over, leaving me with much more time to read and blog about the things I'm reading. Today I read US CO2 emissions increased last year. While this isn't a surprise, it is a little dissapointing.

A new(ish) invention is previewed in this video that might help people monitor their energy use. Wouldn't take much, I'm sure to convert this to a CO2 emissions monitor, which would be awsome! There's no mention of price, but having an inexpensive way to monitor your energy use (and consequence CO2 emissions) would almost certainly have an impact on energy use.

Finally, if California is serious about increasing solar energy use in state, it might consider making solar less expensive than regular electricity. I'm not crazy about solar because there are significant cost issues, and the amount of CO2 emissions associated with making them with current technology is roughly equivalent to the emissions they save, but there are also plenty of people working to make them more efficiently, with less materials, or with less energy-intensive materials. Having a market in place for the finished products would probably ease the minds of those investing in the technology.

Carbon Neutrality at Purdue

At Purdue University, six academic departments spanning the natural and social sciences and linked through the Purdue Climate Change Research Center (PCCRC) are taking steps to address and reduce the university’s emissions of carbon dioxide through a new course: Carbon Neutrality at Purdue (CN@P). The objective of the course is to calculate and then develop a management plan to reduce Purdue’s “carbon footprint”. This footprint represents the annual amount of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide emitted both directly and indirectly to meet the energy and material demands of Purdue University.

The motivation for creating this course was simple: The most recent IPCC report acknowledges what the vast majority of climate scientists have known for decades: that there is a “very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming”. This “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level” (IPCC FAR Summary for Policymakers).

While the conclusions of the IPCC report are not new to most scientists working in the field of climate change, a widespread and growing interest in developing practical strategies for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (the acknowledged driver of anthropogenic climate change) has only recently emerged.

As a research institution with significant strengths in key areas of climate, environmental, and the social sciences, Purdue is well-prepared and uniquely able to take advantage of this emerging interest and to take the lead in addressing practical solutions to reducing its own net carbon emissions. Since any viable and robust solutions must necessarily account for both the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of implementation, the faculty of the PCCRC decided to create a course which pools the interdisciplinary talent and resources of students (graduate and undergraduate) and faculty from fields which span the required areas of expertise. Thus was born Carbon Neutrality at Purdue.

The first step in the process of developing practical solutions for emissions reduction was to determine just how much carbon (in the form of carbon dioxide) Purdue annually emits. As a one semester course, both the faculty and students of CN@P acknowledged that certain approximations would have to be made for the sake of expediency if our objectives of calculating, analyzing, and making suggestions to reduce Purdue’s carbon footprint were to be met within the duration of the course. We therefore divided the footprint into six “sectors” – areas of activity which we believed would capture the majority of Purdue’s direct and indirect carbon emissions. These sectors were: energy generated at Purdue’s on-campus power plant, additional energy purchased by Purdue, building construction and renovation, consumable materials, university-associated travel and transportation, and sequestration provided by Purdue’s Tippecanoe County land holdings.

When the emissions of the individual sectors were combined, we discovered that Purdue is annually responsible for the emission of approximately 191,000 metric tons (~420 million pounds) of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide. (For comparison, burning a gallon of gasoline emits a little more than five pounds of carbon.) CO2 has been increasing in concentration since the Industrial Revolution due to the ubiquitous use of fossil fuels to power a progressively more industrialized global economy, and is primarily responsible for the anthropogenic climate change observed over the past 150 years.

Although Purdue’s footprint is admittedly large, it is a drop in the bucket compared to global annual carbon emissions. The goal of this class is therefore not to significantly affect the amount of climate warming through our individual actions but rather to set a precedent for other major organizations. As a preeminent engineering, science, and technology research institution, Purdue is uniquely positioned to provide and implement robust and practical solutions to the problem of rising CO2 emissions.

We are focusing our efforts to suggest means to reduce Purdue’s carbon footprint that are not only environmentally sound, but economically feasible as well. To be truly “carbon neutral,” Purdue would have to emit no net carbon, either by utilizing only carbon-free energy sources such as wind or solar power or by offsetting our own emissions by reducing emissions elsewhere. However, our primary focus in this first semester of CN@P is reducing our carbon emissions locally through a reduction in energy consumption.

Ideas for carbon emissions reduction have included optimizing existing buildings for better energy efficiency, enacting University policies to encourage energy conservation by individuals and departments, and exploring the use of less carbon-intense energy generation technologies. In a time of volatile and increasing energy prices, a reduction in the university’s energy consumption through the adoption of conservation measures will increase both the financial security and well-being of Purdue.

The majority of the effort during this first incarnation of CN@P was spent to accurately calculate Purdue’s carbon footprint. While we have also addressed potential conservation measures, these suggestions are preliminary, and it is our sincere hope that this course will be offered again in coming semesters to explore in more depth strategies to make Purdue truly carbon neutral.

Megan W. and Katie S.
10 April 2007